literature

My Attempt at Noir

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GWARins-Knight's avatar
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Literature Text

I woke up in my small bed in my cramped hotel room, like every other day. The manager and I had an arrangement: I could stay in the room as long as I wanted. In exchange, I made strange phone calls to phone numbers the manager read off of a small black notebook.

I ate an uninspiring breakfast, a la microwave. Absently-mindedly pushing the paper plate into the sink, I sat in the darkness for a moment... half asleep and watching spots dance in my vision. It was with great effort that I threw on whatever shirt I had worn the previous night. I pulled some clean pants from the dryer of the hotel laundry room. I must have left them there overnight. Nobody had bothered to steal them. I walked out of the hotel and to the highway, to watch traffic go by.

A large underpass shaded me from the blazing sun. I took a patch of concrete, sitting with the homeless and other derelicts who fled from the heat. As I sat down, I felt something heavy shift in my right pocket-- A flask of some unknown and forgotten liquid. I raised the mystery fluid to my mouth, and took a cautious swig. It left an awful taste behind. No wonder I hadn't already drank it. I kept the flask out, grudgingly taking a drag on it to attract attention.

Sure enough, a hobbled man with missing fingers and teeth waddled his way over to me. After some negotiation, I traded him the rest of the flask for an unusually nice pair of small, rounded sunglasses. I made my unceremonious exit before he realized he'd been ripped off. I tried not to think about how he'd just traded the only beautiful thing in his life for a single drink, of a taste godawful even by my standards.

I tried harder not to think about how the sunglasses were probably stolen in the first place. For whatever reason, I waited until I was out of his sight to put them on. I pulled myself over a guard rail, up to the sidewalk of the overpass. A woman who had been leaning over the side gave me a look like I had crawled up from the depths of Hell itself. I gave her a fake smile to break the tension. She spat on a car below and walked away.
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theoneperson's avatar
I like this. i love how you write.