In Florida, Things Are Not What They Seem

by Roy Robbins

She stood, Edna Varicose, under the lamplight where she and Roger would always meet just before their weekly Chinese dinner at Foo Wong’s, where they would plan how they were going to spend all the money he would inherit after his wife, the fair Betty, had finally succumbed to what the doctors unsuspectingly called a lingering illness, brought about by the incremental doses of plutonium 6000 Edna and Roger had been carefully spooning into Betty’s nightly bowl of cream of cabbage soup.

Roger and Betty had married in haste last January, the day after Betty had drunkenly confided, during a night of ice cold vodka shots chased by cans of Coors lite, that she was really a Russian spy, Masha Lyndowska, sent by the Putin regime to inject Plutonium 6000 into the gigantic punch bowls of Mar al Lago, and that she, Masha Lyndowska (aka Betty) had arrived in America two years ago, with all the proper identifications, together with three vials of plutonium 6000, and a secret bank account of $3 million dollars already in place. And just as the fair Betty (aka Masha Lyndowska) had been seduced by the easy Florida life, Roger and Edna had been enraptured by the bank account with $3 million dollars.

And so she stood, Edna Varicose, under the lamplight, on what was to be the last night of the fair Betty’s life, watching as Roger slowly plodded toward her, carrying the container of cream of cabbage soup laced with plutonium 6000 for what she and Roger had come to call “The Last Supper.” It was, appropriately enough, Valentine’s Day, and Edna had found at her favorite Good Will store a lovely white bowl rimmed with red hearts for the occasion. It was then, as she stood, Edna Varicose, under the lamplight, that a tall, sinister-looking man stepped up behind her, and holding her with an iron grip, injected a syringe of plutonium 6000 into her arm as he whispered in a heavy accent, “Mother Russia sends her love.” As her vision faded, Edna could see Roger standing over her, as he talked to her assailant in a language she didn’t understand.