Not All Of It
An eight-year-old comes downstairs on Halloween morning and asks her mother for a chocolate, and the bag she decorated herself is in pieces on the kitchen counter.
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Not All Of It
Three stories this morning, all posted in the last day, and in every one of them nobody throws anything. Somebody just says one sentence out loud, in a completely ordinary voice, and the sentence does all the damage.
These are anonymous posters' accounts, paraphrased so nobody can be identified. A Reddit post is one person's version of events, not proof of every claim in it, and a comment section is a crowd of readers reacting, not a verdict. Where a poster reports what somebody else said or did, this piece repeats it as the poster's account, and no outcome has been added where the source does not provide one.
Not all of it
A twenty-nine-year-old woman writes that her eight-year-old daughter is autistic and does not like trick-or-treating — too many people, too much noise — so most years she stays in and hands out sweets at her great-aunt's house instead, and has never come home with a bag of her own. This year the school ran a trunk-or-treat in the car park during school hours, and the girl came home with a paper bag she had decorated by hand, filled to the top. 1
That night her husband, thirty-two, said he would sleep on the couch because of gas. She got up later for a blanket and found him eating in the dark, and he told her he had only started ten minutes earlier and was almost done. In the morning her daughter asked for a chocolate. The bag was not in the fridge, and her husband insisted it was in the kitchen. It was on the counter, torn to shreds. When she asked whether he had eaten all of her daughter's candy, he shrugged and said: not all of it. What was left was two lollipops and a Rice Krispie treat the girl does not even like. 1
He said it was not a big deal because she could go trick-or-treating, which is the one thing she does not do, and that he would buy more. He then got angry at being shouted at first thing in the morning, and told her she had been in a mood for days — which, she says, is because their daughter has not been sleeping and she is the one who stays up. She also says the one thing she got wrong was calling him fat during the row, that he is sensitive about his weight, and that she knew it. 1
An update posted a few hours later says he apologised to both of them and took the girl to the shop to choose whatever she wanted. The poster adds that she is unsure whether they will stay together, but that her own parents split up on a major holiday and she is not going to do that to her child. 1
It was embarrassing
A twenty-five-year-old teacher in Quebec spent an hour at her boyfriend's family-style Halloween party before going on to her own event — fancy cheese, some candy, cold sandwiches, and a friend of his who, she estimates, spent around six hundred dollars on the evening. She had no real costume, only accessories, and the child of another friend wanted to play with the handcuffs from her police-officer outfit. She let him, then took them back after the boy said he might have broken them, because she was going to need them to leave. The child had a tantrum. 2
Back home, her boyfriend told her it was embarrassing that a twenty-five-year-old would not leave her handcuffs with a child. He said his friends had spent so much on the evening, that it was cheap of her not to hand them over, and that he and his friend both thought so. He went further: that if she was the kind of selfish person who would rather take a cute photograph than give a child something he enjoys, then she should not be with him. 2
She is frank that she wanted them for herself — another event the next day, photographs she wanted, no wish to buy replacements — and calls that selfish in her own words. She also notes that she teaches children all day that they do not always get what they want. The post had 471 upvotes and 102 comments when read. 2
Waiting for you
A twenty-one-year-old living with his parents, between jobs and surviving on savings and a student bursary, met a man of twenty-eight three months ago. The man had major surgery on the other side of the country, which emptied his savings; he came back in a wheelchair and mostly bed-bound, with no family to fall back on because his parents are no contact with him for being trans. The twenty-one-year-old became, in his own description, more of a carer than a friend: wheeling him around, cooking vegetarian meals he does not eat himself, paying off debts to people you do not want to owe money to. Fifty dollars, then another twenty-five. 3
The man keeps mentioning promise rings, which the poster describes as an engagement to be engaged, and says he is essentially waiting for the poster to decide that they are a couple. They have never dated. During an argument about whether to cross the country again for a follow-up appointment, the poster raised his voice, and the man told him he reminded him of his abusive ex. The poster apologised for that, at length. 3
In the update three days later, the poster sat him down and said he was worried about how fast this had gone and was not comfortable being a necessary part of someone's life after three months. The man said he did not feel dependent, that the poster was simply his only friend nearby who could help, and apologised for making him feel that way. The conversation moved to the romance: the man said they had cuddled, that they had the kind of conversations you have with someone you are considering, that he would have preferred a straight no, and pointed out that the poster's dating profile says he wants something long-term. 3
Then the man called it off himself, saying he could not come over any more because it would feel awkward — not that he could not, but that he could not come over by himself. He travelled to the hospital alone, and the lump that prompted the trip turned out to be ordinary post-surgery swelling. He has said he will repay the money when he is paid. The compilation carried 811 upvotes and 201 comments when read, and was posted with the original poster's permission. 3
Where all three land
Not all of it. It was embarrassing that you did not leave your handcuffs with the child. I am waiting for you to decide that we are a couple.
Each sentence moves a bill onto the person who is about to say no. Say the first one, and the mother is the woman shouting about sweets at seven in the morning. Say the second, and she is the one with bad manners about a six-hundred-dollar cheese board. Say the third, and he is the one being kept waiting. Nobody in these stories is being asked a question. They are being handed an invoice with a date at the top, and the date is already in the past.
So: what is the most expensive sentence anybody has ever said to you in a completely normal voice, and how long did it take you to work out what it cost?
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