O. Henry - The Thing's the Play

One of the most famous short story writers that came out of America is O. Henry aka William Sydney Porter. He wrote a score of astonishing tales. For today here's The Thing's the Play:

Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses. One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man.
"There was a story about that chap a month or two ago," said the reporter. "They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the details."
After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over Wurzburger.
"I see no reason," said I, when he had concluded, "why that shouldn't make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn't have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in a real theatre. I'm really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. 'The thing's the play,' is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare." "Try it," said the reporter.
"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a humorous column of it for his paper.
There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and stationery are sold.
One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen, and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a "Wholesale Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont. But after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.
Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent" young beaux of the same side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen's hand. When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated him - honestly, he did.
After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaiters and paper bags of hominy.
Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and dolce far niente.
It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him. With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.
In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed him departed. He bowed low, and said something about "irresistible impulse" and "forever carry in his heart the memory of" - and she suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going down.
"I will away," said John Delaney, "to the furthermost parts of the earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another's. I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for -"
"For goodness sake, get out," said Helen. "Somebody might come in."
He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he might give it a farewell kiss.
Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid ever vouchsafed you - to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and have the one you don't want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel to you and babble of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know your power, and to feel the sweet security of your own happy state; to send the unlucky one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are well manicured - say, girls, it's galluptious - don't ever let it get by you.
And then, of course - how did you guess it? - the door opened and in stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.
The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's hand, and out of the window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.
A little slow music, if you please - faint violin, just a breath in the clarinet and a touch of the 'cello. Imagine the scene. Frank, white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him. Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her wrists and tears them from his shoulders - once, twice, thrice he sways her this way and that - the stage manager will show you how - and throws her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from the house through the staring groups of astonished guests.
And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience must stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray, rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years which must precede the rising of the curtain again.
Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.
One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.
"I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen, cheerfully, "but I married another man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man, but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just writing fluid?"
The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes, however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight, beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her lovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in the last one she had lost a customer, too.
Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomers came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode of neatness, comfort and taste.
One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above. The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise. Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short, pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and his artist's temperament - revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic manner - was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.
Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.
Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40's, with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes. He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful innuendo.
From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the days of her youth's romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in that romance. And then with a woman's reasoning (oh, yes, they do, sometimes) she leaped over common syllogism and theory, and logic, and was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited, which is the sine qua non in the house that Jack built.
But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar. There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A little purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or suspected.
And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent out on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing story of - but I will not knock a brother - let us go on with the story.
One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-reception-room and told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist. His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined.
"But before you give me an answer," he went on, before she could accuse him of suddenness, "I must tell you that 'Ramonti' is the only name I have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in the street with a wound on my head and was brought there in an ambulance. They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the stones. There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to remember. After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have had success. Mrs. Barry - I do not know your name except that - I love you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the one woman in the world for me - and" - oh, a lot of stuff like that.
Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill of vanity went all over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the eyes, and a tremendous throb went through her heart. She hadn't expected that throb. It took her by surprise. The musician had become a big factor in her life, and she hadn't been aware of it.
"Mr. Ramonti," she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage, remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), "I'm awfully sorry, but I'm a married woman."
And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must do, sooner or later, either to a theatrical manager or to a reporter.
Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his room.
Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well she might. Three suitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds and ridden away.
In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes. Helen was in the willow rocker, knitting a useless thing in cotton-wool. He ricocheted from the stairs and stopped for a chat. Sitting across the table from her, he also poured out his narrative of love. And then he said: "Helen, do you not remember me? I think I have seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the past and remember the love that has lasted for twenty years? I wronged you deeply - I was afraid to come back to you - but my love overpowered my reason. Can you, will you, forgive me?" Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in a strong and trembling clasp. There she stood, and I pity the stage that it has not acquired a scene like that and her emotions to portray.
For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unforgettable, virginal love for her bridegroom was hers; the treasured, sacred, honored memory of her first choice filled half her soul. She leaned to that pure feeling. Honor and faith and sweet, abiding romance bound her to it. But the other half of her heart and soul was filled with something else - a later, fuller, nearer influence. And so the old fought against the new.
