Urban Dusk

Great Reeds

Here you’ll find some of J. Reed’s previously published stories, mostly literary fiction covering the dreams, struggles and aspirations of the everyday person. Enjoy.

Let Me Know It’s Real — from Love You Doesn’t Count: A Book of Poetry scheduled to be released later in 2025. ©️2025 by Jermaine Reed, MFA

—

Try and not write love posts about me

or show pictures of me on your wall

Don’t tell everyone I’m a good man

or that I understand who you are

Keep the flowers I gave you

on the ledge of your bedroom window

But don’t make them a TikTok for friends

Simply water them with me in mind

I don’t want to be erased, removed,

deleted and forgotten about

or be a cropped out pic on your profile

My heart would break from disappearing

If we trade insults on the balcony

and vow to not ever speak again

Even if we mean not those words,

deleting my pics would seal the deal

Flowers fade away in a season

And chocolate melts away in your mouth

But a ring lasts a lifetime plus some

On a regular day, a normal time

when you are least to expect it,

I will offer to you that ring

Let it be the first thing you post from me

Only then will I know it’s real

Forgive Me for Oversharing — a poem by Jermaine Reed, MFA ©️ 2024

I left a love note on the balcony, beside your potted plant,

where the sun shines for hours on end.

The last place our lips touched

just happened to be your own hideaway.

Was I ever welcome?

Did I become too familiar too soon?

I’ll always wonder this.

I’d like to think your giggles on date night, your smile over tea,

your funny tone imitating my dad,

were all things genuine,

and emotionally you hid away,

fled like a bat at dawn,

only because of times long before me

that I couldn’t fix.

My box of tools worthless as these thoughts.

My cape worn and battered.

My final battle for your love lost

quietly to time passed.

And our bond worn down by creeping distance

our hearts won’t ever close.

But I’ll reach, knowing our fingers won’t touch,

yearning for what won’t be.

Forgive me for asking to share your love.

Shaniqua Brown’s Broken Past (Originally published in Free Spirit Magazine’s It Was a Mistake anthology), ©️2021 by Jermaine Reed, MFA

Recently, the Bar Association revoked my entry to the Bar, although I passed the Bar Exam with unprecedented scores this past fall. Because of a lewd video of me leaked by an unnamed man to the Bar Association, the Bar has decided my former lifestyle involved moral turpitude. With this Letter of Appeal, I wish to put into context my former work as an OnlyFans “cam model” and my urge to be a lawyer. For me, it starts with my never-present father.

Time has shaded his face in a grayish silhouette. Through streaks of rain that poured down the window of the car, I recall the bright red sports jacket beneath a blue baseball cap on Kevin’s head. As the man who I would never know as my father disappeared into the gloom in the rearview of the taxi, I glanced down at the bag of candy he’d left for me. I searched for Skittles but settled for licorice. This moment overwhelmed me many times in my teen years and has come to define for me what a father is, and, to an extent, who I am.

“Will it hurt?” I asked Charles as he mounted me. I scooted up and hiked my skirt higher. Cars occasionally flew past the alley, their headlights flickering just enough to show Charles’ head peeking over the top of the dumpster.

“Shit,” Charles said, jumping back from a scurrying rat.

“You’re afraid of mice?” I said, squinting at his six-foot frame.

“It’s not a mouse. It’s a rat. Learn the difference. Now, be quiet and spread your legs.”

The sex, in fact, did not hurt. What did hurt was Charles’s subsequently ignoring my phone calls and denying in the school halls that we even knew each other. Boys bragged about sex. They wore their non-virginity like Purple Hearts. Yet Charles wouldn’t even admit to knowing me. So, whenever I heard his name, I folded inward three times, crushed. My eyes would find tiny specks of dirt scattered about anytime he came around. I no longer saw any more of a person than their feet and developed a painful condition from letting my head hang so much.

When I thought the agony of Charles’s ignoring me was as bad as things could get, my Economics teacher proved me wrong. “So, how much can women contribute to our overall economy?” Ms. West said, using a stubby finger to adjust her glasses. “Anyone?”

Deep-voiced chuckles stabbed me in the back, and I bit my lip.

“Depends on how much they charge to hit it. Shaniqua, how much did you charge Charles? I heard you’d do it for a bag of candy,” Larry snickered and elbowed Charles. Fire spread through me like a spark on dried tinder.

“Stop playing so much,” Charles said, smirking at his buddy.

I just remember seeing tonsils and teeth. I slouched in my seat and shook my leg, while fingers pointed at me. The embarrassment is a separate memory of its own, as piercing but more indelible than the deafening laughs. For a moment, I again became the little puffy-haired girl in the backseat of the cab, left alone in the hands of a stranger by my so-called dad.

Memory fading as I wiped wetness from my cheeks, I rushed from the classroom.

For the next two weeks, “How much do you charge?” became a common knife with which my peers, male and female, repeatedly stabbed me in the heart. On Facebook, someone had decided by way of meme that my going rate per hour was forty-cent. For weeks, I sat at my computer shaking my leg, while cringing at the comments made about me.

And when the blade of my peers had been buried as deep within me as it could go, something tore inside the girl I can only recall as a composite character of who I was. It was a painless devolution or evolution as when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Only soaring with lighted wings in the sky do butterflies display their true beauty and power.

So, when Harold asked “how much?” underneath the viaduct, I dropped to my knees, jeans soaking up the greenish water. “$40,” I said, unzipping his pants. I bit my bottom lip to keep my hands from trembling, to keep from losing control.

Boys are queens of spreading gossip. So, for once, I had the eyes of every boy – and man – on me. They no longer called me “Suck-a-Lot” or “Blackie” or “Candy Girl”. They melted my heart with pet names like “Beautiful” or “Sexy”, and they no longer controlled me. Instead, I set a price, a moment, a memory and let them become a part of it. The indelible ink of my soul leaked out with every interaction and every “yes” or “no” I chose to utter. I chose.

“I love your show. You’re the best,” one comment underneath my most recent video read. The man who left the comment did not tip poorly like other men, so I always replied immediately back to his comments. I left three heart emojis and a thank you before scrolling farther.

Eyes glossy and red, I squinted at the last comment and read it again. “I love your videos, but you ever thought about actually going to law school instead of pretending to be a slutty one on the internet or are you not smart enough?”

The mouse jammed a few times, as I clicked through to the user’s main profile. “‘Feminine Fury’?” I said, reading the name aloud. Besides one picture of a sunset, the profile was blank. She had not one follower listed.

“Whatever, hater,” I wrote back.

A few days later, I found myself blurry-eyed and peeking out my apartment window. Blue and red lights flickered, dyeing the street’s brownstone buildings. The news would tell me in the morning who got shot.

Hopping back in bed, I lost myself while staring at the ceiling. I felt around the smooth top of my dresser and sighed as I turned on the lights. Opening each drawer, I stopped when I found some taffy. It wasn’t Skittles, but it would do. As I picked up the candy, I scooped up the black book it had been sitting on.

Black’s Law. I ran my fingers over the worn leather and engraved gold letters. Exhaling, I bit my lip. Years ago, after graduating high school and deciding to make a business of charging men for online sex, I bought a law book. I don’t know why. But months later when I found it tucked beneath the seat of my car, shame and embarrassment infected me. Dumb girls didn’t go to law school.

While scanning Black’s Law, I drooled from the taffy. Whenever I wanted a specific type of candy, it seemed never to be there. It reminded me of when Kevin gave me the candy bag without anything I liked in it.

After Charles in high school, I slept with many more men. I made them kneel, beg and humiliate themselves. I’ve beaten them when they wanted, taken their money and had my way with them. I had their undying attention and affection when they were with me. Yet I never knew the love a man should give his daughter, what Kevin should have given me.

But the night I reopened my Black’s Law book, I replayed the comment on my video in my mind. “I love your videos, but you ever thought about actually going to law school instead of pretending to be a slutty one on the internet or are you not smart enough?”

Dumb girls don’t go to law school. It was not something I had taught myself alone. Society was the teacher. I was a mere faithful student. My faithfulness in society’s impression of what a woman should be without the tempered lessons of a father was misguided. It made me believe I had no dominion over deciding who I could become. But the comment questioning my intelligence pushed me to take off the grotesque mask I had been hiding behind my entire life.

So, I sat up, went back to my computer and wrote to Feminine Fury, “I’m taking your advice. Thanks for being a good friend.”

At the beginning of this letter, I told mentioned my father remains a silhouette in my mind, but I too was a silhouette. My experiences have been dyed with bright yellows and reds but also shades of black and gray. I am not one thing or everything. Everything I have gone through has collectively made me who I am now. And though my story is unique to me, it is not unique to the world. I seek re-acceptance to the bar for my and every girl’s and woman’s benefit.

