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Joe is on page 25 of 370

As she rounded the corner, she nodded coolly at the Negro man who stepped to the side and doffed his hat. Afterwards she savored the little thrill that ran through her. With her dark hair and eyes, pale skin, and delicate features, Patricia was passing. She looked like an exotic beauty--maybe Oriental, maybe Italian--but definitely not colored. High yellow, they called it.

— Jul 19, 2022 08:09AM

A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir

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Joe’s Previous Updates

Joe is on page 282 of 370

The barn sets near where the house was once, long ago, a good ways down the cow pasture from where the house is now, and the wood hangs at a tilt on the sides of the barn, all dried up and flaky from sun and rain and freeze since two grandma's ago, and the roof had fallen open but there's some hay put by inside, pitched around loose, and a shock of birds black as pepper come and go from the slanted rafters.

— Jul 26, 2022 08:23AM

Joe is on page 261 of 370

Just because I'm a cutman, doesn't mean I'm a man. It might take you a minute to figure that our from looking at me, but you can take my word for it. Fighters call me "sir" all the time, but I don't really mind. In a way, it's better. When guys say they like two chicks together, you can bet they don't mean me.

— Jul 25, 2022 09:07AM

Joe is on page 251 of 370

Watching him die, she fell in love.

— Jul 25, 2022 08:44AM

Joe is on page 238 of 370

I'd been in New York City for three years by then, but I still didn't know all the jargon. I knew that the guys who stood outside at closing and wagged their tongues at you were called "fish queens." I knew that "kiki" was neither feminine enough to be labeled a femme, or masculine enough to be called a butch. I was a kiki like most of my friends.

— Jul 22, 2022 09:17AM

Joe is on page 221 of 370

The summer rose and faded, came back again radiant and golden only to leave for good. Bales of hay dotted the fields and disappeared into barns. The drive-in theater shut down and the kids went back to high school. Kate Hands watched the lights streaming along the Beeline from the front door of the coffee shop, smelled burning leaves. She shivered in the cool evening air, went back to cleaning the tables.

— Jul 22, 2022 08:07AM

Joe is on page 175 of 370

I figured this was what my life was gonna be. One waitress job, one lousy room, one dickhead after another.

His place was a mess so I cleaned it up, made it nice. After two days I saw the safe. It was in the wall of the bedroom closet behind his clothes.

— Jul 21, 2022 08:47AM

Joe is on page 109 of 370

My ass was tired of driving, and I welcomed the sight of the dented, mildewed trailers on the east side of Lake Okeechobee. Miles of trailer parks and single and double-wides stretched down to the road on the side by the lake, a few of them tidy, landscaped Florida retirement villages, but discarded refrigerators and broken down cars were the landmarks of my interest.

— Jul 20, 2022 08:44AM

Joe is on page 104 of 370

People come by all day and it's two tokens, one card, gimmie one, buzz me through the gate. Sometimes they don't say anything at all, just push their money through the slot and grunt and wait for me to push their tokens out from the other side.

— Jul 20, 2022 08:19AM

Joe is on page 91 of 370

And finally, in a huge round lacquerware container was Helen Miura's chirashi. The women were amazed by Helen's handiwork. Each piece of vegetable--carrot, shiitake mushroom, burdock root--was uniformly cut and mixed in with the rice like scattered tiny leaves and twigs blown by the Santa Ana winds. Others may have used a grater or a Japanese daikon suri, but Helen was a master with a knife.

— Jul 20, 2022 07:47AM

Joe is on page 18 of 370

So Jimmy was good for her itch, and she calmed down a bit with regular fucking. And he bought her favorite, Carole King's "It's Too Late, Baby." But she didn't like doing it in the truck--too hard getting the jeans off and on. And they couldn't do it at Minnie's. They tried once and Jimmy had to hide in the closet when the Baptist bitches dropped in later than usual one night. Like they were keeping an eye on her.

— Jul 18, 2022 08:58AM