All the Colors of the Dark

by Chris Whitaker

the flair of fiction dulled a reality too severe.

Friendship was a difficult art to master.

“You’re different today,” she said. “I’m just tired, I guess.” “Tired of what?” “Of being me.”

Norma reached for her dog-eared paperback and tossed it to Saint. “You need to escape more,” she said.

Saint wanted to ask what it was like, to lose the thing that defined you. But perhaps she knew: it left you someone else. A stranger you had no choice but to tolerate, and see each day and feel and fear.

“If you ever get the chance to make someone smile, or better yet, make someone laugh, then you take it. Each and every time,” Norma said.

“Just a girl trying to find her way through the darkness.”

“And those teeth are large. Rabbitesque. I could open a can with them.

Can relate haha

“I could come see your beaver.” “You some kind of pervert?” Saint said. Jimmy caught himself and turned a deep shade of crimson. “I didn’t…I meant at the marshland.” “Where you’ll expect me to show you my beaver?” Jimmy began to sweat as he loosened his collar. “I just meant…I could help you photograph it.” Saint blew out her cheeks. Jimmy looked toward the sky, then at his shoes. And then Saint began to laugh. And she looked at his face, so open and honest and horrified, and she clutched her stomach and laughed so hard Jimmy could do little but dab the sweat from his brow and join her.

She was ready for whatever he needed. “I need to steal a car,” he said. She was not ready for that.

She was fluid and rigid and lay just at the tip of his reach, his fingers bumping along the edge of her. She was constellations he could not map. She was beautiful and hateful, thunderclouds and summer rain.

“I just…I wondered if the memories are coming back to you yet?” Tooms watched him with intent, his dark eyes fixed on Patch like he was seeking a tell, something that would show him the kid was drowning. “Memories?” “If you can remember more about the man.” Patch shrugged. “I mean, it’s Eli Aaron, right? But I never saw him. I never even heard him.” Tooms sighed, then spoke of the therapy, of eating right and maybe taking gentle exercise.

After reading the entire book I'm not 100% sure I even know what was going through Tooms mind.

That night he cleaned, so tired his body fought each movement with all it had, locking his muscles till they ached.

He smelled of chard and metal,

He would be a small scratch in the record of her life, no longer deep enough to alter the perfect rhythm.

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

he’d responded with an invitation to duel.

“You want dessert?” Sammy said. “Anything with honey.” Sammy ordered ricotta brûlée for himself, “And a jar of Manuka for Winnie the cunting Pooh.”

“When it comes to marriage, love is merely a visitor over a lifetime. Respect and kindness, they are the true foundations.

That's terrible

She wanted to tell him that Jimmy said there wasn’t room for her piano. That sometimes she fixed his dinner and he forgot to thank her. That he was not silly in any of the good ways. She wanted to tell Patch that Jimmy did not like her being a cop. That he wanted to have children right away, and that when they did he expected her to step out of her life and into a mother’s.

Jimmy sucks

He took her to the small public library, surprised that such a reader had not been before. “So other people have touched these, maybe even read them on the toilet, and then you just go ahead and take them home?”

“This weekend I’ll show you how to disengage a testicle.”