Tungsten & Zoetrope.

Tungsten

One: *, two: ten minutes to spare, three: Jenny McIntyre. And that’s ultimately how I got the scar, the one just beneath my left eye. It was just an accident. Most people don’t even notice- this one guy from down St. Wolfgang‘s street, I’d known him for years, fucking ages, and he only noticed then. When he asked he said, ‘Is that a scar?’. It was. For you see I have a scar running along a crease just below my left eye.
Sometimes you feel obliged to tell a more interesting story than the truth and scars are a good example of something people feel really ought to have a good story to tell. So it can’t really count as bad lying, it’s too utilitarian, I reckon. I had no intention of lying but I lied regardless. Even as I started lying I thought I’d lie pretty small lies, the prettier the better though. And before I knew it I’d gone and told the biggest fabrication I could’ve with a limited amount of raw materials- Jenny McIntyre was still present (all lies have a grain of truth in them, it makes them more believable) but this time round it was set in peril or a forest or somewhere (I was slightly ambiguous so that he helped make the lie with me- a rearrangement of responsibility if you will). At that point the scene was set for the climactic unravelling, the reason the scar was worth having. Only I couldn’t think, a huge scaffold of yarn flimsily resting on the real foundation of…

[panthers, villains, rapists, lasers. No. pistols, scalpels, shards of glass. No. and this is taking too long. splinters of wood, sheets of iron, frames of tungsten…]

‘Tungsten’ I said.
What a lie. It was the biggest lie I’ve ever told. Though not the one with the most consequences.
But it serves him right for not noticing after all these years.


Zoetrope.

He didn’t have a zoetrope.
He had the something that had been invented a few years earlier.
It did him fine.
He drew a series of pictures (in a circle):
Of a man watching a zoetrope.
Then, when he span the circle and watched just one part of it the pictures appeared to come to life.
(He continued, perhaps it improved the quality of life.)