Two Stories by Joseph Randolph
Interim Findings
Jim recruited the focus group on God at the bus stop by offering snacks and by speaking with the eager calm of a man who had mistaken sociology for salvation, and he set up on a bench with a clipboard, a pack of granola bars, and a sheet titled CONCEPT TEST: GOD (VERSION 3.1), because Jim could not stop himself from treating ultimate questions as if they were products with packaging problems, and one by one people drifted into his orbit—an older woman with a shopping cart, a guy with earbuds, a teenage boy in a hoodie, a man in work boots waiting with the tight stillness of someone between shifts—and Jim began by asking them to rate God on a scale of one to ten in terms of usefulness, emotional comfort, and credibility, which produced the predictable range of reactions: laughter, suspicion, a polite refusal disguised as silence; Mark stood a few feet away pretending to look at his phone, knowing he was complicit in whatever was happening, and Jim pressed on, explaining that the culture’s problem was messaging, that God had become either a scold or a greeting card, and that a concept this old needed better positioning if it was going to survive the economy of attention; the older woman took a granola bar and said, “Honey, I don’t rate God, God rates me,” which Jim wrote down as DATA POINT: REVERSED CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP, and the guy with earbuds said he’d give God a three because God “has terrible customer service,” and Jim nodded gravely, as if this were a serious critique of product support, and then the man in work boots, who had said nothing, looked at Jim and asked, flatly, “Why are you doing this,” and Jim, caught, offered a sentence too clever at first, something about social science and despair, then stopped and tried again with plain speech, admitting that he wanted to know whether anyone still felt held by anything larger than their own pocket altar, and the man shrugged and said, “Sometimes I do,” and Jim felt the answer strike him with the quiet force of a true thing spoken without posture, because it contained no argument, only a lived remainder, and Jim asked, too quickly, what it felt like, and the man, after a pause, said, “Like you can breathe even when everything’s hard,” and Jim’s hand froze over the clipboard, because the group had wandered, the bus arrived, people boarded, the moment dispersed, yet that phrase stayed lodged in him, unquantifiable, and as Mark drove them home Jim stared out the window with the strange grief of a man who had tried to turn God into a survey and accidentally received a sentence no model could absorb.
Jim Explains Weather to a Pigeon
The pigeon chose Jim, which already irritated him, because Jim preferred systems where selection could be explained without resorting to grace, but there it was on the curb outside a laundromat, head bobbing with the casual authority of a creature that had survived every human plan by refusing to care about any of them, and Jim, running on three hours of sleep and a mood that treated human life as an argument, began explaining weather as if the pigeon had asked, starting with the fact that people mistake prediction for control, that they hear “seventy percent chance” and imagine a bargain with the sky, as if numbers were charms you could hang around a storm’s neck; he drew a crude sketch on a receipt—front, line, arrows—then remembered receipts have their own theology of totals and began overexplaining the difference between a forecast and a verdict, and the pigeon, apparently satisfied with his attention, hopped closer, and Jim felt the familiar longing for a listener who couldn’t interrupt with a story about their cousin’s divorce, so he kept going, telling the pigeon that weather is the world’s way of reminding a mind that reality remains larger than any narrative, that the atmosphere keeps moving while humans keep pretending their thoughts create containment, and then, as if to confirm the thesis, the laundromat door opened and a woman stepped out with a basket and a face drained by repetition, glanced at Jim, glanced at the pigeon, and offered him the tight smile people offer to prevent a stranger’s strangeness from becoming a shared problem, and Jim, suddenly furious at the social rule that required him to shrink, leaned toward the pigeon and said, “See, even this—this is weather,” meaning the fear in her eyes, the caution, the way every public space becomes a negotiation over whose inner life is allowed to appear, and the pigeon pecked the receipt once, right on the little arrows, then turned and walked away with the blunt decisiveness of a creature whose entire philosophy could fit inside its feet; Jim watched it go, receipt limp in his hand, and felt, for a brief second, the clean humiliation of realizing that what he had wanted from the pigeon was the same thing he wanted from every person—an answer that proved the sentence arrived—yet the only answer the world reliably provides is motion, and the sky above the laundromat kept shifting with total indifference to his explanation.
Joseph Randolph is a multidisciplinary artist and professor from the Midwest. He is the author of Vacua Vita and Sum: A Lyric Parody, and his debut novel Genius & Irrelevance is currently under review. His writing has appeared in Action, Spectacle, The Penn Review, F Magazine, and elsewhere, and he received second place in the 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award. His music is available on streaming platforms, and his paintings can be found on Instagram @jtrndph.
