My stories are always a long time coming- they spend at least a month being mentally formulated before I can finally wrap my head and emotions around them. This particular piece has taken two months of pondering at the very least and was furiously written out in the space of about two hours. It started out in my head as more of a plotted story, but I'm an epic fail when it comes to plots and it somehow morphed into a poignant piece. I really like how it came out- it's a story of revenge, love, and ultimately how the things you lose never really go away. I hope that you enjoy it and would love any feedback :D!




Six months and he would have thought that all echoes of Eva had faded by then.


He spent three days locked in his best friend’s guest room after her murder, dehydrated and crying himself to sleep at regular intervals. He pushed the armoire in front of the door to keep Fox at a distance, to keep the tempest of his emotions at bay, to keep his grief and guilty conscience bottled up in his dreams where they should stay and out of spoken conversation where he couldn’t dare release them for fear of a disaster.


He was almost ready to crawl into a bottle for the rest of his life when Fox took the door and the dresser out with a sledgehammer, threatening to take his head out, as well. He didn’t want his friend to see him like this, broken and devastated and holding onto the wedding ring that he took from her lifeless finger before the cremation like it was all he had left, because maybe it was.


He spent the remainder of the week angry- angry that someone had taken something that didn’t belong to them, angry that something precious was lost, furious that he was sleeping alone for the first time in seven years, but most of all devastated that his wife was really, truly gone. He was kicking furniture and destroying personal property, yelling at Fox and feeling sorry for it but not sorry enough to apologize, driving at breakneck speed when he snuck out of the house and secretly hoping that he would crash. He was angrier than he ever thought he could be… angrier than he ever thought he should be.


Seven days passed and there he was, broken and devastated and shattered and ultimately burning with rage, not knowing if he wanted to grow up and take a stand, not knowing if he was capable. He couldn’t let the case go unsolved, couldn’t just let the authorities pass this off for lack of evidence, couldn’t let her be a mystery, couldn’t let people act like someone beautiful and majestic and amazing had never been.


After a week, he told Fox that he was leaving. He didn’t say why he was leaving or where he was going- didn’t speak of the revenge that he planned to extract because he knew that Fox would try to stop him or stick him in solitary. His friend said nothing, brown eyes bleeding with sympathy and “don’t go” and “you’re not okay” before he fetched something from one of the kitchen drawers.


He took the proffered sheet tentatively, almost afraid to glance at it. It was a photograph, folded and torn at the edge from having been agonized over and tucked away. Eva was luminous and laughing, his own eyes were bright with bliss and spiked eggnog from Fox’s annual holiday party, and his arm was wrapped around her waist in front of a lit Christmas tree.


“I thought maybe you’d like to keep it,” Fox said, his gaze morose and tentative. “For when it doesn’t hurt as much… for something to remember her by.”


He thanked his friend and gunned out of the place as fast as possible without so much as a backward glance, shaken to his very core by the photograph of better times that he soon stowed in the glove box of his car away from the urge to rip it apart. He’ll never admit it, not even under pain of death, but there are times when he takes it out and turns it over and over in his hands before his stomach twists and his head aches and the pain gets to be so much that he returns it back into safe-keeping.


He was driven by revenge, obsessed with retribution, crazed by an animalistic desire to settle the score once and for all. He bribed police officers and weaseled his way into their records, scoured prisons and penitentiaries for men matching the vague description of the lowlife who stopped his wife in an alley and filled her with bullets for some sadist reason that he’ll never understand.

He no longer knew how to be anything other than Eva’s avenger. Any other parts of him, the other people he could have been, died with her.


Just thinking about the guy who so wrongly took his livelihood turned his blood to red-hot ire. He found himself thinking that life shouldn’t be random, that the legal system should try harder, that she should still be faithfully at his side. What gave that bastard the right? Why did they let him get away?


There were still nights where he woke up in nondescript motels on the road to revenge, drenched in his own cold sweat and an unvoiced scream locked in his throat. He lamented the unbroken blankets beside him every night, grieved for the flat pillow and the unoccupied side of the bed that felt empty and lifeless and wrong. He still dreamt of her, but not sparkling and beautiful and immortal as his memories found her. His subconscious dragged up the repressed images of her lying stagnant and bloody on a slab in the morgue, lovely and tragic and waiting to be identified.


He saw Eva in everything that he did, heard her in everywhere that he was. Her voice was in the autumn wind, her skin in the uninterrupted snow, her loveliness in the spring flowers, her blood in the rhythm of the road beneath him and her aroma in the smell before rain. He threaded it all down deep to where he kept the memory of her, but she was everywhere, and every day he felt like he was losing a little part of her. How many times would he have to say goodbye?


He made a goddess out of her ghost, but his gut was empty, trying to grow around where she should have been, stretched taut and unable to hold the weight.


Some days, he thought she might be proud of him. Those were the days where he managed to take stock of the little things, to stop and smell the roses- those were the days where he let go of her for a little while, but never for long, and managed to do something for himself. Even if it was just a new jacket or a cup of good coffee, he could picture her delighted smile and taste her cherry lip-glossed kiss, vivid and beautiful and fleeting and never long enough.


But the memories never lasted long and he was grounded back to reality- that someone had killed his wife, that the love of his life was gone, and that he was going to make that son of a bitch wish he had never laid eyes on her. The memories kept him alive, but the sun rose, the sun fell. In the end, it didn’t matter.


