"Telling You"

~
Life is like this: one minute you're lying by your air conditioner in the heat, reading haiku and wishing you didn't have to go to see your new therapist, and the next minute you're in his office blinking at him in surprise and thinking that he looks familiar, that you've seen him someplace before.

. . .

My Buddhist boyfriend wasn't the first man to dump me. The boyfriend before him did, too. His teenage sons instructed him to dump me because I'd declined their invitation to a game of Monopoly. I'd just eaten dinner at their house, and they asked me to play, and I said no. (I had my reasons.) Then, after I'd gone home, the sons held a family conference and told their father that he could do better than a woman who wouldn't play Monopoly. And so my boyfriend told me, in a gentle voice, "I have to let you go. Let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you."

"Actually," I said, "there are three things you can do for me." But I will repeat only the first thing here, which was never to call me again.

These excerpts are from "Telling You," a short story by Jasmine Skye. The story is continued in The Sun (Issue 335, November 2003), pp. 42-46.