Noir

by Christopher Moore

they growl at the light like Frankenstein at fire.

wouldn’t know how to treat a member of the gentler sex if she smacked him upside the head with a sack full of vaginas.

Cursing in French is classier. It ain’t even like cursing. More like poetry.”

That’s when the first kiss happened. It was the kind of kiss that he wanted to wake up to and keep refreshing periodically until he got one long last one, salty with tears, in his casket.

She rolled onto her face to give him a good shot at the hooks in the back. “Free my people!” “I will. I am the Harriet Tubman of your breasts.”

He was Romeo and she was Juliet, he was Heathcliff and she was Cathy, he was Tristan and she was Isolde, he was Ahab and she was Moby-Dick, 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. She was Snow White and he was the Seven Dwarfs, he was the Scarecrow and she was the Flying Monkeys—it

“Broad came into Sal’s and Sammy lost his mind. You could see it happening.” “You could not,” I said. He could not.

“What were you looking for when you came into my bar that day?” “I was looking for you. Just you.” “But we’d never met.” “I didn’t know you were what I was looking for, but there you were . . .” “What if I hadn’t been there? Would anyone have done?” “Nope. I wasn’t looking for just anyone. I wasn’t looking for you until I found you. I thought, That’s the guy I’ve been looking for, that guy, right there.”

They lay down between her trench coat and his overcoat, wrapped the stars around them like a blanket, and made love until time disappeared.

with the keen Sherlockish detective powers

the fog off the bay was streaming between the buildings like a scarf through a stripper’s legs, leaving everything damp and smelling of sailors’ broken dreams.

limited to what he had read in certain novels, such as Gunslinger Gym Teachers of Lesbo Gulch, Jailhouse Sex Kittens in Heat, Little Women, and so forth.

moved through the club like a shark patrolling a reef, which is to say, with the smooth grace of knowing no one dares fuck with you.

these guys have got to have some serious cheddar, because they have some of the biggest trees I ever seen.” “Doll face,” Jimmy interjected. “Strictly speaking, I don’t think the size of their trees has anything to do with their income.”

Every guy can basically be boiled down to what he wants and what he’s afraid of.

who lifted him against the wall and held him there in a way that

Just for the record, I am not the villain here, I am just the narrator.

Only then do I bid them a fond farewell and send them off to hors d’oeuvre Valhalla.

“Hey, you ever feel like you might just be the construct of an unyielding, all-seeing bureaucracy beyond our perception that is molding humanity to its own will and pleasure?”

“Ever think we might be just pieces in a self-building, evolving machine, forming itself to crush the human spirit?”

I wanted to throw her across the seat and hammer her like Martin Luther on the church door,

I know I’ve only known you a week, but it’s long enough to know that I want to know you another week, and another week after that, and as many weeks as there are, that’s how many weeks I want to know you. That’s how swell I think you are.”

You think you can go over my head? Everyone is over my head,

I can hear you cringing. It was fine, it was good, it was friendship, and it was all in good spirits, but seen through a lens of today’s political correctness and horror at cultural appropriation, I suppose it is cringeworthy.