A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

Falling is barbed-wire terror ripping down your spine, a sharp drop and a sudden stop, scrabbling for a rope that isn’t there.

My breath is the only thing I can hear, heavy and arrhythmic. It bursts out of me in gasps—painful,

Her hips don’t sway when she walks. She just goes, hands in her trouser pockets and the motion of her body straight and sure.

don’t know why she’s here early. I don’t know why she won’t tell me her name. I don’t know why she never speaks to me, or who she is. But I want to find a loose thread on the collar of her shirt and tug. I want to unravel her.

I struggle to imagine any of those girls letting Ellis Haley go anywhere by herself. You must’ve had to peel them off like tiny well-dressed leeches.

So I do a lot of my reading outside, during the day, a crocheted blanket tossed onto the quad grass and a thermos of tea at my elbow, devouring the dark and the macabre with white sunlight burning the nape of my neck.

And here, my heart beating fast and the taste of ink on my tongue, the city opening wide below us like a waiting mouth—