“You really don’t trust me, do you?” she asked, lighting a cigarette and taking a long first drag.
“Not for a second,” he said. “Why, should I?”
She shrugged. “Up to you, I guess—though relationships are built on trust. At least, that’s what they say.”
“’They,’ eh? Well, I don’t trust them much either, if it’s any consolation.”
She smiled, letting smoke slip slowly from the corners of her mouth. “Close your eyes,” she said. “Just for a second.”
“What for?”
“Just close them. For me, okay? Please?”
He looked her over blankly. Then, after a moment, “Fine. What the hell.”
She took another drag on her cigarette, taking care to build an ash tip on the cherry, then—suddenly and deliberately, but with no more thought than she’d give to flushing a toilet—she twisted the lit end into his upper lip just below the nose, scorching the skin and leaving the smell of singed hair and flesh hanging in the air like some hellish cologne.
“Fucking bitch!” He jumped back a step, his eyes big as plates. “Jesus! What is your problem?”
“Me, I don’t have a problem,” she said, taking a last drag on the smoke before dropping it onto the floor, where she ground it out with the toe of her shoe. “Because I don’t trust anybody. Not even myself.”
“I can see why,” he said, carefully fingering the wound, checking for blood or ash. “Point taken. But next time, try an anecdote, for Chrissakes. Okay?”
“Random”: a Hoodlumman sudden critique
Oops, forgot the last line: “Oh. And liberals suck, man!”
“Stories From My Childhood” a shank sudden parallel.
Not bad, not bad.
Though I have to admit, what I’m really pining for is the Alpha Baboon supplemental “sudden fiction.”
Damn that oxytocin.
Good one, Jeff. While reading it I got a sudden, cartoonish mental image of that poor bastard, slack jawed with shock, crossing his eyes to look at the cigarette on his lip.
Sorry Billy.. I’m kinda too busy right now.. but I hate to see my groupies pining.. You can go over and yap at my supplemental dialogue on ”Overheard in a Bunker..” if youre really hard up though.
–AB
Ancedote? That’s for snakebite. Aloe’s the only thing that works on burns.
Thanks!
Good thing he didn’t have a moustache – he could have gone up like a protesting monk.
Bill, you seem to be somewhat out-group here. Perhaps it would help if you said: