“The Lover’s Telephone Revenge”

Folklore keeps up with the times. There has been a story going around lately about a lover’s revenge, in which she uses a telephone rather than something traditional like a voodoo curse.

A man wants to dump his current live-in girlfriend and tells her bluntly one morning that he is going away for two weeks, and he wants her to be gone and to have all of her things cleared out of the apartment when he returns.

When he arrives back home, he half-expects to find the apartment trashed or the girlfriend still there, refusing to leave. Instead, he finds to his satisfaction that the woman and all her possessions are gone, and everything is apparently in order. Then he hears some kind of odd sound coming from the next room and finds the telephone off the hook and a voice spouting some kind of gibberish.

He shrugs and hangs up the receiver, only to learn, when his next phone bill comes, that his former lover had called the time/weather number in Tokyo and left the phone off the hook for a week or so. The bill runs to the thousands of dollars.

Serves the male chauvinist pig right! Somehow I have never heard this particular story told about a man pulling the phone prank on a woman.

But I have encountered plenty of other tellings of the story, including one in the form of a comical poem by Felicity Napier, entitled “Natasha Says,” that appeared in the English journal New Statesman . This time the couple are vegetarians, and the woman doubles her revenge by scattering health-food seeds throughout the apartment and watering down the whole place. The last stanza :

Then she dialled; listened to the New York Speaking Clock

and gently laid the receiver on the duvet; it would lie, like a slug, awaiting the growth of the bright sprigged pile of mustard and cress—so good for you—and slammed the door.

This story kind of grows on you after a while, I think. At least it has a less violent conclusion than other lover’s-revenge urban legends in which cars are filled with concrete, couples are trapped in campers, or husbands’ appendages are immobilized with superglue.