Revenge is Fictional

This story works as a stand alone story but is also the denouement of a week of vaguely related stories. So maybe start here.

Mitch looked at the tatty old photograph, his four ‘friends’ from school. Eric, Monk, Lucy and Danny. He’d see them tonight for the first time in what? 20 years. God sometimes he felt he’d prefer to take 1000 painkillers than meet up with that crowd again but they were part of him, part of his psyche, so in a way he was looking forward to it. He wasn’t in the photo because he was the one taking it. He’d complained at the time but big Eric had told him to shut up and take the bloody photo and of course everyone was scared of big Eric.

He hated that these were his friends from school, he’d been their friend but had they ever thought of him as theirs. Had they gone to a posher school he supposed he would have been their 'fag'. He wasn’t really part of the gang just an auxiliary member, the gopher, the butt of the jokes, the tagger on. He’d only realised it when he left school and went to university, realised what a fool he’d been. He’d allowed these four to bully him, dehumanise him, destroy the fragile ego of a teenager in order to boost their own. They say sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you but that was just plain wrong, the bruises Mitch received at the hands of Eric healed but the mental wounds the others inflicted still festered and certainly shaped the man he’d become today. He wondered if it would be the same at the reunion, if they would fall into the same roles. He guess they would, it was all they knew.

He looked at the juvenile faces again. Eric the policeman, Monk the big shot financier, Lucy had married a rich man with a dodgy background and was now a patron of the arts, whatever that means, and Danny, what was Danny? The man about town, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, all completely legit but only just. What would they make of him?

Ha, he called himself a writer but who was he kidding, what did he write? Press Releases, tweets and Facebook updates for a biscuit company. His novels lay untouched by publishers in a heap on his desktop while his 140 character missives were becoming his Magnus Opus.  It’s true his collection of tweets promoting the launch of the new range of summer berry biccies was up for a Green Hen award for Online Marketing but it was hardly the big time. He could see his ‘friends’’ response now, the green what?

One of the great things about being a writer is it's terribly cathartic at times. How good would he feel when he was shaking his old friends’ hands or kissing their cheeks, knowing that this week he’d plotted their death or downfall; sent them to their graves or to prison, extracted his revenge on their fictional forms. Eric had been shot in the head, Monk humiliated, Lucy shot in bed with another man and Danny killed by an almighty haymaker. And at what price to him, well nothing, revenge was sweet but no one got hurt, no child porn was made, no guns fired, no fists flown and more importantly no chance of Mitch getting caught and spending the rest of his life in prison; literary revenge and emotional cathartics costing nothing in 'bang up’ time.

Mitch had one last thing to do, one last act, he took the knife from his draw, swallowed the Paracetamol and took a deep breath. How gentle, how delicate the knife nicked the protruding veins, the blood trickled, his breath shortened and the lights gradually dimmed. Being dead would make the reunion so much more bearable.