He was mean all year round, then on his birthday out came the bunting and mean-jammed sponge, dusted as if it were scared of the icing sugar. I'd have wrapped him in that bunting if I could. I'd wrap him with his fingers a millimeter from that stupid cake, the candle never lit. There he'd stay. There he'd rot. Then maybe, just maybe, I'd enjoy the day too.
"You really don't get it, do you? Let me say this real slow so it sinks in. Your petty-meanness is the punishment, it is the karma. As soon as you feel it your body makes stress hormones that have all kinds of awful effects in your body. My inner-peace, that is my reward. So, getting involved in this stupidity... would be stupidity. Ciao."
His face solidified into a tightness as if he wore a concrete mask. With eyes the grey of steel knives, and a mouth just as sharp, the order was given. They say he was once a man, that long ago those eyes were blue and sunlit ponds, but a half century casual meanness had thickened into a well tailored cruelty.
"Be careful of the meanness mask," said Ben. "It has a habit of becoming the real face, of forcing kindness to become the mask."
Beneath a crying sky, with icy rain seeping into my marrow, his last goodbye was spoken as easily as ordering a pizza.
Posing in her tennis dress, she served meanness as if she were training for the cruelty ace.
It was the meanness of yesterday's thin-sliced bread, waved at the butter and scrapped with marmite. There's not a smile in the world that can hide what it really is.