A Strange Revenge

"You remember Jennifer?" I ask Marcello while playing with a Rubik's cube.

"The woman you have been dating that once worked for the George W. Bush administration?"

"Yes, that one. I just dumped her after breaking her heart, miserably."

"That's so unlike you," says Marcello, his shades still on in the middle of the night.

"I must admit that I did it on purpose. I had to borrow from a Woody Allen movie to render my master opus."

"What the fuck are you talking about?

"I asked her to move in with me. The day of the moving, and as the movers were bringing her stuff into my flat, I told her, 'You know, I don't think this is gonna work.' Her jaw dropped. I went on saying, 'Call me bastard, call me whatever name comes in your mind, but I have to be honest with you, Jennifer. I met somebody else.'"

"Jesusfreakingchrist. You are…"

"Next thing she did, she yelled at the movers, 'Get all my stuff back in the fucking truck.' Like in the Woody Allen movie, she grabbed the manuscript of the novel I had been working on for years and took it with her on the way out. She tossed it in a dumpster that's below street level. There's no way I could recover it."

"Why would you do such an infamous thing?"

"Well, it occurred to me that I should do to her what the Bush administration did to this country…"

"That's so woodyallenesque of you."