Two Sentence Stories

The boy’s mother was insane, and everyone wondered what would become of him as a result. He could have followed in her footsteps, but instead he pushed himself harder than anyone else and became more successful than his classmates and friends with a happier provenance.

You are a rough, country girl torn out of the hills near a town where I used to live and I have been lost in more countries than you could probably name. And still, he chose you.

He had a crush on my friend Sarah, though she couldn’t stand to be around him. He phoned one night when I was drunk and immediately accepted my completely insincere invitation to visit—meaning I spent the better part of a good weekend kicking myself whilst trying to distract him from the fact that he was being brutally rebuffed.

The will the old woman left behind clearly specified that if any of the objects in her home were moved from the way in which she had originally positioned them, the museum established in her name would lose funding from her heirs and be dissolved. After the night of the art theft, the curators determined that if they hoped to keep the museum open, they had no choice but to leave the empty frames on the walls interspersed with the remaining works.

She hated her job and complained about it constantly. But she never applied for another one.

She was tired of beating around the bush in a phone call that had lasted too long. Finally she told him, “Pick your choices, because you’re either insensitive and careless, a sadistic asshole or just afraid and embarrassed—but which one is it?”

I was always entranced by your word-ramble poetry, and the beautiful ideas that would fall out of your mouth. But outside of those conversations, we barely spoke to each other at all.