A Beautiful Day for Bad News

The sun blazed in the bright blue sky on the day that she left me. Really it was a perfect day. I mean because of the weather. You know, meteorologically. It was just like her to end our relationship on such a wonderful day. She couldn’t have just waited for rain and allowed my mood to match the sky. Nope. Instead she gave me one parting shot and delivered our love's killer blow on the warmest, most glorious day of the year.

I knew that she’s been seeing someone else. That hadn’t been a surprise. I’d thought that it was simply a temporary arrangement until she got her head right. I’d thought that it was just a stopper in our ever-leaking vial of romance. Eventually the leak would stop and we could refill it together. Turns out that as well as being weak, allowing it to go on for so long without saying anything, I was also wrong about being able to repair the forever elusive concept of ‘us’.

I thought about what else I could have done but I stopped myself before too long. She had moved on from me by the time she'd started having other men in our bed. She must have. There clearly wasn’t a way back from that and, even if there had been, what kind of man would I have been to stay with her after all of that anyway? Not much of one, surely. But I wouldn’t feel so empty, so completely and utterly alone. That’s where I was now. A sad, lonely man acting only out of fear of what happens next.

She’d railed at me about not being a man, about not being tough. She couldn’t believe how spineless I was. She’d wanted me to scream, to get angry and show her some sorely missed passion. I had cried quietly, thinking hard about how our lives together were ending like this. She spat more vitriol at me, mostly about how worthless she considered me to be. I cried softly, explaining gently how she couldn’t live without me. She’d found that to be hilarious, laughing cruelly in my face. She told me that I was deluded and that I’d better pack up and move out and…

At that point, it hadn’t taken much to kill her. I’d taken the shapeless glass ornament, the one that I’d always hated, from the mantelpiece and caved her skull in. By the time I’d realised what I was doing, the living room had taken on the appearance of a charnel house and she was lifeless on the floor.

So now, as I walk in the sunshine, covered in ichor from the most heinous of crimes, I wait for the police who must be on their way by now. The number of strangers who’d seen me and screamed, I’d be surprised if the army hadn’t been deployed.

I stopped in the street and thought about all of the times that she’d been right. Every time, in fact, except for one; she really couldn’t live without me.