“The Boss” is a new (very short) short story by Robert Coover. Read the whole thing at The New Yorker.
Read my review of Coover’s latest novel, Huck Out West, here.
Here are the first two paragraphs of “The Boss”:
The gunman lights a cigarette, watches despondently as dusk falls upon the empty alley. He is alone in a lonely place, summoned here to receive instructions from a master criminal known only as the Boss, but the Boss isn’t here. No one is. It’s spooky. He feels like a marked man. The Boss is known for his ruthlessness. When he orders a killing, someone dies. The gunman would like there to be witnesses for what happens next, but the alley’s deserted.
He glances at his watch, a gift from the Boss. Face a gold coin, no numbers. A joke, probably: time is money. Or, maybe, money is time; it depends on what you’re short of. The Boss is a great joker. The watch hands are hair-thin, like the edge of a razor blade, hard to see, especially in this fading light. There and not there, like time itself. Which is perhaps not being clocked—perhaps that’s what the numberless face is saying. How can you measure the shit you’re buried in? He doesn’t know what keeps the watch running. Battery inside, maybe. When the battery dies? Don’t think about it.
