One-Sentence Story: A Dark-Eyed Boy with Glasses
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| Glass Tears by Man Ray |
She was sitting in a cafe telling a good friend about the man who had betrayed her—he had confessed to her almost at the beginning that had things been otherwise, he would have wanted to marry her, but he was already married, a relationship he could never leave, and so she gave herself to him on those terms until she became uneasy (there were little clues) and, eventually, though he told her that she was crazy, that she was imagining things, one of his friends finally blurted out the truth: the man wasn’t really married, he had lied about it and asked them, his friends, to lie as well—and how, in going over and over it all, trying to understand why he could do that to her (had she been squandering her love on someone who was utterly worthless and possibly even evil, or was it just something to do with the frailties of human nature, the terrible things that people do to each other when in the grip of powerful, frightening emotions?), she kept coming back to something he had told her about his childhood, about how he never needed much sleep, even when he was very young, and so he would sit up in his room, in the dull haze of the street light, a dark eyed boy with glasses, building towers of steel with his erector set, late into the night, while everyone else was asleep; but when she finished her friend looked her in the eyes and said coolly, “Even contract murderers were children once, you know.”
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