JARED LIPOF
Warren’s wife’s head appeared in his office doorway.“You in the middle of something?”
He faked a yawn and opened a folder and scattered depositions on top of the Quincy’s Historical Emporium catalog he’d been examining. “I believe I’m at liberty.”
–– "Capt. Hezekiah Coffin"
It’s fifteen minutes to lunch break when Madison, that prick, points his phone out the window and starts filming the scene taking place below.
“Look at these morons,” he says.
––"Ready, Fire, Aim"
You want to get rich in this country, you've got to put in the hours. Me, I won over a hundred-thousand bucks on a game show. Forty-four minutes of airtime, that's over two grand a minute. Yours truly, quick as you please.
––"Luckpusher"
It was the fall the NFL players went on strike, asking that their wage scale be calculated as a function of gross revenue—a demand the team owners recoiled from as if someone had upended a pitcher of urine across each vast mahogany desk.
––"Mastermind"
Across the street from our school lived a man with a broken face. He hadn’t always lived there, but for the past three days, freed by the final bell, we’d walk past the yellow buses idling along the drive- way and there he’d be, sitting in a window, an X of bandages across his nose, a gauze skullcap held in place by a chinstrap of medical tape. Just two eyes and some nose holes. A mummified king, silent and cryptic, scowling at everything beneath him.
––"Mastermind"