10 Answers to the Question “Where’d You Get Your Black Eye?”

by Luc Reid

1. “Yeah, I didn’t think you could get hurt head-butting a shark. Cartilaginous fish, my ass!”

2. “It’s a tattoo. Like it?”

3. “From your mom. Man, she is one wild chick!”

4. “Extreme chess.”

5. “Well, I was asking this guy how he got his black eye, and apparently he’d had it with answering that over and over …”

6. “I was sitting next to this pregnant lady on the bus and I said, ‘So, when are you due?’ Long story short, he wasn’t actually pregnant.”

7. “Oh, this isn’t mine.”

8. “I heard these weird noises late at night from my neighbor’s house, terrible, inhuman ululations. I crept into my back yard and climbed the fence to land on their weedy, overgrown lawn. A pale green light pulsed in the neighbors’ attic window, silhouetting a dark figure that it seemed to be clawing to get out. I moved closer, slipping silently through the grass, my eyes riveted to the window–and that’s when I stepped on the rake.”

9. “The black eye is nothing! It’s the microchip they implanted in my brain that worries me.”

10. “Well, it’s actually kind of a funny story involving you, me, this conversation, and a time machine stuck in a loop, but I’m so sick of telling it, you might as well just go ahead and punch me now.”