{#378 They say revenge is a dish best served cold. You’ve waited ten years for this moment}

The following is a work of fiction. I’ve always said fiction has a good dose of fact, mixed with some fantasy. I’ll let you determine what’s what. Enjoy! 

I come from a long line of rage.

My lawyers tried to get me off on a insanity plea, but I told them like I told everybody else in that courtroom I wasn’t crazy and I damn sure wasn’t sorry. I don’t think that helped my case. But I’ve been taught my whole life there’s nothing wrong with the truth.

I’ve also been told on numerous occasions to keep my mouth shut.

I’d had all I could take. The literal love of my life expected sympathy for his foolish decisions to take a lover that has bankrupted him. That’s after what I got. I didn’t feel any sympathy, I felt a maniacal fury towards him and the last ten years of my life. I’d warned him over and over again to just shut up. My head pounded, my teeth chattered, my hands clenched.

When he reached for me, I scuttled backward like a crawdad. Crawdads aren’t scared, you know. It’s just self preservation. They will fight. They will pinch you seventeen ways to Sunday if you have the misfortune of picking them up in a way they can twist and get their claws into you. Crawdads are, pound for pound, meaner’n shit.

Like I said, I’d warned him on countless occasions. He knew about my family: my Great-Grandmother, the granny witch, who was really just a gardener and healer but would drown kittens or slam them against a poplar post in a Kroger bag for population control. My grandmother, who saw a psychic like she saw her hairdresser, and cast spells on those who crossed her. The whole family on my Dad’s side was crazy: his mother killed both her husbands, one with poison in his soup, the other she shot point blank but got off because she said he was strangling her. Funny how they didn’t look for bruises. One of his brothers killed two girls after they pickpocketed his billfold in a bar he shouldn’t have been in, anyway. Felons aren’t supposed to go to drinking establishments. Ran them off the road and stabbed them like they were potatoes going into the microwave. Another brother was constantly in and out of Brushy Mountain for aggravated assault and rape. Drugs, robberies, murder. They had it all.

And I learned how to castrate pigs and calves when I was eighteen.

He should have known better.

The moron bought me a gun, even though I already had three of my own. He bought me a pretty pearl handled Case every Christmas, too.

Everything about him made me crazy. His hateful mother, who, for some reason, never believed I was good enough to marry her son. I guess because I wasn’t willing to pop out a baby for her to spoil. How utterly ridiculous for a grown man to wear Slayer t-shirts and collect Star Wars memorabilia. Yet he did. How positively foolish for these fifty year old men to go out camping in the woods once a month, usually even in the rain, without the benefit of a tent. They ate beanie-weenies, smoked pot, and drank moonshine and cheap red wine. They shot guns and swung from a grapevine pretending to be Tarzan. I’m sure they had a Jane visit multiple times. These whores, these absolute disastrous males who are bored with life after the war, too settled of an existence after what they lived in the eighties. Why did he pick me? I was never going to be wild. I was value and tradition steeped in sweet tea.

But push me…..push me. I’m the wildest cat you ever had the pleasure of petting.

And then it was all over.

Just a little blood. Just a little bleach. Just a little lie.

The last two months of rain made the digging easy.

Good friends ask questions and help you find solutions. I have a great many good friends.

Best friends keep quiet and help you dig. Of these, I have two.

I blame the moon, because I always blame the moon.

Where better to bury the dead than a graveyard? It was past midnight, because nothing good happens after midnight, so that’s when I insisted it be done. I had my charms from Savannah, and the bad juju from New Orleans, and all I could think was how the stupid son-of-a-bitch should have listened. I rolled my eyes in the dark.

There was a church nearby, close enough for us to hear the bells toll the hour. How ludicrous for church bells to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for their melody. But they did. I rolled my eyes and kicked him again under his camo tarp. A nice touch, I might add.

I warned him if we couldn’t come to an agreement, I’d get my payment one way or another. After all, revenge is a dish best served cold.