Empty desks have personalities. Mindy is gone. Frida opens the office, stands in the kitchen with coffee still too hot to drink, looks at the desk. Casandra comes in, clocks it: "Yeah." Chloe takes an earbud out when she passes the desk, puts it back, says nothing. The room runs its normal morning. But underneath - the quality of a room that knows something has been set in motion. Melissa comes in from her own Dallas trip at eleven. Sees Mindy's absence, gets the nod from Jayme: *she'll be back.* Opens her laptop. The pitch document is in the third folder, moved there so it's not the first thing she sees. It's still the first thing she notices. She doesn't open it today. But the room is different without Mindy in it. The temperature changed. There's a particular honesty that arrives when the person who was watching isn't there. Melissa closes the laptop and goes to find Jayme - because there's something she wants to say, and today's room is the right room. Featured: Frida Martinez, division lead. Casandra Cass, production. Chloe Dawn, editorial. Melissa Sanderson, strategist. The Marfa Munchies is a daily fiction podcast about a food, beverage, and lifestyle division of a creative agency between Marfa and Dallas. New episodes every morning. Follow the world at @marfamunchies on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky. . . . | ai-assisted fiction

What you see is what it is. And also what it isn't. Frida comes out late, the way Frida always comes out late, and finds Jayme already at the fire pit with a beer she isn't drinking. The Davis Mountains are a darker dark. The stars are obscene. Melissa has a pitch she wants to bring. Jayme is going to do what's responsible, which they both know is not the same word as yes. Mindy does not come to the fire. Chloe and Casandra have built their own smaller fire on the other side of the property and are laughing at something on a phone, twenty-two and twenty-eight, cataloguing the night. On the far side of the compound, a different division has their own fire going. The worlds don't touch tonight. They just burn, separately, under the same indecent stars. The phone is still on the desk in Dallas. The phone will still be there Monday. So will whatever is on it. Featured: Frida Martinez. Jayme Nichols. Casandra Cass. Chloe Dawn. The Marfa Munchies is a daily fiction podcast about a food, beverage, and lifestyle division of a creative agency between Marfa and Dallas. Episode 1 closes here. The phone will still be there Monday. Follow the world at @marfamunchies on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky. . . . | ai-assisted fiction

Right is not the same as beautiful. Mindy Carpenter in the back room with the lights off, scrubbing through the selects from the week's clean-label shoot. Frame 0847 is the one. The window light did what it was supposed to do. The frame doesn't lie. Her phone lights up on the desk beside the keyboard. She does not pick it up right away. Something passes across her face in the dark that the monitor light catches and that no one is there to see. She turns the phone face down and goes back to the selects. On her way out she tells herself, in the private voice everyone keeps for the lies they need, that it was a good week and everything is fine. She drives home through the Dallas dark with the radio off. Featured: Mindy Carpenter, creative director. The Marfa Munchies is a daily fiction podcast about a food, beverage, and lifestyle division of a creative agency between Marfa and Dallas. New episodes weekday mornings. Follow the world at @marfamunchies on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky. . . . | ai-assisted fiction

The water is the same every time. That helps. Jayme Nichols on a dock at the edge of a Dallas lake in the blue before sunrise. Ten minutes of not holding anything together. It is a practice, not a mood, and the distinction matters to her more than she can explain. She is the senior strategist of the Munchies division and in practice its center of gravity. She is carrying something she has told no one. The dock is for not examining things. You set the weight down. Then you choose, freshly, to pick it back up. That is the other half of the practice. Featured: Jayme Nichols, senior strategist. The Marfa Munchies is a daily fiction podcast about a food, beverage, and lifestyle division of a creative agency between Marfa and Dallas. New episodes weekday mornings. Follow the world at @marfamunchies on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky. . . . | ai-assisted fiction