Ten Minutes

Jayme Nichols stood on the dock at the edge of the lake in the blue before sunrise and did not, for exactly ten minutes, hold anything together.

This was the practice. It was not a mood, though it looked like a mood, and that distinction mattered to her more than she could explain to anyone who hadn't needed it. She'd moved from Austin to Dallas two years ago for reasons she described to people as a job change and described to no one as the actual reasons, and somewhere in the wreckage of that move she had figured out that she needed one thing in her life that asked nothing of her, and the lake had turned out to be it. The water was the same every time. That helped. In a life where she was the fixed point that everything else rotated around - the clients, the team, Cynthia's expectations, the whole quiet weight of being the person a division ran through - the lake was the one place where she was not the fixed point. The lake didn't need her. The lake had been here before her and would be here after, indifferent and gray and exactly itself, and ten minutes of standing next to something that didn't need her was, it turned out, enough to begin.

She was the senior strategist of the Munchies division, and in practice she was its center of gravity. Frida led from the front, with the instinct and the relationships and the visible certainty. Jayme held the middle, where the actual machine was - the client management, the hard calls, the daily triage of keeping five talented people pointed in roughly the same direction. She managed up with Cynthia, which was its own discipline, a careful translation between what the division was actually doing and what leadership in Dallas needed to believe it was doing. She was good at it. She was good at all of it. The cost of being good at all of it was that nobody ever asked whether she was carrying too much, because she carried it so smoothly that the weight was invisible, and a thing you can't see is a thing nobody helps you with.

She was carrying something now that she had told no one. She didn't examine it on the dock - the dock was for not examining things - but it was there under the ten minutes, the way it had been there for a few weeks, a private weather she kept off her face when she walked into the office. The audience of her own life had not been let in on it. It was hers.

The sun came up the way it came up, laying a single band of hard yellow down the middle of the gray water - there for a minute, just for her, gone before anyone else would have been awake to want it. Jayme breathed, and let the lake be the lake, and at the end of the ten minutes she picked the weight back up - because that was the other half of the practice, that you set it down and then you chose, freshly, to pick it back up - and she drove to the office and was the center of gravity again, and nobody could have told, from the way she held the room that morning, that she had ever set anything down at all.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

Listen daily. Apple Podcasts · RSS

Follow the world. @marfamunchies on Instagram · TikTok · Threads · Bluesky