A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

Thirteen thousand feet above sea level, you can drown in air like water. I read that drowning is a good way to go. By all accounts the pain fades and euphoria blooms in its place like hothouse flowers, red orchid roots tethered to the stones in your pocket. Falling would be worse. 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 cheek is pressed against the snow. I don’t feel cold anymore. I am part of the mountain, its frigid stone heart beating alongside mine. The storm batters against my back, tries to peel me off this rock like lichen. But I am not lichen. I am limestone and schist, veined with quartz. I am immovable. And up this high, pinned against the eastern face with thin air crystallizing in my lungs, I am the only thing left alive.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

how grief would tie itself to the small things, that I’d be living my life as normal and then a bit of music or the cut of a girl’s smile would remind me of her and it would all flood back in. I understand the concept of sense memory. But understanding isn’t preparation.

until the past reached out from parchment and ink to close its fingers around my throat.

The Skull is supposed to be here, at the Boleyn House altar. I could drift down the hall with gin running hot in my veins, find the girl in red standing guard by the crypt door, and murmur the password: Ex scientia ultio. From knowledge comes vengeance.