Thirty Seconds or Less

The weight of words never spoken — how silence can be its own kind of violence.

empty chairs · unsent letters · kitchen table · reaching hand · silence

89 played this week

Lyrics· 261 words

[Verse 1] The timer starts the second that the call connects Thirty seconds or less is what my score reflects A man named Daniel says his mother just passed away And asks if I can cancel her subscription today

[Verse 2] I want to say I'm sorry like a person, slow and true But the clock is climbing red and my supervisor's listening too I say it fast, I say it kind, I say it in twelve words And somewhere both those true things get crushed into one bird

[Chorus] Thirty seconds or less, thirty seconds or less They want my heart efficient, they want my grief undressed I'll give you what I can before the bell goes off Thirty seconds or less, God, is that ever enough

[Verse 3] Daniel says thank you, says I was the nicest one He's called all week, no one let him finish, no one I go three seconds over and the system flags my name I don't take it back. I'd do it the same

[Bridge - half time, almost spoken] There's a folder in my drawer of names I went over for Daniel's in there. So's the man who lost his store They can flag me red forever, put it all in my file Thirty seconds couldn't hold him. I gave him a while

Short Story

*A story for curious minds*

There was a small bridge toll booth on the edge of town where a woman named Ines worked the overnight hours, and above her booth hung a sign that said AVERAGE TRANSACTION TIME: 11 SECONDS, updated automatically, glowing pale green like something that mattered very much.

Most nights, cars rolled through quickly — coins in the basket, gate up, gone. But on a particular foggy Wednesday, an old man in a rusted blue truck pulled up and didn't move when the gate lifted.

"Sir?" Ines said gently, leaning toward her little window.

"I'm sorry," the old man said. "I just realized — this is the last time I'll cross this bridge. We sold the house. We're moving in the morning to be near my son."

Ines glanced, almost involuntarily, at the green sign above her booth. Eleven seconds. The man had already taken nine just saying that much.

She could have simply said "safe travels" and waved him through. It would have kept her average intact. Instead she said, "What was it like, living on the other side all these years?"

The old man told her, in maybe forty more seconds, about a porch he'd built with his own hands, about a daughter who used to wave at this very tollbooth every morning on her way to school, about how the river used to flood every spring before they built the new levee.

By the time he finished, nearly a full minute had passed. The sign above the booth blinked from green to a dim, unbothered amber — not red, not an alarm, just a small color shift nobody downtown would ever look at closely enough to notice or care.

"Thank you for asking," the old man said, and drove on into the fog, his taillights shrinking toward the far bank.

The next car arrived within seconds, slid coins into the basket, and rolled through without a word, and the average ticked back down toward green almost as if the minute had never happened at all.

Ines never told her supervisor about the conversation. It wasn't the kind of thing that fit in a report. But she kept, in the back of her register drawer, a small folded scrap of paper where she'd written the date and just a few words: *the porch, the river, the daughter who waved.* It wasn't proof of anything. It didn't change her numbers. It was simply hers — a record, however small, that for one minute on a foggy night, a whole life had been allowed to cross the bridge at its own pace.