Tag: hard-boiled

The shop’s windows were painted over with advertising. The front counter, made of red and white speckled melamine, was heaped high with impulse-buy opportunities—lolly-pops, gum-balls, postcards and cigarettes—and manned by a teenage girl who acknowledged my entrance with a brief and artificial smile and then returned to desultorily filing her fingernails. The light filtered through the lurid paint only dimly, tinted red, blue, and yellow, so that the backmost rows of shelves were cast in shadow.