Noir

by Christopher Moore

Her lips reminded me of a valentine, shiny red and plump, but a little lopsided, like maybe she’d taken a shot to the kisser in an earlier round, or the valentine heart had acute angina.

My dear ma was an English teacher, and from the time I squeaked out my first word she steeped me deeply in metaphor, simile, symbolism, alcoholism, and all the various iambs of the poetic tradition, all of which have served me greatly over the years in pouring drinks, welding ships, bird-dogging broads, and waxing poetical on both this and that.

fog lay spread across the city like a drowned whore—damp, cold, smelling of salt and diesel—a sea-sodden streetwalker who’d just bonked a tugboat . . .

type of broad you could take home to Mom then ravage in the spare room under urgent whispers while Mom harrumphed her disapproval to Dad about just what manner of floozie would allow herself to be named after a stinky English cheese.

she was the Titanic and he was the Iceberg, and they liked that so much that he was the Iceberg for a while and she was the Titanic.

felt as if I just threw a rock and busted out the streetlight that was the only light in my miserable life.

scarf through a stripper’s legs, leaving everything damp and smelling of sailors’ broken dreams.

I wanted to throw her across the seat and hammer her like Martin Luther on the church door, such was the power of forgiveness, but I wasn’t done confessing.

Felt a little spooky standing out there in a glass box in the dark, on a deserted road with the stars splattered out over me like a suicide’s brains on the ceiling, the neon no-vacancy sign buzzing like a barber’s clippers,

red Mary Janes with heels high enough to give a stripper a nosebleed.