After I swore I would never love again because of Leila; Leila who flayed my happy aorta with her box cutter blade of sheer indifference…

Her haphazard glue gun of milktoast apologies failed to repair my superior vena cava. It was her inferior vena cava of insincerity that cut me and left me feeling more burned than incised.

I felt bitten, chewed and a little blue as she withdrew her industrial strength ice pick of ambivalence from my kitten heart. Yes, she had licked that ice pick clean.

As she closed the door, traces of her toxic dime store perfume slapped me upside the head.

I wanted to crawl under the porch and live with the dog in a smell of dirty pond water and greasy frogs. Of sour kitchen rags my mother had buried for luck under the house.

Yes, Leila left me a mere shadow of my former shadow of myself.

Still faint from the chest carving and head slapping perfume, I heard the phone ring. It ricocheted off my brain. Then, a soft whisper through pink lipstick. Marilyn. My sweet Marilyn!