One-Sentence Stories
Before he breathed his last, they led him outside to look at the sun for the last, and first, time.
*
Travel books fascinated him so much that he spent his entire life chained to his desk, with the curtains drawn, reading them.
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He loves maps for their own sake, it is true, and when he shouts out while pointing at a random destination, “I want to be there,” he is not expressing a desire to be anywhere, particularly, on this great earth, but only a wish to be a fiber, a speck at most, on an intricately-folded, colorful piece of paper.
*
After half a century, a man returned to the city of his birth to discover it practically unchanged: all the old buildings were miraculously intact, although yellowing slightly, and the entire population of half a century ago, 2,489,863 souls, by exact count, were still alive, although yellowing slightly.
*
Two men were life-long enemies because of a word said decades earlier, a word misheard, misinterpreted, and exceedingly trivial, in any case, to any objective observer, a slight inflection, some say, a thread of air escaped from between more-or-less-closed lips, or a twitch of the eyebrow, and yet the results were the horrifying death of one man, and the maiming of the other.
*
He ignored public fascinations with movie stars, athletes, statesmen, revolutionaries, mass-murderers, and poets, by writing well-researched, footnoted, and illustrated biographies of bus drivers, cashiers, beauticians, filing clerks, plumbers, and roofers.
*
At the border between there and there, a young man who was caught with a generic secret inside one of his bodily orifices was forced to swallow a strong doze of laxative, then whisked to an insane asylum, where he spent the remaining years of his productive life.
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Slang is crowding out real words, he foolishly thinks, forgetting that every word belongs to the shadowy vocabulary of an illicit crowd, invented to reassure and flatter its speaker, and confuse outsiders to what is being said.
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The pretty woman confided, “Whenever I closed my eyes I would see its aerodynamic head, its black turf, its angle, and then suddenly the phone would ring, dispelling my vision.”
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After his fifth gin and tonic, the scrawny, asthmatic man known as Uncle Moe divulged to an empty ashtray, “Yes, I must have known more than a thousand of them, but I’ve never known any of them more than twice.”
*
There, he could appraise them without the anxiety of actual contact, without stripping himself, a pseudo yes to a usually no situation.
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On an unseasonably cold night near the corner of Broad and Pine, one dandy said to another, “Yes, yes, life is short, and we are the beneficiaries.”
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Resigned, the single woman begins each conversation with a male stranger: “We’re only talking because you want to fuck me.”
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He has traveled around the globe a thousand times just to spill his seed on the carpeted floors of unheated hotel rooms.
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At 40, the bachelor decided to travel, to see the world, and among the many marvels he discovered, he was dismayed to find out that women everywhere, judging from the evidences gathered through the thin walls of hotel rooms from Brussels to Johannesburg to Riga, always vocalize their pleasure during sex, and that men, any man, really, always last minutes and minutes longer than him, which explains, finally, why he was still a bachelor after so many years, despite the good looks and charms that had attracted countless women to him initially.
*
The well-matched couple remain childless after five years of marriage, and now sleep on bunk beds, him on top, her on the bottom, although they flip flop occasionally
*
Suddenly she couldn’t remember her husband’s birthday, her children’s names, his face, whether she had ever cheated on him, whether she was even married.
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A boy was born on the luggage carousel at Singapore’s Changi Airport, spent his infancy in the storage room of the baggage claim, grew into a happy, healthy child prancing around the beautiful atrium of the food court (often serenaded by classical music), had regrettably brief friendships with people of many nationalities, had sex for the first time, with a backpacker of indeterminate ethnicity, behind the check-in counter of the Royal Brunei Airlines (terminal 2), read the biography of Lee Kuan Yew and many bestsellers, spent much of middle age brooding in the departure lounge, then died, of abdominal hernia, in a well-scrubbed stall of the men’s room.
*
Convinced that war is the only authentic game, the only game worth playing, he dedicated himself to being a mercenary, and proceeded to participate in the Pakistani-Indian War of 1971 (where he lost a finger), the Yom Kippur War (where he lost his right foot), the Falklands War (where he lost the right side of his face), the Gulf War (where he lost the left side of his face), and the 1995 civil war in Sierra Leone (where he lost another finger).
*
A fake life is not redeemed by a real death, he finally realized, as orange flames licked his angry eyebrows.
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A national icon in his youth, loveless and lampless, he languished for decades in cold, inhospitable countries, working an assortment of bullshit jobs that deeply offended his sense of personal greatness, his destiny, which he came to understand as the punishment of the people he had left behind, the wreaking of havoc on his homeland, when he would return.
*
He is a lifelong ingrate, having betrayed everyone—lovers, friends, relatives, dogs—who has ever benefited him, on principle, but he is strangely loyal to one whom he has never met, who has done nothing for him, who does not even know that he exists.
*
To your less-than-delicate question, Sir, I can only respond: Of course I would do it all over again, because even though I’ve lost my left eye, and my right ear, and my nose, and both of my legs, I’ve experienced something truly different, truly amazing, and have managed to escape an absolutely meaningless life that was slowly killing me back home.
