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This Story was a Runner Up in The Story Library's First Competition.
I'm a pretty ugly guy—not grotesquely misshapen or the kind of harrowing, pock-marked ugly that makes others fear the onset of a plague, but just a simple, traditional, smile-at-the-floor-and-hurry-past kind of ugly. Add to this the fact that the whole time I lived in Japan, I was too lazy to shave, something most Japanese women find mortifying even from the otherwise attractive. So it came as a considerable surprise to me when the two middle-aged ladies in one of my English classes, tapping madly on their electronic dictionaries, announced to me piecemeal, "Mika and Yuko wish to be candidates for the position of your girlfriend."
Mika and Yuko were the two young ladies in the class, and they were present during all this. One of them was very pretty, and the other was somewhere in the neighborhood of cute—both fine catches for a shaggy foreigner—but at the moment of this announcement, they were, above all, attentive. They studied my reaction with keen interest. I could feel my temperature rise under their gazes. It crossed my mind that someone with better Japanese and, more importantly, an ounce of suavity might have parlayed this discussion into a vigorous threesome. Not only was I not that guy, but I couldn't get over a more immediate and realistic stumbling block: How could I express an interest in either with the other one staring at me? How could I thus insult either of these lovely ladies who had taken the time to see my inner beauty, which I like to think of as a supermodel named Gustava I swallowed whole the last time I was in Milan? So I just stared at them, then at the table, and then into space, and eventually they both stopped coming to class. |
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