Grayson Wright
November 30, 2018 9:46 PM
Some dishes are best served cold. by Grayson Wright
Gray’s income had never been significant, which was part of the reason why it was only since he had come to Sonora that he had begun subscribing to the newspaper. His income here was not the best he had ever made, but he sacrificed part of it to the paper for two reasons.1. He liked reading the Opinions and the Arts and Culture and the cartoon sections.
2. He figured it was the sort of thing people grown up and boring enough to be professors were seen reading in public.
One Saturday morning, having dutifully paid the owl its few knuts, he was flipping through Arts and Culture, finding it fairly uninspiring and regretting that but thinking that at least he still had cartoons to go and presumably looked very grown up and boring right now, when his eye fell on a name in a small headline. As soon as his brain unscrambled the distortion produced by the edge of his glasses and understood the name, he was, mentally, in another place.
”Ah, Wright. There you are.”
Gray, only about two feet away from the person standing in the door of his tiny office because he had not even been back from lunch long enough to sit down again, nodded. “Here I am,” he agreed. “Am I supposed to be somewhere else?”
“Well - you weren’t until you got back from lunch. I assume you’re back from lunch?”
“That is a good assumption,” said Gray. “Can’t write worth a damn on an empty stomach, and there’s nothing like the magic of a good milkshake.”
“Indeed,” said the section manager, a humorless fellow who had only come along a few months earlier, along with the wave of other new people brought along when the station was sold to some rich guy without a cause, a pureblood second son or the like - Gray had always, or at least since the very early days of his professional life, preferred not to look too long at bosses, lest he find them looking back at him sometime. “Since you are back, though, the - whatever it is you do - will have to wait - the boss wants to see you.”
“Thought you were the boss, Watkins.”
“Next boss up.”
Seeing the next boss up involved the lift, which was always a hazardous undertaking - it was only slightly larger than a coffin and the charms on it were none too reliable, even though he had taken it on himself to use his degree in Charms to act as a maintenance man instead of a staff writer and tried to improve on them a bit. Riding the thing upstairs was like going to reverse Hell - a notion which amused him, and which he noted for work purposes, as he had been writing skits for a late night program ever since the new ownership arrived and regretfully said that it didn’t know quite what to do with him, but not to worry, it would think of something before it was time to renew contracts. As it was time to renew contracts, he assumed that was what he was wanted for, but also assumed he’d be stuck on the late shift until the end of his current one, so any idea was one he hadn’t had before.
“Ah, Wright. There you are.”
Did these people get their dialogue from the same stock book, or was the new boss some kind of master of Imperius who literally controlled all the flock of underlings he had brought along with him and used them as human puppets, parroting his every quirk?
The last time he had seen this particular name, it had been on a desk placard, and its owner had informed him that once his contract ran out - something it had been only days away from doing - he was going to be out of a job. The network, it had been explained to him, was moving in a new direction - and his resume made him too much a part of the old liberal establishment (something he had not even realized he was part of, or even realized existed, really) to be part of that new direction. It had, he had been assured, been nothing personal, just a lack of ‘fit’ at the place which had practically been his home since he was twenty, but to which they had just swept in….
He realized his hands were crumpling the edge of the newspaper and he made them relax so he could read the actual news item.
Would-be media mogul forced to declare bankruptcy....
Gray stared at that beginning to a sentence for a long moment, then read it again just to be sure he knew what it said. Then he read on further into the sentence. Then he read the next sentence. Then, very slowly, he began to smile.
He noticed a colleague next to him and directed the smile away from the window and toward that person. “Good morning!” he said, as cheerily as he had spoken since his return to Sonora, if not the cheeriest he had ever sounded since his return to Sonora. “Isn’t it a fantastic morning?”
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Some dishes are best served cold.
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Grayson Wright
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Mary Brooding
December 13, 2018 2:14 AM
Like jello salad! by Mary Brooding
Mary smiled, surprised to see such a chipper smile on Grayson's face, and even more surprised to find his tone so cheery. Of course, the fact that he was holding a newspaper at the same time made the whole effect a bit daunting but still. He wasn't a colleague she'd normally describe as chipper and it was nice to see his mood so high."It is, isn't it?" Mary agreed, prone to agreeing with such things in general. "You seem particularly aware of it today. Good news?" she asked, gesturing at the paper and wondering what sort of headlines could prompt such cheeriness. She hoped he wasn't the sort of psychopath that got excited over bad news, although that seemed unlikely. There was, of course, the chance that something she would consider bad news would be good news to her fellow professor, but she trusted the fact that it was, at worst, neutral for her, and waited happily for Professor Wright's reply. In any case, the light filtering in through the window cast sunny morning shadows on his face, and he seemed more boyish than usual somehow.
She was biased, of course, considering she found few men to be the sort of "Rugged" that others seemed to. She supposed that came with the territory both of being deeply attached to her girlfriend, and only ever having desired a girlfriend anyway. Still, there were some men that seemed less boyish than others, and Grayson Wright had certainly been high on the list of "not boyish." He rarely ever featured the sort of innocent sweetness of actual boys, like Dorian.
"I'm a bit behind on the news," she added.
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Mary Brooding
Like jello salad!
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Grayson Wright
December 18, 2018 4:11 PM
Or ice cream! by Grayson Wright
“Of a sort,” said Gray when asked if the paper was the reason for his good mood. “Just a small indicator that maybe the universe will self-correct in the end.”He put down the paper and folded it up. “A – not very nice person bought the network I used to write for. He fired me. He just lost his shirt. I’m half-inclined to send him a note on condolence and some advice on how to get into the business of working as a private tutor to spoiled rich brats – but that would be, eh, almost stooping to his level.”
He spread strawberry jam onto his toast with the air of one flinging about the congealed blood of his enemies instead of fruit preserves, despite his total lack of direct personal involvement in the downfall of this particular one. “I probably sound like I already am,” he added semi-apologetically, realizing that he probably did sound unpleasantly vindictive to someone not involved in the story. “Sorry – not, er, very nice, gloating over someone else’s problems, is it. But that’s what the – jerk gets for deciding to rebrand to focus on promotion of increasingly fringe political ideologies and fire people who were making the – organization – money just because – political something or other – apparently I was a threat to family values. Which apparently nobody else found interesting enough to complain about, either.”
This was not strictly true – he knew there had been some pearl-clutching before the network was bought out; the hyper-conservatives had apparently complained about ‘subversion of proper gender roles’ and that had been before he was important enough for there to be unfounded rumors about his personal life – but as far as he could tell, it hadn’t lost them any money. If anything, ratings had gone up on the two projects he’d had a substantial role in which had been complained about, which meant they probably had on others he had been less involved in and therefore hadn’t read the nasty letters about. Which was good enough for him.
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Grayson Wright
Or ice cream!
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