
ANCHORAGE by Marc Tweed
That’s the Way of the Boss. That’s the Way of the Boss! Well, fuck.
Marc Tweed’s short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the 2022, 2023, and 2024 editions of NOON Annual and he has also published fiction in New World Writing Quarterly, Juked, The Normal School, Cleaver, X-R-A-Y, and many other literary journals. His story Mean World was longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 of 2022. He lives in Seattle, where he works as a technology writer. Marc‘s dogs—Omen and Mavis—have psychic powers they only use for good.
That’s the Way of the Boss. That’s the Way of the Boss! Well, fuck.
Bill Gunderson was more than a coworker to me, in fact I’d gone kayaking with Bill maybe three weeks before they chucked his severed head off the 29th floor of the Pemberton Building. He was our top seller the year before that ordeal, three out of four quarters. The guy was a data security sales machine. It was a windy evening this happened. I remember his head making a sound like an empty coconut when it hit the concrete and bounced twenty feet in the air, coming to rest directly in front of my girlfriend, Veraldine, whose exquisite face elongated…