I’m sometimes criticized for being cold but I opened up my heart once. All I have to show for it is an STD.
Category: Two Sentence Stories
Cheap Thrill
They were teenagers when she traveled across the country for a visit, and there were no cultural activities to entertain her. So they ran through the dollar store and came out covered in tacky jewelry and fake tattoos.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The day he received his rejection letter from Harvard, he buried his face in a towel and wept. He wasn’t sad for himself, but for his parents.
A, B, or C?
When she thought about him, The Great Thing That Never Was, she could observe herself dissolving into a completely unpredictable mass of emotions and raw nerves. If she saw him again, would she say, “Fuck you,” or ignore him completely, or throw her arms around his neck?
Educated Poverty
He poured everything he had into his education. By the time he received his Master’s degree, he couldn’t afford to frame the diploma.
Pick-ups
They were stupidly passing time, re-telling the worst pick-up lines they’d ever heard. Out of the crowd, one stood out as the clear winner: “Baby, you’re so fine, I’d like to put you on a plate and sop you up with a biscuit!”
Silly Question
They walked into an expensive menswear shop, and the salesman asked rather ridiculously, “What brings you in today?” He raised his eyebrows and smiled, “Fate?”
Justice
After a lengthy career of art theft, he was captured, tried, and sentenced to several years in jail. He got out, wrote a book about it, and made more off the royalties than he ever had off stolen art.
Gossip
After Adam, she decided she would never again date anyone her girlfriends wanted to set her up with. She needed to be able to confide in them but it seemed unfair and unkind to share things like: “Your friend is a premature ejaculator,” or “My massage therapist thinks he’s gay.”
Too much snow
Spring came. Only then did she remember that there was a season apart from winter.
Confession
All the other nuns assumed she had joined them because of a shared devotion. She later confessed it was simply because she hadn’t realized that the last man who asked her to marry him would be the last man who asked her to marry him.
Status Quo
He loved their sex life. She loved her rabbit.
The Less-loved
When her childhood crush informed her he was getting married, she felt devastated until he added: “We’ve been together so long, I feel like I owe it to her.” Suddenly, she felt very sorry for his fiancée.
Look-alikes
We hadn’t seen William in at least two years when we went to pick him up at the train station, and we were killing time waiting for him by pointing out weird people we saw. I was doubled over with laughter having identified someone who looked exactly like William if he became a crazy, disheveled mathematician ten years from now when my friend Nicee gently touched my arm and said, “That is William.”
Doubt
Their country was in the throes of civil war when his wife received an irresistible job offer in America, and so he followed her and watched the years unfold on her steadily increasing rank and wealth. In time, their children became successful doctors in New York and LA, and still he couldn’t convince himself that they wouldn’t all have been better off staying in the country of his birth.
Guarding
Every fortification has a foundation. If someone has built a wall, it’s because at one point in time or another, they felt insecure.
Ex
At the time, it seemed as though they were really having fun together. But in retrospect, she realized she’d only gone out with him for the excuse to wear pretty dresses.
New
She had always found the botanical gardens incredibly boring. But on her first date with the botanist, he ran around throwing his nose into the best-smelling flowers and guiding her hands over strange-feeling bark; and it was a whole other world.
Abysmal
I asked you what was wrong. You said, “I can’t get drunk enough.”
The Exchange Student
Her friend had traveled a long way to visit but the school refused to allow her to bring any guests to class.
He tagged along anyway, and she introduced him as a foreign exchange student to all of her teachers, while he nodded awkwardly and pieced together broken English which was, in fact, his native tongue.