And while she hesitated, from the room above came the soft, racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the noblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve without injury, but whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far from the neck. This music and the musician caller her, and at her side honor and the old love held her back.
"Forgive me," he pleaded.
"Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you love," she declared, with a purgatorial touch.
"How could I tell?" he begged. "I will conceal nothing from you. That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away. Although you married him, Helen -"
"Who are you?" cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her hand away.
"Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always loved you best? I am John Delaney. If you can forgive -"
But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang: "Frank! Frank! Frank!" Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!


Source: East of the Web
Bio: Wikipedia

The Grin

He was madly in love. No, not madly, desperately. He could see nothing but her; listen to anyone but her. She turned him blind. That woman who suddenly invaded his life like a storm, made him lose his mind. No, it wasn’t love at first sight; it was love at first talk. From the very moment that he found himself alone with her and they started chitchatting, he knew that the two of them would have a lot to talk about, and even more to live with.
Till then, he was the lonely kind of guy, but always on the look out for an adventure. She was an open-minded lady but somewhat oppressed by her family’s must dos. She needed the spark that could put her life and soul on fire. He had lived a lot. She, only a brief love affair, a way out of her life’s dead ends. When they met, she was still going out with the other guy, he was alone. Both of them felt an invisible thread binding them together, the thread of the divine madness, the thread of real life.
“I want to live; I want to live,” Stella would repeat monotonously time and again. And he asked himself: “But why? Why, can she not live her life the way she wants to?” Soon enough she would though, as she’d leave the other guy and come and rest in his arms.
As the hours and the days passed rushing by, they felt all the more closer to each other. That wasn’t so hard to happen, since they had much in common. They liked the same music, they enjoyed going out to the same places, and together they felt ecstatically happy. There was so much joy in their relationship that Chris, that was his name, has actually started worrying. “This is so perfect that it’s hard to believe! No, no one can really feel as happy as I do in his life!”
Well, things weren’t really perfect, since they couldn’t be as much as they wanted to be together. Her parents, with a sleepless eye, would watch their every move and even though, she was old enough to be in college, they wouldn’t let her stay late out at night very often. So, the moments of her happiness, of their happiness, were few and brief, almost stolen. They’d enjoy their love; the passion, the lovemaking, the lust, the pain of it, but they wouldn’t really feel alive.
“Abandon your home; we can live together,” Chris proposed more than once, but she refused. She was afraid! She was afraid to leave her prison cell. “No, it must not be done this way,” she kept saying. How was it to be done then? If you don’t grab life, it just slips away from you.
More lonely and lovely days and nights passed across memory lane and as days turned into weeks, their passion and lust for each other were still growing stronger; they just couldn’t live apart anymore, not share the same bed, not be in the arms of the beloved one, any time they wanted to. It was then that Stella proposed that they should make their relationship official; meaning they should get engaged. It was the only way for them to be together. And he, who has once declared that he’d be a bachelor forever, who was fanatically “free and independent”, simply said “ok!” Love had turned him blind. He wouldn’t even listen to his best friend, a woman he always trusted, and who said to him that Stella didn’t meet love in his face but a life-jacket; the key that would break open the doors of her rusty cell. Even his best friend, his brother in drunken arms, with who they’ve been through a lot together, and who always insisted that one day he should get married, really felt that she was not the one for him. “She is draining you!” he said to Chris.
Soon enough they got to be engaged and not long after that more things started changing. The freedom that they longed for didn’t really come, since it now depended more on her parents than ever before, as they came to live in their house. Chris was willing and determined to do anything for her; to endure everything, to work hard to help her; to help her make every single one of her dreams come true.
Some day they got married and moved into their own home; and from that day on, Stella started to transform herself into another woman. She no longer wanted to be the girl that Chris had fallen in love with, but somebody else; a woman that would do and act and dream, just like everyone else did. A woman with her “must dos” and “must haves” and “must things”. At the beginning he thought that she was passing through a crisis, but that wasn’t the case. He saw her, with unbelieving eyes, throwing away all her clothes and replacing them with “decent” ones; to stop listening to her once worshipped rock music and start enjoying silly pop songs; and to forget all her dreams about distant travels into open and faraway skies and deep blue seas.
