She said:
You’re not supposed to break up with people on a sunny day. There’s a cardinal law about it, you know. If you must break up with someone, it should be raining, or at least look like it’s going to. You know the type of sky – cloudy. Slate-grey, like you can sketch a chalk drawing across it. Ponderous clouds lugging their weight about, lording it over the earth like HA! I win again…

It was brilliantly sunny. A brilliant summery day. It was close to perfect. All we needed was to win the lottery and life could have ended there and then, complete, fulfilled.

We were having a picnic. It was the type of picnic with no indication that something was going to happen during it – you know how everyone says there is supposed – again, that word, supposed – to be, like, a feeling…some sort of intuition that screams at you that SOMETHING is coming. Something was coming. And it may have been something wicked, depending on what side of the coming you were seeing.

No signs, no omens (because, no clouds). He handed me a slice of cheese. I’m those people who eat cheese for fun, you know? The flat, sliced, melts on everything type with the cow drawn on the cover, smiling, as if you’re not about to eat something that came from its insides? And maybe the cow won the lottery itself, the lottery of being picked from its cheese? I mean, what is wrong with advertisers? Drain a cow and then make it your poster child for your product. Kill a berry and its entire family, then resurrect it, smiling, on a billboard, larger than life.

I was eating the cheese, and I looked at him, and he smiled, and that was when I knew that it was over.

So I blocked out the sun.

tSN