The blade on the paper cutter is sharp and sinister. It is precise, but still, your edges are never right. Your sides are cockeyed and tilted. Black ink births tiny white fringe with each slice. The machine is imperfect, and it is flawed, but it’s better than you could ever be with scissors or clippers or knives. Cutting paper is a young person’s game.
When recounting the story, she liked to tell people that it was all Harold’s fault. Didn’t most criminals blame other people for their crimes, especially their crimes of passion?
Peggy gave her big brother that look, the skeptic face normally reserved for her four-year-old son when he announced he could fly or had mysteriously become a black belt in karate.
Lincoln Rush drove out Willow Grove Street in his black 1964 Nova SS, thinking thoughts the color of his fender.
I don’t know if fate owed me an upswing, but life hadn’t been easy for the last two years. I came to New York to escape the constraints of my Boston upbringing. I was the second son in a long family line that had a rigid tradition: the first son became a doctor, the second son became a lawyer. The allure of law was nonexistent to me…
“It ain’t gonna fit.”
“You, my friend, are a pessimist.”
“Why am I a pessimist?”
“Situation wanders along, you see it as a problem. I, on the other hand, being an eternal optimist, view things as opportunity.”
