Uncle Empire

By Lev Winters

Jack stood in front of the mirror and his mind raced. It was late—or early, depending on your view. He replayed the evening's events, which already felt like a lifetime ago, through a reel-to-reel player in his mind's eye, desperate to discover where he had gone wrong.

He had picked her up on time, held open his car's passenger door, and even complimented the shade of her eye shadow. At the restaurant he was both witty and attentive, with an air of unassuming confidence. Yet when the date came to its natural conclusion, on the terrace outside of her building, he was refused even a modest kiss.

Jack's thoughts wandered to the gray hairs he had plucked from his scalp that morning—maybe he had missed others. And there was, of course, the small incident at dinner. Jack had requested no onions on his salmon, since he was allergic, and when the dish arrived, with onions, Jack grew somewhat dissatisfied. Perhaps the girl foresaw a future with this man and his uneven temper and was repelled. After all, a man must always keep his cool.

A prisoner of self-awareness, Jack brushed his hand through his hair, ready to resign himself to bed, when a final thought hit him like a revelation: It was none of those things!

He realized then, at this late and lonely hour, that this woman rejected his advances not on account of his blundering ways, but simply because she was repulsed by his hideous facial deformities, the ones he suffered as a child, when he was mauled by an alley cat, and his parents had been too poor to care.

Relieved that things were out of his control, Jack went soundly to sleep.