He tore up heaven and earth looking for him, looking for a way to end him, looking for a way to settle the score. He wanted to give her peace, to avenge her memory, to finally put her right. Was it revenge, or was it unconditional love? Was he following her to the ends of the Earth, or was he fulfilling his own selfish desires? Was it retribution, or was it doing the right thing?


Blind faith can take many forms.


Sometimes he thought his head was going to explode with the weight of the loss and the emptiness and the guilt and the grief and the anger and the devastation. Sometimes he wished it would. Sometimes the Earth’s pull was just too great and he lost himself, lost her. Just when he thought he hit bottom… how many ledges would he have to slam into on the way down?


He thought that maybe he was supposed to let Eva go, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t see her ended without justification, he couldn’t scatter the ashes from the urn that lingered in the darkest corner of his trunk until he had redemption, he couldn’t put her to rest until he put her right.


Wherever she is in that wide wide heaven that he knows she resides in, he knows that she can tell he loves her. He knows that she can see it in everything he does because he sees it- not just in his thoughts, but in the way he smells her ratty old bathrobe every night before he goes to sleep, in the way he pulls the picture out of his dashboard and traces the planes of her face, lovely even in a photograph, even in the way he can’t look at a woman with green eyes without his breath hitching. He sees her in everything and he knows that somewhere she sees it, too.


Six months and he would have thought that all echoes of Eva had faded by now.


But they never really do.

wow, that was an amazing story! You are very talented and you're writing is so descriptive; I loved this story

There will be more coming soon right?

Thank you so much ! You have no idea how much your feedback means to me... I'm sure I'm not the only writer here who starves for it.

Nope, there won't be any more. I feel that my strength is in emotional imagery and that I'm lacking in plot development and synthesizing, which makes for better short stories than novels. I aspire to make my writing raw, to make it poignant, and it loses something when I try to drag it out and put a plot behind it. I can't seem to stretch it and keep my style, so to say, so 99% of my stories come in one part and the 1% that don't are the ones that I don't like because they're not "me."

Aww man, I was hoping to find out if he finally gets revenge or not. But I understand what you mean. I think that makes your stories even better because there's a cliffhanger, we'll never know what happens, and that just makes it more intriguing

And I also understand how much it means to get feedback from readers, writing takes alot of work and wonderful writers like you should get lots of comments

I've been told that I have a very read between the lines style, and I would agree with that statement. All I attempt to convey are life, death, and love- all I want to do is to get the reader to feel what I feel as poignantly as I feel it. I don't need to tie things up or to give my stories a firm structure to do that. I'm constantly asked, "What happened? How did it end?" but to be honest, I never really know. If it's not vital to the story or to getting my point across, I don't think about it.

Thank you so much for all your kind words ! I think I'm blushing .

um, "wow", too. I want to also thank you for sharing this story. Without getting too personal, I'd been going through a similar situation for many years and it's funny that the place you left of at is about the same place I've been lately. I'm sure we all have experienced death/loss at some point in our lives... losing someone very special to us... and anger, grief, resentment, self-destruction are all normal parts of the whole grieving process. I'm actually glad you left it off where you did cause at this point, he has a choice... and we all do. He can either keep acting out in anger, can take that pain and cause more pain but really that's all he'd be doing - causing more pain and reliving it day after day. And that doesn't bring the person back... just makes things a lot worse. Or he accept the reality of what happened, learn from it, heal, start living in the Now and truly be happy. And of course his wife would be happy and proud, too. She wouldn't want him to act like that, I'm sure. And this way, I'll even say that it'll touch even more people because of the fact that you left it off where you did. Great writing! Great message! You're very talented. I look forward to reading your next story.

Thank you so very much :D! I'm glad that you were able to relate to it. I didn't really think about everything you've mentioned when I wrote it, but now that you bring it up, I suppose that all of that is very true. Great insight . Thanks for reading and reviewing!

Rabid, that's such an amazing piece.

'He was angrier than he ever thought he could be… angrier than he ever thought he should be' - his own feeing of helplessness and rights comes out there and when he askes how the shooter could have the right, its almost as if he feels that Eva's murder was not only a violation of her rights, but also his? So, the closure in that case is not only for her, but for him too, because he has that underlying feeling of helplessness in the aftermath of having someone so precious, so tethered to him just ripped away from him?

He says that it's avenging her, but in a way, it's a way of avenging the part of him that's broken, and that also ties in with why he can't remember her the way she was - he can only remember the remains of her, because the shooter destroyed him too, he took away his ability to remember her as she was. So, he wants to see this guy dead so that he can have her back at least that way, that if the case is closed (to him, because he won't tell anyone he's killed the guy), then he can stop looking at her as a crime and start holding onto her as a person?

Excellent story :D

Excellent. I think that portrayal of intense emotion is an area where some short story writers really fall down, but you've done so well here. His emotion is so raw and striking that I could almost feel it as I was reading.

You've a lot of talent :D

Aww, thanks so much, you guys . You made my day. Alissa, you've described the complex that I was going for exactly right... although, I didn't think of any of that when I wrote it . Once I have a general idea of what's supposed to happen and how I want the story to turn out, I have a pretty one-track mind. I tried to leave it at least a little bit happy with the third to last paragraph, but I can never resist a poignant ending over a happy one :P.

Glad to know! I love endings like that, they always leave you with more to think and feel!

By the way, I think I'm your opposite; I can't do emotion all that well, but plots are my forte, so if you're ever interested in plots, do let me know