Chris, could not believe, didn’t want to believe, that those things were actually happening. He loved her. She was his soul, his heart’s better half; she wouldn’t disappoint him. Things would change again; he was sure about that. And they did, for the worst.
Their life had turned into a bore; a continuous repetition; a day no different than the one before or that that followed. Only on some weekends when they drove to the mountains or to the sea, he could feel something of her old self waking up in her, but it just lasted for that long. She would say that she loved travelling by car; that she liked the speed and the sense of danger, as she drove like there’s no tomorrow. “Well, at least, she still likes something,” thought the once ever smiling but now sad-faced Chris. “This is not what I wanted. This is not what I’ve dreamed of!” he’d keep saying to himself as time went slowly by.
They were moving away from each other day by day. Their love, their marriage, ended up to be a simple living together; brief meetings at the dinner table, a few drives to the sea and even fewer nights out. The smile was gone for good from his face. Only when he’d drink alcohol he would smile; and he did drink a lot. But his drunken smiles were bitter; bitter about a life going by unlived; for dreams lost at the expense of time.
One day Stella announced to him that she were pregnant. Chris felt sure that even that pregnancy was somehow programmed to happen. She realized, he thought, that he was going to go away, and so came up with an idea to keep him there, to keep her safe. Security was all that mattered for her. She needed someone to look over her. And so came Sonia. And he started smiling again, but not for long.
Stella, having born the baby, thought that her duty was over, so she hired a woman to look after it. She didn’t want to waste any time in her struggle to climb up the stairs of social status. At that time she was working in a big advertising company where, as the story always goes, one is permanently trying hard to undermine the other’s position. And of course, she wouldn’t allow that to happen, just to spend time with the baby. So Sonia passed straight from her mother’s body into a stranger woman’s hands. Unlike Stella, Chris loved their daughter dearly, more than his own life. She had awoken hope in his life again. Holding her in his embrace he thought, that better days were yet to come. However, just as his love for Sonia grew stronger, so did his hatred for Stella. “She’s a woman without a heart,” he said to his best friend, Costas, one day, and insisted “and I’m going to kill her. I will!” The latter remained silent. Besides, what could he say? He did warn him about her a long time ago.
For the next couple of years his life was like a black and white film; black for his living with Stella, and white for the joy that Sonia gave him. It was a hot and humid summer when his wife announced to him that they were going to spend the holidays at a mountain resort that her colleagues highly praised. He had no objection; just as long as he had his daughter with him, he didn’t care even a little bit about where they were going to spend they holiday.
And so they went. Every day, in the early morning, while Stella was still asleep, he would take the baby for a walk in the woods or a visit to some of the many neighboring fairy tale like villages. Of course the girl was barely able to walk, but he didn’t mind carrying her for long hours in his arms. From the very fist days, the two of them made a lot of friends in the surrounding area. They all loved the beautiful doll-like girl, and the openhearted and unpretentious ways of the father. As for Stella, well, she didn’t seem to care at all about them. She’d sleep until early noon, then have breakfast all by herself and then go for lunch at a good restaurant with her so-called family. She’d spent the afternoons watching television, and at nights she would go out, so that her colleagues could see that: “Yes, she does go out!” Even though he didn’t have to, since the housemaid followed them there, Chris was spending his nights talking with the baby and reading her stories. He did go out a couple of times, just to find his new friends, and share with them at some quiet little place a few bottles of house wine; away from all the noise and the fuss of the tourists.
One night Stella announced to him, as she always did, that the next day they would climb a nature trail that led to the top of some magnificent waterfalls, as her friends have told her. Chris didn’t say no. Why, would he? But in the morning, she made him so furious that he almost hit her, for the first time in his life; and that, when he saw her wearing high-heeled shoes to climb up the mountains. “Just because we are going to be in the wilderness, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look decent,” she said, after hearing his furious comments. “You are right, as always, dear!” he answered back, sarcastic as ever. And so, they started of.
