Fiction: Dear John

He found the note lying on top of his favorite coffee mug.

Dear John,

I’m leaving you for Stephen Kotzenpillar. I can’t stand another minute in our alleged marriage — especially the stale, boring, unimaginative, unexciting, unfulfilling, so-called sex. I want out, and I’m getting out.

“Stephen Kotzenpillar? She can’t be serious! He’s twenty years older than she is.”

Stephen makes me feel special. He makes me feel young and vital and sexy and desired. You haven’t even noticed that my fancy lingerie isn’t in the house and hasn’t been for nearly six months. Stephen likes it and has generously added to the collection. He has a real eye for buying those things. And sexy bras. And shoes. All you ever bought me to wear to bed was a pair of flannel footie pajamas with a pink rabbit pattern.

“You said you wanted those footie pajamas!” John protested.

After you and I are divorced, Stephen and I are going to be married in a jet at 20,000 feet on our way to honeymoon in first Switzerland and then Aruba. You never took me farther than those hideous caves where two bats crapped in my hair.

“Oh, God, I’ve never heard the end of those damn bats. And, yeah, he’s rich, but he’s ugly as a baboon’s butt. Stephen Kotzenpillar! God!”

Our marriage is dead and I’m sick of dragging along with its corpse. I want to know again what it’s like to wake up without wondering if we have a spare razor blade in the house. Especially when I’m not sure which one of us I want to use it on. These last six years have been a mindless, repetitive slog through the swamp of life. And with this I am finally free.

I’ll have my lawyer contact you next week and you can tell him who your lawyer is. Don’t even think of a) trying to work things out between us, or b) selling my grandmother’s china hutch on eBay before I can have it moved.

One thing: I’ll be keeping your name because that’s how people know me and, frankly, I can’t stand the thought of being Katie Kotzenpillar. Stephen is fine with that.

Katie

“Divorcing me for that creep and she’s keeping my name? I can’t believe this!”

John sat down hard on his chair and almost missed hearing the loud, strange noise from the living room. Puzzled about two things now, he got up again and opened the door between the rooms.

There, on the couch, lay Katie. Smiling and looking sexy in her footie pajamas with the pink rabbit pattern. An open a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket on the end table accounted for the noise.

“April Fools!” she said.

John sagged against the doorway. She’d done it to him again, but this was the worst. Or best. Or something.

“I’ve already called your office and told them you’re sick. So … why don’t you come over here and have a little sip of this for medicinal purposes?”

He walked over to her, smiling ruefully. She had some orange juice in the champagne glasses and he poured the bubbly to make them each a mimosa.

“You’re terrible,” he accused.

She giggled. “And you’re gullible.”

They clinked their glasses and drank.

“And after a couple of those,” she whispered, “we’ll see if you can still manage the drop seat buttons on my pajamas.”

“Now you’re talking my kind of April fooling around.”

Comments

  1. Greg says:

    Well, you suckered me! You’re the first and last to fool me today. I had forgotten what day it was. The drop-seat detail in the pajamas was a good laugh to save for the end. Funny underwear never fails. Makes it all PG-rated somehow.

  2. bryon says:

    Greg,

    I’m glad you liked the story, and I’m glad to know it works. I had written a very serious story, taken from the headlines, and was scheduling it to post for today when I realized I didn’t want that story to go up on April 1. So it’s scheduled for next Thursday, and I had a day to come up with something else. I went into my file of stuff I’d started but didn’t know what to do with and found the letter. I managed to tweak it for April Fools Day (a day I normally prefer to ignore).

    Bryon

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *