Oh ferchrissake, just say it already. 
I won't pout or get all teary or give you the silent treatment
or grab the car keys and slam doors like was my M.O. 
in our beginning eons, ages, lifetimes ago. 
You needn't be gun shy. 
I’m a grown-up now. Also, weary. Just spit it out.

Go ahead and say the words, bubbeleh. 
If you beat around the bush or stuff it you’ll feed that
woulda-coulda-shoulda monkey brain
which only aggravates your ulcer or, what’s worse, 
you’ll wind up like my Uncle Sol who, 
on his eighty-eighth birthday finally bellowed to Aunt Hinda, 
“I never liked your farkachte kasha, Hinda,” 
but she was in the kitchen with her hearing aid turned off
and when she shuffled back into the front room there was Sol, 
felled by an aneurysm. 
Talk about a tree falling in the forest.

Give it to me straight, sweetie. 
Pick the place. Under the sheets, in a jet over Iceland, 
across the dinner table, beside a still stream, out on a limb, 
through thick and thin. Wherever. Whenever. 
Clear the air. Get it off your chest. Lay it on the line. 
We’ll be fine, I promise.

But here’s the deal, dear one. 
Whatever you’ve got to say, say it to my face. 
No phone call. No email. No text. 
Thou shalt not send the message by tom tom or teletype. 
Neither shall you write the words in the sky with smoke
nor slide them under my cellar door. 
When you speak the speech I pray you look me in the eyes.
I want/need to see if trying to pull the wool over them.

Ozzie Nogg's work has been published in Diddledog, Apollo’s Lyre, Flashshot, Apocrypha and Abstractions, 50 Word Stories and is upcoming in Donut Factory. Her book of personal stories, Joseph’s Bones, won First Place in the 2005 Writer’s Digest Press International Self-Published Book Awards. She lives in Omaha, NE and you can visit her at: www.ozzienogg.com