In closing, I do not have to tell the Bar how difficult law school was. I do not feel compelled to recount the last five sleepless years of my life. But I ask the Board this: knowing what you know now, would you still deny my acceptance to the bar? Are you willing to continue to try and snuff out the dreams of a woman for experiencing womanhood, or will you allow the most qualified person you know to advocate for girls and women alike? Either way, I will continue to be a force, and I do not regret being who I am or who I have been in the past.

Sincerely,

Shaniqua Brown, J.D.

Shaniqua Brown, J.D.

******

The Marvelous Mark (Originally published in Straylight Literary Magazine), ©️2018 by Jermaine Reed, MFA

The dash of green seems too focused and deliberate, unlike the birthmark on my face. The mark is shaped like a fallen leaf and bleeds down my neck to my collarbone. It is the distraction that disrupts my every first impression. I don’t think about it often, only when I see green or when I awake or go to bed.

“Tell me a wonderful story through your painting,” the instructor had said two days ago. He is a mild-mannered man who comes across as too shy to be a teacher. Whenever he speaks, it is as though he is talking directly to me, begging me to walk him through my painful past.

Now, I sit on the edge of my stool, paint dripping from my brush, staining the hardwood floor. My nosy landlord regularly invites herself into my apartment under the guise of collecting rent. I bite my lip while I consciously decide to let the paint do what it wants.

The green splatters of paint on the floor strike me. I don’t know what it is, but I see something, feel something. A dot here, a drip there.

My mind’s eye sketches up an image of a small, frail girl on a play yard. She is crying. Her skirt is hiked above her bleeding, skinned knee. The smell of burned flesh dangles on the summer air.

“Why are you so ugly?” the big girl says, as she towers over the smaller girl. It is not a question but an accusation. The other kids laugh and point at the girl on the ground.

I am simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. My heart breaks because there is nothing I can do to help the girl. She is simply a memory, a moment passed. Tears line her discolored cheek. She sobs, alone in her shell.

More paint splatters to the floor. It falls in slow motion, spattering into a dozen dots. I dip the brush again, this time into a darker green and let it descend to where it may. It is out of my control.

Now there is an older girl dominating my vision. There is no one in the gym room other than him and her. Her bluish eyes shimmer above the horizon of creased bags beneath them.

His head is down, turned in the opposite direction. Not once has he met her gaze. The large space now seems smaller, overcrowded with uncomfortable thoughts, drained of oxygen by the anticipation of unwelcome news.

“I don’t understand why we can’t tell anyone we’re together,” she says to him, voice crackling. I stand behind them on the bleachers, a silent, invisible observer.

His football jacket hugs his sculpted frame. He sighs and shakes his head. “It’s probably better if we didn’t see each other anymore.”

The words are a dagger-shaped eulogy, plunged into her soul. The air seeps from her lungs. A million words ramble through her head but fail to form any intelligible sentence. She feels expendable. I sob for her.

It is two weeks later, and she passes by him in the hall. He has a cheerleader attached to his arm. The cheerleader sees the girl and proceeds to place a gagging finger down her throat. The girl with the mark bites her lip, dies on the inside.

As the red paint marks the floor, it overlaps some of the green. The colors are separate but together, on the brink of blossoming into yellow. They are unexpected partners, clandestinely building something of which I know not. I am just a witness.

The colors know my secrets. They know me. They bring to life pieces of me that I have tried for years to tuck away. I want to stop the paint from dripping because my landlord’s voice will shake the walls when she sees. Yet I have lost control. I dip my brush in yellow.

And so the colors leak, and I envision a girl who smiles for the first time in a while. She has landed an interview with a large company. Everyone wants to intern there. She has practiced for days, stood in the mirror, perfected her responses.

The man’s eyes roam over her frame, as she walks into the office. He sits behind the desk and invites her to have a seat. He is clean-cut, with the type of smile seen only in commercials. The office smells of fresh lemon and coffee.

He nods as he looks over her resume. She bites her lip and shakes her leg in anticipation. Each time she thinks he’s about to say something, he seals his lips. Finally, he is done reading.

“Tell me about yourself,” he says to her, but the question seems directed more to the side of her face. That is where his gaze lingers. As she speaks, she notices his blank nodding, how he is preoccupied with her mark. Warm embarrassment causes her to stutter. She stops talking, and it takes a moment for him to realize it.

I want to hold her hand, but I am hopeless. She chews her lip, and I take a small step from the corner of the room. I stop. There are no words of encouragement to offer.

