Another joke. One more. As if anything could make it go away. Karen McBride dangled her finger over the delete key, her teeth grinding as though disintegrating the email manually. She hated these things and knew why the bastard kept sending them. He had no soul, no conscience, no respect. No concept of what it meant to be normal.

She punched the button finally with a subtle shake of her head. It was growing difficult to shrug these things off. Her therapist, the pompous bimbo, was wrong about that. “Just ignore it Karen,” she told her once upon a session, “eventually he’ll get tired of it and move on to something else.”

“Or someone else,” Karen had said with no hint of sarcasm. At the time it still hurt to know the troglodyte cheated on her. It still hurt that he moved in with that slut. It was his choice to end the relationship, but for some reason he kept burrowing under her skin.

One more thing her therapist had been wrong about was becoming clear; he wasn’t growing tired of it. She never replied, never acknowledged his adolescent actions and still he kept cyber-jabbing her sides. Now the emails were increasing not only in number, but also in their rancid bile. Mostly it was the simple art of curiosity that drove her to open them time and time again. Some of it was a basic tenet of truth that she ran and hid from whenever its cracked nails streaked against the blackboard of her mind: she missed him.

How could that be? There was no logic to it. She never sat up late at night thinking about him. She didn’t stare into the milky swirl of her coffee in the morning feeling a melancholy sadness sweep over her. She didn’t pick up the phone intending to call him. Ever. But the truth swam in the thin layers of epidermis that she scrubbed clean every day. She slid her hand away from the keyboard and stared at the idle screen.

What would she say if she replied? What kind of person would she become? She didn’t walk the straight and narrow; that was always a miserable and lonely road that held no mystery for her. She wasn’t wild and without abandon, either. She made poor choices when it came to men, that was all. Most of the time she was able to correct the mistake before things got out of hand. Almost all the time. Except this time.

He had managed to seize control from her. He controlled the relationship and he still maintained that control. He let her know it with every message dropped into her inbox. A blank screen gazed at her with a patience she wished she owned. She wanted it back.

She thought about where she had lost it to him. A tender homesick sensation slipped under her shirt and caught the front of her bra. It slid beneath the satiny fabric and clutched her heart.

Karen stormed away from the desk and spit words out into her empty apartment. “Son-of-a-bitch!” The urge to trash something held her tight. She slapped the wall and winced as the sting of pain caught her palm a moment later. Tears trembled inside but she caught them with her rage.

“Breathe,” she told herself. “Just … breathe.”

She stood in the hall with her eyes closed, focusing on the long, slow breaths filling her lungs and then the empty apartment.

She gave him power. She gave him the power to control her. She couldn’t see it at the time, but she saw it now. She fell for him hard and let him know it. Her mother had taught her better, but like so many other lessons, this one had been easier to hear than to heed.

“Don’t, for any reason,” her mother said, “let a boy know how much you like him.”

“Why?” Karen had asked.

“Cause then they won’t respect you and if a boy don’t respect you, you’re gonna get hurt.”

Mom was right. Karen didn’t listen and here she stood, alone and still reeling, still hiding from him. And still missing him. It was sick.

She felt a ripple glide through her body. A tiny tremor and then it was gone. She hovered in the room, looking around at the familiar surroundings, finding memories that belonged to him everywhere. The glass coaster on her coffee table that she always put out for him, the one he never used. The remote for her TV that she never got to touch when he was over. The Dali picture hanging on the wall that he made fun of all the time. He had infested every facet of her life and the reality struck her in tiny aftershocks, each one growing stronger until it tore down the foundation of her life.

Karen dropped back against the wall and collapsed to the soft shag carpet. She drew her knees in tight against her chest and sobbed into the bony structure of her knees. It had been months now and she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t move on. It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t seem to, either. It was like they were two solid plates deep within the crust of the earth wedged against each other trying to separate, knowing it would take an external force to rip them apart.

The weeping passed and Karen shuddered, sniffled, and then laughed uneasily at the absurdity of her emotions. She looked up from the faded knees of her jeans and her gaze locked on the empty glass vase sitting in the entertainment center next to the TV. He brought her a dozen red roses in that vase when they first started dating. As she gazed at its simplicity she realized it was the only romantic thing he had done in all that time. Of all the things sitting in her apartment that suffered the stains of his existence, that was the keystone, the mark that held all others in its shadow.

Karen kicked her legs out and sat motionless, staring at it. She couldn’t remember the last time it held any flowers but it remained right there, front and center. It was the first thing she noticed when she walked out of her bedroom in the morning and it was the last thing her eyes sought out at the end of a long, lonely day. She simply hadn’t noticed before. It was like a weight locked to her ankle, dragging her back to remind her of what was missing, and what she realized as she wiped her eyes dry was that she wasn’t missing a thing.

The vase was empty. So was he. She didn’t need it. She didn’t need him. He was a dozen red roses, brimming with life when she first met him. He was an illusion, like those flowers. They were beautiful on the outside but they were already dead, empty, and hollow. She wouldn’t see it for a while until their stems stopped drinking water and the petals dried and one by one fell to the shelf around it or to the carpet and she had to pick them up one at a time. His petals were almost all gone now, too. All she had to do was pick up the pieces and toss out the rotting stems.

Karen climbed to her feet, brushed out the wrinkles from her jeans, and straightened her shoulders. She stared at the vase and walked over to it. Her heart thumped in her throat. It wasn’t him, but at the same time it was. She couldn’t explain it but she knew that picking it up to put it where it belonged was about to change something within her. Her hand reached out and her fingers gently touched the cheap glass. She picked it up like a dead mouse she found in the kitchen one winter afternoon. Her body shuddered. Another little tremor.

Each step to the trashcan produced another quiver, each one growing stronger. As she dangled the vase over the can, she wondered –for only a brief moment- just how strong they could get, and if she would survive them.

Then her face hardened and Karen swung her arm and smashed the glass into a million little pieces.