He charmed her by saying unusual things like: “You and I are like a block in a logic game, we have to go together.” They were so un-romantic that they felt genuine, whereas the tried-and-true romantic lines she’d heard so many times before from other men always felt forced and contrived.
Category: Two Sentence Stories
Sharing #2
When she went down in the world, she was not surprised to see her circle of friends diminish; but she was shocked when her fortune changed, and the same thing occurred. Some friends who could commiserate with her in the roughest of times couldn’t seem to bring themselves to celebrate with her when things were good.
Condescension
Once, during a discussion about neurons, he laughed at her and said, “You’re such a victim of Time Magazine!” That was the end of the affair.
Concessions
She married a man obsessed with hunting and camouflage. At the wedding reception, they cut open a groom’s cake in the shape of a deer head.
Flying
She didn’t have many good memories of her father. But there was one that she clung to: when she was very small and they played together in the pool, and he would put her on his knee and throw her high into the air.
Hypocrisy
All the girls in the female student lounge had their noses pressed to the windows to watch the inhabitants of floor C in the all-boys’ dorm across the lawn put on a voluntary, low-fi improvised strip tease complete with strobe lighting and floor fans. But when the boys finished up and gestured that it was the girls’ turn to reciprocate, the room quickly emptied.
The Theft
I had a thing for the peanut posters plastered in every subway car. Late one night, emboldened by booze, I ripped one out of its flimsy frame and felt surprised no one else seemed to notice.
Bi-coastal
She thought she was a West Coast girl accidentally born on the East Coast until she visited a friend in California. Listening to the girls there talk about making out with each other the night before—since they’d gotten bored at the party where no interesting boys could be found—she realized she was, in fact, fully an East Coast girl.
The Impostor
He waited years for her to leave her husband. One morning, he awoke with the sense that things could end simply because the person he was waiting for didn’t exist; and the person he was severing ties with was merely an impostor.
Tables Turned
At first, she thought he was cold and seriously lacking in empathy, because whenever she brought up her impending surgery, he changed the topic or simply told her not to worry about it. But he was there when she came to, helping her to change out of her paper gown and even pulling up her panties for her; and she saw he had been worried more than she had.
Two words too many
She didn’t mind when he stared at the photo and blurted out, “This looks nothing like you!” She did mind when he added, “It’s hot.”
Time Marches On
When she first visited Athens, she was surprised—not by the ruins, they were exactly as she had expected them to be, but by the rest of it. For all the quaint charm of the dusty agora and its tumbled columns with flowers growing up in between the cracks and butterflies hovering poetically over them, a ten minutes’ walk in any direction, and you might think for a moment you were on a dingy street in Philadelphia or Detroit.
The score
He dreaded his birthday. He couldn’t help making an unconscious tally every year of who phoned or e-mailed and who didn’t and he preferred not to be so painfully aware of which friends and family members didn’t care enough to remember.
Bearings
I do, in fact, have a moral compass. I just haven’t fine-tuned it yet.
Crazy
She read that Nietzsche went insane and clutched the neck of a horse being mercilessly flogged by an irate coach driver. She could never understand why it was Nietzsche and not the coach driver who got hauled off to the asylum.
Change
He got into nonprofit work because he loved people. He got out of nonprofit work because he hated people.
Gold Digger’s Nightmare
When they married, he was four times her age but they got along marvelously. Then some asshole invented Viagra.
Let Down
She grew up on Disney movies, Jane Austen novels, and romantic comedies. She was disappointed, during her first kiss, to discover that the human tongue felt strangely like a giant slug in her mouth.
Past Tense
She was not the jealous type and never suspected him of infidelity. All the same, she was morbidly curious about his former lovers—what kind of panties they wore, what they looked like, how smart they were, what sexual techniques they had—and couldn’t bear the thought of being inferior to them in any way.
Ex-boyfriend
I’m glad you couldn’t see me on the phone. I cried silently every time you were talking.