“Sure, sure,” he says. He promises to give her a call back. She receives not even an email.

The colorful wood beckons me, compels me to continue. Separately, the colors on the hardwood make no sense. Together, they are an abstract image of everything I am.

Although there is none in my place, the smell of coffee arouses my senses. My mind travels to the time I first meet my instructor. He is a man with a boyish face, young for a teacher. The dark, strong coffee in his cup is at odds with who he is, reserved and mellow.

We are in his classroom. Technically, it is his basement. He makes a grand gesture that isn’t so grand, tells me that this is where his classes take place. His smile is genuine, though.

“I paint, but I’m no great artist,” I say, pushing back the strand of hair that has harassed me all day.

His hand on my forearm is soft, warm. It relaxes me. “There’s a great artist in everyone, including you.” He is the only one who sees not my birthmark but me. For a split second, I believe I can create art.

The paint on the floor does not feel like art. It is not complete. I do not feel like an artist. Yet the drying colors articulate what I have been unable to.

***

As the instructor evaluates my painting, my heart thuds against my ribcage. It is just him and me here in his basement. He walks back and forth, hand tucked beneath his chin. He is a mad scientist, challenged by what he beholds.

“This paint does not belong on this hardwood,” he says, thoughtfully. “It is out of place.”

My stomach flips, and I regret having had the square of wood sawed from the floor. I bite my lip and know my landlord will explode. How could I had been so stupid?

“It isn’t finished.” The words choke from my throat but from the soul of the ten-year-old schoolgirl pushed down on the playground all those years ago.

He turns to me. There is a glossy sincerity in his eyes. “It is marvelous,” he says. “It shouldn’t be, but it is.”

The smile radiates throughout my entire being. I am aware that I can’t recall the last time I smiled. The instructor uses technical terms, art phrases, that I am unfamiliar with. I attempt to curb my excitement. I trace my hand over the birthmark. It is a part of me. It is marvelous. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

*****

I bumped into love,

then tripped and fell into your hot embrace.

Tangled in soft sheets,

our breath catching, you and I become one.

Your pain dissipates

into tantalizing moans and arched back.

Deeper inside you,

I find the woman who you once were.

My name on your lips,

whispered to me like a sensual chant.

Your soul bends to me

because I am more than a visitor.

When your mouth opens

and your eyes roll back, there isn’t a word.

Your body traps me,

pulsating and pulling me further in.

You gasp, and I flood

every part of you, from inside to out.

If we multiply,

somehow, we know, it would be destiny.

My father always used to complain that I was one of those “damn millennials who doesn’t know his ass from an apple.” He hated the internet, because he said it made people dumber. For me, everything was digital from the news to my friendships. My life revolved around my phone and my ability to connect with the world around me through social media.

The thing that irks me is that when older people speak of Millennials, they tend to refer to us like a product made of the same mold on an assembly line. What separates me from others in my generation is my love for reading and writing. The smell of books always relaxes me.

Four years ago, I took a job as a homecare provider. I was fresh out of high school and I had absolutely no plans to return to any form of school. Each and every night at dinner, my father would say, “When I was your age, Brian, I had two jobs.” And my mom would vigorously shake her head in agreement.

My writing career wasn’t taking off anytime soon, so to show my parents I could keep a job, I became a homecare provider. My father called it “women’s work,” but it was enough to get him off my back. My company assigned me to work for a man named Derek Albright. He was paralyzed from the neck down and, subsequently, bedridden. Every question I asked him about himself went unanswered.

“Look, son,” Mr. Albright said to me one day. “I’m not your friend.”

“I just thought you needed someone to talk to.”

“You get paid to clean my house and wash my ass. Do what you’re good at.”

I didn’t take his rebuke personally. He was a man who could do nothing for himself. I had no clue as to what had left him the way he was, but I was sure that I would be bitter too. So, I smiled my way through ringing mops and sweeping.

Three months after starting my work for Mr. Albright, I came across a manila envelope labeled “All Things Beautiful” while dusting boxes in his attic. An unfinished manuscript written by Mr. Albright peeked out. I propped down on a dusty crate and began to read.

“Brian,” Mr. Albright said, his voice echoing off every wall.

I checked my watch and realized that I had been in the attic for nearly an hour. I reorganized the manuscript and tucked it back inside of its housing.

“What were you up there doing?” he asked. “Dusting doesn’t take an hour.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking away from the suffocating weight of his gaze. “I lost track of time.”