The trail took them three hours to climb, since the lady with the high-heels couldn’t move any faster than a turtle. However, Chris kept calm. He just left his mind free, to flow in complete serenity and take in the images of nature’s magic, as with his mind eyes he travelled far and away, to the worlds he had always dreamed of. At the end of the long and tiring journey, a fantastic sight came to take their breath away, as they found themselves standing over a twin waterfall that really looked and felt awesome. Its waters were falling from a hundred feet high into a small pond, which poured into a wide river. The height was a bit breath taking, and the sound was deafening; but they both added a touch of magic to the whole experience. As they stood there, watching the magnificent site, Stella who was leaning over the edge to have a better look, suddenly slipped, lost her footing and fell head down into the lake.
Panic-stricken Chris found a path that led to the lake and rushed his way down, running the danger to harm him self too. As he arrived there, safe and sound, he reached for Stella and grabbing her from the right hand, he pulled her out, only to discover that she were dead. He tried to call for help from his mobile phone but there was no signal. So, leaving her there, lying on a rock, he started climbing towards the top of the falls. There, his phone picked some signal, and so he called one of his new friends and told him what had happened.
Help arrived two hours later. They found him broken-down, shivering, crying desperately over the body of his wife; the woman that more than anyone else in the world he ever loved. They wrapped her breathless body in a blanket and carried it back to the village, but not at the place where they were staying. Chris didn’t want his Sonia to meet the face of death so early in life.
He spent the rest of the day talking with the police and then sitting quiet and drinking his pain away with some of his friends. They didn’t bother him. They just sat around him and let him be. Late at night, they walked him home. He was drunk, but he still had his senses. As he entered the house, he found his way to Sonia’s room. He sat at a chair next to the bed for long, staring with love at her gentle face. In the end he caressed her cheeks and kissed her hair, and went to bed. Before falling asleep a small scene, like a vision, was being recreated in his mind’s eyes, a resent scene. Stella is standing at the top of the waterfalls for a moment, before he pushes her down to her death, to his salvation!
If anyone could watch him sleep that night, he’d be in for the surprise of his life, as he’d see a big and wide grin taking shape on his otherwise sad face.

For Her Eyes Only

I hope you are enjoying your Sunday. Here's one of my own stories for you. Find out what happened For Her Eyes Only:

The last time they met was more than ten years ago. And now, that she was standing there, right in front of him she looked lovely as ever. She didn’t change a bit over the years; at least not in his eyes. That woman was Dawn, his Dawn, the Dawn of his juvenile years, the Dawn of his dreams, the girl that once hurt his heart almost fatally, without even knowing it, who killed his present and future. The woman that has wedded his once best friend.
George, Dawn and Nick were inseparable when they were kids. They grew up in the same neighborhood, lived the same lives. Both of the boys then, both of the men in the years that followed, were in love with Dawn. Nick would express his feelings at any given moment, anywhere, but shy George would never talk about how he felt about her, even though she knew. She knew him!
Well, as always the story goes, the brave or at least the most capable win the game, thus some day George heard that Nick and Dawn were seeing each other, after that that they were lovers, and not long after that they were going to be married. “Married”. His heart broke when he heard that word. His soul and body were in pain, insanity started to infiltrate his mind. “No” he thought “I can’t allow that to happen. No, never.” But yet, there was nothing he could do about it. To quarrel with his friend; nothing could come out of that, to at last express his feelings to Dawn; for that it was too late. What could he do?
He left! He abandoned that small provincial town where he grew up and went down to Athens, to get himself lost in the big city, one unhappy soul among many others. He sought his fortune in crime. He became tough and heartless, a man without emotions; without a conscience. In that sordid world in which he killed his time and his soul, he became known as the “Icebreaker”, the speechless murderer, who was capable to bring to an end any given mission. However, no matter how much his heart hardened, no matter how crime became a way of life for him, he felt a flame burn deep inside his soul. The flame of his tender and eternal love for Dawn. A love that was impossible for him to get over. He looted many female bodies, some with tenderness others with violence, but whatever he did, whoever he was with, the image of Dawn would never leave his mind’s eye. He could never love somebody else. His heart belonged to her. Only her. Only Dawn could turn the beast into a human being again, sooth his soul, pull his body out of the slime.
