All the Colors of the Dark

by Chris Whitaker

Patch wondered if hope was its own kind of punishment, sometimes worse than certainty, than the long and closed-off road toward healing.

not have read the memo.” “I took her number.” “And I sent her an actual memo thanking her for her service but making it clear she would no longer be required in my bed.”

“You don’t fuck with a honey badger,” Misty said, as Heather fought back tears and sloped away.

I had to feign orgasm. And people say I’m a misogynist.”

Giving a man a badge and gun doesn’t mean you’ve given him the moral code to use either correctly.

“Some of us assign greater merit to those flaws. If we’re ten percent bad does that make us good?” Out in the sun she placed a hand on the hood of the cruiser. “It depends on how bad that ten percent is?”

“You love this guy?” he said, and he did not meet her eye because it was not a comfortable question for him to ask. “Love is a visitor.” He laughed, but it was not unkind. “Well, then I hope it comes to stay soon.”

“When you kept the bees, I used to come out each morning before you woke to check for the dead and remove them. Their friends used to get together and attack me.” Saint smiled. “And you know why I did it? Because your day would be ruined. Because you take the problems…the flaws in design, and you take them so personally.”

beside him watched a small blonde girl swipe a candy bar and stuff it into her pocket. “You’ll get caught doing that,” he said. She tilted her small chin up. “Fuck off.”

“Franklin Meyer was a cunt, and not the gentleman kind. Franklin’s father was a cunt, too. As kids they were cuntlets. A line of cunts, each one cuntier than the last.” “I wonder what the collective term for—” “A cuntet,” Sammy said knowingly.

In his bedroom he boxed the pirate memorabilia. He was not a pirate. He was a thirty-year-old man with a criminal record.