“Well, don’t. I’m ready for my bath.”

After getting some water and a towel, I washed him up. There were dark spots on his back, probably from old bedsores. There were also what appeared to be surgical scars near the nape of his neck.

When I got home that night, I could only think of the manuscript I had read. It was a brilliant story about a woman born blind who is eventually given the ability to see. At first, everything to her seems beautiful, but then she begins to see the ailments of the world, from homeless families to starving children.

It had been a while since the last time I had written anything. Mr. Albright’s piece inspired me to pull out my laptop and go to work. No matter how hard I tried though, I just could not find where to start. And then my inspiration drowned away under the reality that maybe I didn’t have what it took to write a book.

“You used to be a writer?” I asked Mr. Albright nearly two months after reading his unfinished manuscript.

There was a long silence, as I swept his bedroom. It was fairly clean, since his overnight care provider usually did much of the sweeping. I made a show of cleaning to give him enough time to respond. When ten minutes passed, I decided to go to the living room.

“You were snooping through my stuff in the attic,” he said, as I was about to leave the room.

Chills crawl through me, freezing me in my steps. His voice is a flat emotionless line too thin to partition off the underlining heat in his tone.

“No. I saw your manuscript by accident.”

“You read it?”

“Yeah. You should finish it.”

“This coming from a snot-nosed kid. I’m a quadriplegic because of one of you punks.”

I let Mr. Albright rant. He cursed his way through telling me that he had been paralyzed when he was run over by a texting teenager. The kid had been let off with a few traffic citations. His jaw drew tighter before relaxing, and then he exhaled.

“Even if I wanted to finish that manuscript, I have no way to do it,” Mr. Albright said, as he closed his eyes for a moment and looked into a place I could not see.

The next day, I came to his home with my laptop, the one I’d used more recently to search the web for nude pics and vids than for actual writing. The chair screeched across the floor as I dragged it into Mr. Albright’s bedroom and plopped down beside him. Then, I pulled up Microsoft Word.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked me, the weight of his regular glare pressing into me.

He squinted when I moved my mouth but no words came out. I folded my hands, and the trembling stopped.

“You’re going to tell me your story as I transcribe it,” I said, my eyes not leaving his.

Up until this point, he had never smiled in my presence. But there was a glimmer of something now on the edge of his mouth. For hours, he spoke and I typed. Sometimes he squinted or peered towards the window. Other times, he fell silent for minutes on end. When he spoke, every word matched the emotion down to the inflection in his voice. Inside of the soul of this man lived the distilled, pure essence of a poet. I could have closed my eyes and been in a theater watching a man perform the greatest one-person show in history.

When my laptop died, I finished transcribing with my cell phone. I stopped only to give him water, but I ignored my restroom needs. The story he told was beyond beautiful. After printing the pages at home, I added them to the rest of his manuscript.

For the next four months, Mr. Albright allowed me to read other shorter pieces that he had written. All his stories sparked something in me and made me think beyond what I supposedly knew. They challenged my understanding of the origins of my own biases. It every way, they were resilient. They were not overly depressing, but they were drenched in a sobering reality. They somehow felt so real that when I walked away from them, it was like pulling away from another world.

From his stories, I gathered that Mr. Albright was a brilliant writer who would one day be celebrated. I also came to believe that before living the life of a writer, Mr. Albright had lived many different ones.

“I used to want to be a writer,” I told Mr. Albright one night.

“Used to?”

“It isn’t for me. I can’t tell a good story.”

“Have you ever had a bad experience?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can tell a story.”

Mr. Albright became my writing mentor. I read my pieces to him and he critiqued them. Not once did he hold back. He asked me challenging questions about my characters and my stories. “Every line must have a purpose,” he always said.

I worked for Mr. Albright for another few months before a blood clot caused his lungs to fail. Two weeks after he passed away, Mariana, his nighttime caretaker, showed up at my home.

“Mr. Albright told me to give this to you if anything ever happened to him. He said you would know what to do with it,” she said, handing me the All Things Beautiful manuscript. I thanked her and closed the door.

####

All Things Beautiful was a story that needed to be shared with the world. That is why it was the first story I ever published. And I believe it is the same story that inspired me to become an award-winning author and gave me the strength to show my father who I am. The ups and downs Mr. Albright encountered were uniquely eye-opening, and so were mine. I hope that one day we all appreciate the beauty in the struggles we face. This is why I write.

******

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