For the July prompt call: The UFO abduction was the *good* part of my day…

It just so happened that my boyfriend was an asshole. Let me set this up for you – we met about nine months ago. He bought me flowers, and took me on walks by the river. He never pressured me about sex. He had a good job, good shoulders, and good hair. He made me laugh. We’d been talking about moving in together, not too seriously, but edging around the ideas of it. He’s a wonderful guy – he paints, which if you’re like me, just makes you stop and stare and wonder how in the world someone so creative deigned to talk to someone plain-Jane like me. (My name’s Jane. It was a common schoolyard witticism.)

He’s always got time for his little brother and his friends, and me. The problem was that I decided to ease into the idea of him moving in, my place being bigger with a view of the river, by having him housesit while I was away for a week. I have a cat.

On the second day he called up complaining the cat was keeping him up at night.

When I got home the cat was gone. He said that it had been hit by a car and he’d taken it to the vet.

She was an indoor cat.

So I broke up with my boyfriend and went for a long walk up into the hills, the way emotionally mature people do when their cat gets murdered, and then there was a beam of light.

I woke up in a clean white room without any clothes on, and people asking me questions about my views on sanitation and funeral arrangements and hippy Jesus, but at least I didn’t have to face going back to my apartment. Small mercies, right?