Noir or Never

by Mary Corinne Powers

The sun set like a fat lady easing into an icy ocean while night sprawled against the sky like a hooker in a steel drawer in the county morgue.  I poured three fingers of rotgut, but I couldn't slurp it fast enough. So I gave up and used a glass. I know when I'm licked. Hell, I usually even enjoy it.

She burst in like spontaneous combustion at an over-insured fireworks warehouse, her stilettos pounding like gunfire at a South Central drive-by. She had legs longer than a sentence by Faulkner and lips meant for blowing... the saxophone. Yeah, that's it. Look up “hubba-hubba” in the dictionary, you'll find this dame.

“Nick!” she ululated, melting into me like a stick of polyunsaturated margarine on the roof of a Chevy Impala in August.

“Who's Nick?” I wondered, already harder than Chinese arithmetic. We slid to the floor like overcooked linguini dripping from a shattered bowl hurled against a dirty wall.


Mary Corinne Powers is the mother of three brilliant sons, two breath-takingly moronic labradors, an ancient Volvo station wagon, and an intriguing assortment of mostly-dead plants. In a previous incarnation she was a child and adolescent therapist. She now works as a freelance writer, high school teacher, and volunteer wine-taster-at-large. She is becoming her own work of art.