Short Story: Vigilante

By
A story taken from one of our writing prompts. I thought you'd enjoy it, and it's so much shorter than the last thing I posted. 
He was impervious to her abuse. I don’t think he even noticed it. He was so in love with her (or her bank account, I haven’t decided which) that he was totally deaf to every scathing word. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. I was only ten years old, but she apparently didn’t see that as a reason to let up on me.
Oh, how I hated her! She would criticize everything I did. My room was too messy, my stuttering annoyed her, I was too old to be playing with dolls. She had a way of making every insult sound enormous.

The last straw came when I caught her going through my underwear drawer. I screamed at her until I was out of breath, and when Dad grounded me for being unkind I cried for two hours straight, but, of course, he took her side over mine. The injustice rankled, and I determined that I would do something about her.

The next afternoon, I spent a good three hours catching wasps and putting them in a jar.  
That night, when we were having dinner at her house, I took my jar along in a tote bag, and it sat at my feet as I ate. I was starting to have second thoughts about what I was planning, but then Dad’s girlfriend told my dad the tie he was wearing was awful, and he should get rid of it, and he promised her she wouldn’t see it again.
That made me mad. I had given that tie to him last Father’s Day. I couldn’t stand to think about my present sitting in the trash, so I excused myself to go to the bathroom, grabbed my bag, and headed straight for her bedroom.
Once I was there, I opened her underwear drawer, shook my jar until the wasps were too dizzy to fly, then tipped them in, closing the drawer quickly.
I went back down to dinner, sure that the girlfriend would demand to know what I had been up to, but she was evidently too intent in staring into my dad’s face to notice anything else. I spent the rest of the evening terrified she’d somehow find my prank before we left, and I was very relived when we went home.   
I figure the trick with the wasps must have worked, because I never saw her again.
It’s been nine years since then, and my dad is now happily married to a much kinder woman, but I still haven’t dared to tell him what I had done that day, and I hope he never finds out.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 6 (Rough)

By
Six Feeling a strange combination of sleepiness and so much anxiety that it was very hard for me to stay in one place, I sat down at the kitchen table with the meal packet I had chosen and started to eat, turning on the phone that would be replacing my pendant during my mission. I had been practicing the use of the phone for a while now, but I still wasn’t fully used to it, which I hoped wouldn’t cause me problems later. I tapped on the screen a few times and pulled up the details of today’s schedule, not all that surprised that most items on the list had been phrased vaguely. It was entirely possible that a human may steal my phone sometime during the mission, and it wouldn’t do if my phone contained information that revealed my true identity, or even alluded to it. According to the schedule, I was supposed to leave for something called a high school in twenty minutes, but I didn’t have a clear idea what to expect, which made me downright uneasy. Pon was supposed to ...
Read more

The Dungeon

By Christie Vick
Caryn Pinkston and I got together on zoom this morning to talk about our writing. We used a prompt and wrote for fifteen minutes. It was fun! Mine is a sketch, not a complete scene. It could be a hook on the first page of a novel, and it’s  historical fiction, a genre I don’t usually write.  The prompt: He insisted on taking us on a tour of the establishment. I hesitated before descending the stone stairway. It was dark, lit only by the guard’s  torch. The air became rank with the smell of death and feces. At the bottom of the stairs, I lifted my tunic to cover my nose. The odor was stifling.  The guard smirked. “You get used to the stench down here.”   “I doubt it.” I’d already forgotten the man’s name. Was it Geoff or Hal? He was a heavy-set man with a braided, gray beard.“Take me to the prince,” I said.  “He’s at a lower level. The princesses are here.”  “The girls? You have them kept here? Show me.”  The guard walked ahea...
Read more

Farmerella (Based on Cinderella)

By
Once upon a time not too long ago, in a partly magical place called Bear Lake, there lived a teenage girl named Ella. She loved to dance, but she didn’t get much time to practice. She lived on a farm, and because of that she had a lot of chores to do.   She didn’t like chores, but she always did her best to do them well. Somehow, she always found time for chores, school, her homework, and her dancing. But then her father broke his arm, and Ella had to help him more than ever. Then she had no time for dancing at all. That made her very sad. One day, while she was at school, Ella heard about a dance party. Her father would be almost better by then, so she knew that if she did her chores really fast, she could go. The only problem was that this was a fancy dance party, and she would need a dress. When Ella got home and talked to her mother about the problem, her mother told her that there were some old dresses in the attic. If Ella found the time to fix one, she could use it. ...
Read more