Katie Marks Stops at Starbucks
She was driving to work, following a white BMW with paper tags as it swerved around slower traffic, late because of this mess, in dire need of coffee, and closely trailing a sparkling new BMW, thinking about the 8:00 meeting with Brett, about the way Brett always smiled right before he told her how wrong she was, how she never seemed to get it and it made him question the decision to promote her last June, not that he meant she didn’t do good work sometimes, of course, but lately it didn’t seem like she was in it to win it, so if she could just step it up, he liked to say, his lips stretching into a full-tooth shark mouth, just step it up, Kat, even though nobody called her that, and she’d nod like she always nodded, hating herself, but maybe for once she’d bite back, maybe for once she’d snarl “I’m fucking in it to win it, Brett, you piece of shit shark-mouthed motherfucker,” and the look on his face, she could picture it, the way his lips would open wider for a second as he inhaled, then droop back down over his stupid too-white teeth, snapping shut in a satisfying pop, or maybe a poof, like when you blow out a match, and it would feel amazing, like when you finally escape for lunch, when you push open the heavy metal door at the bottom of the stairwell, the one in the back that nobody uses, when you step out of the dark quiet, out of the barest
***
She was driving to work when she saw the school bus swerve. It was terrifying, really. Was the bus driver drunk? She heard the kids scream, sharp but ghostlike. She jerked her steering wheel to the left, hit the gas instead of the brakes, and zoomed up onto the shoulder right as the bus hit the new BMW in front of her. The shiny little two-seater never stood a chance. It spun a 360, flipping twice, then landed hard where her car had just been.
“You’re really in it to win it, Kat,” Brett had written last night, when he pinged her at 11:30 and asked her about taking over Jeremy’s role on the Marriott account.
“Hey, it’s a CODE RED, bro,” she’d messaged back. She added a winking cat emoji. He “hearted” it.
This morning: two coffee emojis.
“On it,” she’d answered.
“Bad accident,” she texted him now. “Traffic’s a nightmare. I’ll lead the call from my car.”
A thumbs up on the screen of her phone. Then two coffee emojis and a crying face.
Her fingers hovered over the knife emoji for the briefest second.
“I gotchu” she wrote instead. “Will hit Starbucks between calls.”
Hannah Grieco is the author of First Kicking, Then Not forthcoming from Stanchion in August of 2025. She writes a literary column for Washington City Paper, edits prose at a variety of small presses and literary journals and teaches English at Marymount University. Read more of her work in The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Brevity, Craft Literary, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Fairy Tale Review, Wigleaf, and more. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.