A New Noir

It was a Tuesday, 11:06 pm. The night was as dark as something really dark and not well lit. I stared at a computer screen as empty as something empty with nothing in it.

Evelyn had just called to tell me I was a bastard. She had legs like something long and sexy, but after two highballs she was as crazy as something really crazy. She drove me nuts. Both ways.

She wasn’t the first to call me that and she wouldn’t be the last. I got that all too familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach like a bad feeling you get in the pit of your stomach at times like this.

But I needed to put Evelyn behind me. I took another shot of my bourbon and went to work.

I had just scored a new gig. A writing gig. The kind of gig you dream about when you’re new to the writing game but always seems just beyond your grasp. But I wasn’t new any more. I wasn’t young. I felt like something old trying to do something young people should do.

I had just four weeks to do character sketches, plot outlines and put together an outline. Then the real race would begin. Fifty Big Ones. And I had to pull it together in just 30 days. Fifty thou in 30 days is like something hard. Something really, really hard.

So I stared at the blank screen the way some animal stares into something.

I had heard on the street some rouge writers were having a secret meeting tonight over at Nanowrimo—a seedy website on the outskirts of the internet. Only the locals knew about it and they weren’t talking—not to me, not to the cops and not to publishers.

I reached for the mouse. It felt like a mouse-like thing in my hand. My nimble index finger clicked the left button, placing the cursor into the address bar like a cursor-like thing blinking in an address-bar like thing.

I was in faster than a fast thing.

I went over to the genre I was going to pile 50K of words into. Mystery. Suspense. It’s a tough genre, gritty like gritty stuff, but it has the edge I need. Sub-genre: Noir.

I saw a couple tomatoes at the bar along with a couple toughs. The toughs looked like tough people—people who know how to be tough. I took my place at the bar to the right of a juicy fruit, placing her between me and the tougher looking tough guy.

The Lolita stopped writing in her notebook and turned her face toward me and gave me the look of someone who knew how to write. She had been around a pen and paper before.

“Buy you a pen beautiful?”

“Sure” the word slipped out of her mouth slowly, like a slow thing coming out of a mouth-like thing.

[ To Be Continued… ]

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Art found here.