One-Sentence Story: The Slow, Cool Detour
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| Road to the Ranch by Georgia O'Keefe |
It started out as just another meat and potatoes divorce case—a wealthy business man who wanted to dig up some dirt on his second wife—let’s call her Ms. Bottle Blonde—so he could invalidate their prenup (men are such slime—
hey, you’d grow up hating them, too, if you had a drunken abuser like mine for a father—that bastard drove my mom off before I was ten—at least he always claimed she’d left of her own volition—in the middle of the night, without even saying a word to me—but I’ve always suspected that he whacked her in the head just a little too hard that last time, and that if I had guts enough to look, I’d find her pitiful remains in some unmarked, shallow grave right out in the woods behind our old house—
so I did what I always do in cases like this, I immediately scheduled an appointment for myself with Ms. Bottle Blonde’s hair stylist—
this has been a surefire strategy in the past because soft, spineless bimbos like Ms. Bottle Blonde will typically spill just about every ghastly detail of their so-called personal lives right into the hot little ears of any guy who happens to be touching up their roots—
but here was the catch: I couldn't get even a microscopic hint of a shadow of a particle of filth about Ms. Bottle Blonde out of him, even though I went back several times for conditioning treatments and even highlights—I had to say I really admired the way the guy kept his mouth shut even though with a slut-case like Ms. Bottle Blonde, there were clearly goods to be had—and then, get this, he gave me the best hair cut I’ve ever had, bar none, so long after it became clear that I’d been taking a slow, cool detour off the eternal freeway of human weakness and depravity—my cash cow, in other words—I found myself scheduling regular appointments with him, and the more I got to know him, the more impressed I became with the guy, by his basic human decency, not to mention his skill with hair, and I finally began to realize that the continued deception I had been maintaining came at a cost, that it was starting to eat away at my soul, and one day, I found myself coming clean to him—
“I’m not a lawyer, like I first told you,” I confessed, looking down at my bitten-to-the-quick finger nails, “and not a friend of Ms. Bottle Blonde’s, either—just a run-of-the-mill, down-at-the heels girl detective”
but he just laughed quietly and told me not to worry, that he heard stranger things every week, and then he gave me another great hair cut, and that is the happy ending to this story—
you probably thought I was going to tell you that I solved the mystery of my mother’s disappearance and was finally able to come to terms with my traumatic childhood, and that I found love at last with a good man—the hair stylist—and gave up my sordid detective work forever, but isn’t a great hair cut as much as you have any right to hope for out of life?
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