A short short from a few years ago.
Revenge
a short story
by
William Evenhouse
The child’s eyes were green and luminous under black eyebrows, thick like a grown man’s mustache. When he saw the locked door shake slightly, he frowned, and his eyes began to sparkle. He leaned forward in his chair, elbows bent on his desk.
“You can’t enter,” he said. “You haven’t got a key.”
“I have a key,” a familiar voice laughed. “You can’t keep me out.”
“I don’t give you permission.”
“I don’t need permission. I am who I am.”
The lock groaned softly, the knob twisted, and the door opened. A tall man stepped into the room and closed the door again.
The child looked at the man, at his luminous green eyes, his thick mustache. He saw the knife in the man’s right hand. The left hand was bloodily bandaged.
“You are not grandfather,” he said. “Grandfather is dead. When he fell, he put his hand though the glass and he bled fast and furiously. He has been dead one month today.”
“Perhaps,” the tall man said, moving the knife between his right forefinger and thumb. “But what sort of child pushes a grandfather down a balustrade?”
The child sat back and narrowed his glowing eyes.
“My mother,” he said. “He killed her with a knife like that one. Don’t you think he deserved to die?”
“It could have been a mistake,” the tall man said.
“No mistake,” said the child. “He was the best left-handed knife thrower in the circus world, and the knife pierced the center of her throat. No mistake.”
The child leaned forward again, moving his right hand carefully toward the small plastic pistol at the edge of his desk.
The man laughed a short gurgling laugh. “The pistol is just a toy. It’s not real. It shoots a bb. You know that.”
Now the child reached quickly for the pistol. “No more a toy than a pretend grandfather with a knife in the wrong hand.”
In the blink of an eye, the man raised his right arm and flicked the knife at the child. Before the child could level the pistol to point it, the child felt the knife entering his neck.
“You’re good!” he managed to whisper, just before his head burst into a cloud of luminous green and gold flecks.
The tall man turned slowly toward the door, but before he could openly smile, his own head and body began to dissolve into a similar luminous cloud, and he only managed to cry out once as he twisted to see that the child’s head had reassembled and the little pistol had been fired.
“Why?!!”
“Because I am the writer,” said the child. He leaned back, his eyes aglow. “And I call the shots.”
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William Evenhouse is an 84 year old American folksinger who lives in Oakland, California now, in 2023.
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