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"