“She will be miserable. She is miserable. I know. I can feel it!” he thought every now and then, at moments of unbearable loneliness. “Me and Nick are made from the same mater, we are tough and strong-headed, but me, I would never do anything to hurt her. Dawn, the poor thing, didn’t really know much about us. She had no idea what we did when we were not together, she never heard about our young gangs, the robberies and the drugs, she didn’t know that Nick even raped her sister. The poor soul, she knew nothing…”
Thoughts, thoughts and more thoughts. He’d spend many sleepless nights just sitting and drinking. His head was never at peace. His life was a nightmare. He’d look to alcohol and women for salvation, but his heart would still ache, his mind would still spin in painful memories. How could he give his soul a rest?
The time swiftly passed, the years flooded by, and George kept sinking more and more into sadness. The news he would hear every now and then about Dawn and Nick, were getting worst all the time. And when he found out that Nick has started abusing her and their daughter, he felt at a complete loss. For a long time he would wander in the streets of the night dressed in rags, always drunk, talking to himself, howling like a dog, always ready to pick a fight, to hit somebody, to kill someone. Until one night, in a bar of the underworld, he collapsed. “From the booze” thought those who knew him; “Nervous breakdown” said the doctors.
He took treatment for a few weeks in a private clinic, since he could afford it. Little by little the drugs and the serenity of the place helped him stand back on his own feet again. While there he took some important decisions about his life. He would give up drinking, throw away all of his bad habits and start anew. And of course, claim the love of the woman that rightfully belonged to him.
So, he went back to his native town. Using the money that he earned after all those years of hard and heartless work, he opened a big and luxurious cafeteria. It was in the street that passed right in front of his venture that he would meet Dawn again that day, after such a long time. At first they both felt a bit perplexed but a minute later they were hugging each other. It wasn’t long before she started crying, and he, not knowing what else to do, just held her in his arms, caressing her hair, not talking.
As her tears dried away he led her into the building. They sat at a remote corner and started talking about their lives, about the mistakes they made, about the wrong routes they followed. George, of course, could never tell her the truth about his life, about what he did all those years he was away. So, he created for his sake, but hers also, a different life, a better one, one that only existed in the books of fantasy. He made up new memories just for her, just to see her smile, for her eyes only. Dawn didn’t follow his lead. She told him the truth. Her life was worn with endless pain, washed with bitter tears. Her only true joy was Nana, her beautiful, smart little daughter. However, she said, despite all the pain and tears, she still loved Nick. Ok, he wasn’t the Nick she grew up and fallen in love with, but he was Her Nick, after all.
George was sitting there, listening to his long lost and found again love without a word. He only thought “She loves him still; so what? She doesn’t want to break up with him; so what? This whole thing has to come to an end, and it will!”
In the weeks that followed George visited his friends at their home quite often, but they also came by to see him at the cafeteria. Nick felt really glad that his good old friend was back in town again. “There are so many things that bind us together”, he thought, but he didn’t know that there was also something quite dangerous and explosive in their relationship; something that emotionally kept them miles apart. As for Dawn, she started feeling better with herself. She would smile more often, even laugh. She seemed to have started loving life all over again. But also, she could sense a special feeling growing inside her soul for George. She would feel that he was her most intimate person, her man, somebody that the years didn’t change for the worst. “I’ve started falling in love with him” she would think every now and then and smile to herself.
One day, just before the break of dawn, something happened that would change everything, forever. Nick, was driving home from a neighboring city quite drunk, and at a dangerous curve of the road, he lost control of the car and plunged into a gorge more than two hundred meters deep. In a minute the car caught fire, and that was the end of it; and of him, of course.
George and Dawn mourned for a long time for his untimely death, but of course that fact did not prevent them from going on with their lives. So, three years later, they got married and everyone who knew them would say that they were a couple very well matched; like made in heaven. They would also say, that “George was the man Dawn should have chosen right from beginning!”
They lived a long and happy life, always loving and caring and forgiving. They trusted each other completely and they had no secrets between them… Hmm, to tell you the truth, George had a tiny little secret that he never came to share with Dawn. He had helped Nick, just a bit, to check in to the world of no return by spoiling the breaks of his car. No, Dawn should never find out about that. Besides, he did it for her. For her eyes only!