Deanna was looking over my video tapes one afternoon. When she got to the end of the shelf, she turned and asked the usual question. “Barcelona?”

I shrugged. “It’s a strange story.”

“No it isn’t,” she said.

“Not the movie,” I said. “It’s a fairly pedestrian little piece. I’m talking about how I ended up owning a copy of the movie. That’s a strange little story.”

“Well?” she said. “C’mon. Dish.”

“Couple of years ago, when I was in college, I lived on top of a mountain. The college was in the valley but the only place available was on the mountain. Anyway, we rented movies from a little shop called The Bookstore that was in a plaza next to the river.”

“Barcelona was one of these movies?”

“You have to understand that it got really boring on that damned mountain. We got three channels and only one of them was halfway clear. We rented anything that looked sort of interesting.”

“So Barcelona was one of those movies?” she said again with an almost sensual smirk.

“Yes. Yes, it was.” I paused because Deanna's smirk had transformed into a grin that made her face look like it was going to split in half. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said, but the grin remained.

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Yes,” she said. “I honestly do.”

“Okay,” I said. “That winter we got a lot of snow in the mountains. Two, three feet. Something like that. It was miserable.”

“I’ll bet,” Deanna said.

“You have no idea. One day in March, it got up to sixty. Everyone was walking around in shorts, wondering if this was the start of spring and then the snow started to melt. Three feet of snow in a handful of hours. The river overflowed and the floodplain filled up. Unfortunately, the plaza where The Bookstore was got flooded out with everything else.”

“Everything else?”

“BuyLow, Kmart, a movie theater, some other small shops that we never went into. All of them were under two feet of water. Needless to say, the water didn’t help out The Bookstore’s computerized record-keeping systems.”

“I imagine not.”

I squinted “Did I mention that we’d rented Barcelona the day before the flood?”

“No,” she said, “but you probably should have.”

“Well, we did. And after the flood came, there was no real way for them to figure out who had what movie.”

“So you kept it? Isn’t that like theft?”

“It was more laziness than theft,” I said. “It was just that we never got around to returning it. They didn’t know who had it and they really didn’t care. Everything was covered by insurance anyway.”

“So you kept a movie that you really didn’t like.”

“Yes,” I said. “Was that wrong of me?”

“It didn’t belong to you,” Deanna said, sitting down on the couch next to me.

“It does now,” I said, reaching for her. We both knew that her boyfriend, my roommate, wouldn’t be home for hours.