Noir

by Christopher Moore

Light being the natural enemy of the bar broad.)

Sal wiped down the bar with a tattered rag like he was mopping up blood from a fresh ax murder, listless, like he knew he was just stirring the gore on the surface.

perhaps he was just a lowbrow mug who 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.

“Voilà!” said the artist, in perfect fucking French.

I was feeling like a bootful of shit, hold the boot.

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.

he looked like one of those dried-up faces you carve out of an apple in third grade to teach you that time is cruel and we are all just going to shrivel up and die, so there’s no point in getting out of bed.

His experience of the lesbian community was somewhat limited, which is to say, 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.

She smelled of gin and cupcakes, and while that was mysterious in itself, I figured I would ask her about it later.