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Taking another trip to the local home and garden store to find a better-fitting pair of rubber gloves, inefficient man Lou Westin has been plotting revenge against his wife’s killer for sixty-five years. Westin, now 88 years old, has worked diligently, though incompetently, since 1951, spending up to several years on each small detail of his plan to track down a man named Gabriel Pollack, get him to confess, and murder him in cold blood.
“I’ll make him pay for what he did,” said the elderly Westin with the conviction of a 23-year-old. “There’s nowhere to hide. Mark my words: I’m going to find this scumbag.”
According to reports from Westin’s neighbors, most of whom were born several decades after Westin began obsessively and unproductively plotting to kill Gabriel Pollack, his home is filled with stacks of extremely dated newspaper clippings as well as black and white photographs of his then-newlywed bride. “Lou seems really committed to finding this guy that could very well be dead by now,” said Westin’s next-door neighbor Jaclyn Chavis. “Obviously I don’t want any real violence, but you have to wonder how anyone could possibly be so ineffectual. I mean, he’s read dozens of books on hotwiring cars, just on the off chance he needs to hotwire a car if things don’t go according to plan. It’s unbelievable.”
In the years following his wife’s murder in 1951, Westin has fought in two wars, remarried and later divorced, and he also retired from his venerable 40-year tenure as a high school physics teacher. All the while, he was incessantly and ineptly preparing to avenge the murder of his wife.
“Old man Westin seems a little nuts,” said local teenager Riley Duran. “He’s always in his garage furiously hitting his punching bag, which he’s obviously way too old to be doing. It’s either that or he’s in the front lawn tying up sacks of potatoes with rope and tossing them into the trunk of his car.”
“Remember me?” said Westin, practicing his triumphal, never-to-be-heard speech over and over in the mirror, his face wrinkled and his eyes bloodshot. “Shut up! I don’t want your excuses, and I don’t want your apology! I want my wife back!”
At press time, an equally inefficient Gabriel Pollack was on the highway headed back to murder Westin and finally finish what he started in 1951.
