The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

The two men stopped there, and looked at one another. And in that moment Dickie learned something. This thing about looking into someone’s eyes. If you’re talking about making a connection, the term is quite misleading. He looked into people’s eyes all the time. What’s really happening in these moments is that you find yourself looking at their eyes – that is, the gaze stops at the eye itself, arrested by the beauty of it; and their gaze does the same at yours; and the two gazes and your souls behind them skate off each other, swirl over each other, like mercury on mercury, so that standing quite still you feel yourself spin out of control, around and around, like a car aquaplaning, until you come to rest again, and you show no sign at all that anything of note has happened, except to permit yourself perhaps a little smile.