Circa 2010, a group of friends would meet at the bar every Wednesday and come up with comedy bits. They called themselves the Intellectuary. One night, they had an idea: a heist business. That idea, like most in birthed inside bars went nowhere. But now, in the year 2025, it’s turned into the first 3,500 words of a short story. This is the first chapter of that story that might never get finished. Enjoy. For FREE.
A watched pot never boils, but you have to play to win. Seems like no matter which direction I take I’m going to end up a loser with warm water.
Perhaps my first mistake was considering hyper-specific idioms as a guiding force in living my life. I’ve always been a literal person anyway. Searching for answers in metaphor just isn’t my style of living.
While we’re talking about style, my apologies to those of you reading this expecting flowery descriptions of the events leading up to today. Lower your expectations. While some writers paint a vivid picture with words, I give my readers only what they need to understand the story. When I see a brown house, you’ll know because I tell you it was a brown house. I won’t tell you it’s a mid-century home with a brown paint that seems to have been added to the brittle siding by the steady hands of time itself. That’s not me. I promise to do my best to keep things interesting if you promise to do your best with one, maybe two, adjectives per noun.
Let’s go back.
You already know the basic story. Or else you never would have picked this up to read. Sure, maybe someone was selling a pre-loaded Kindle at a garage sale. That’s possible. But unlikely.
What you don’t know is my side of the story. And I would very much like that side of the story to be the one that’s sustained through time and told in the history books. I’m changing names to protect those closest to me who have somehow managed to avoid this whole mess. Everything else is 100% accurate, according to me, the only one close enough to the action to make the claim. For the parts I wasn’t directly involved, I’ve filled the gaps through the word of my friends, and of course, public record. You would be surprised how much the FBI can record from one phone.