Hell Hath No Fury…

I sent his soul straight to purgatory, and the only one praying is me; that he never finds escape.

He had catalogued me with a single, cheap word: whore. My nappy dreadlocks, my gothic ink, the way I wore my lipstick like a dare, each thing was filed into his tidy little boxes until I became nothing more than a label he could point to and mock. He practiced small cruelties like a man polishing a trophy: the shove, the laugh that used my name, the staged “accident” meant to test whether I would break. When he crossed the Rubicon, the thing he expected was noise; screams, bargaining, begging, teary eyes, the kind of public spectacle that feeds weak men.

I did not give him that. I folded the moment into myself and walked away. I kept living. I read. I wrote. I laughed. I ate supper on stoops. I let ordinary days be the camouflage for the work I was doing: counting, timing, cataloguing the exact moment his arrogance made him careless. Patience, for me, is not peace. It is a weapon tempered with boredom.

When the hour came, it was short and surgical. No fanfare. No witness framed in the wrong light. I moved like someone who had learned the economy of consequence: one decisive action, then the world rearranging itself in the aftermath. He fell apart in that space between action and reaction, the man who had practiced cruelty now met a blade to his jugular. And he could not lawfully rehearse his way out of. He crumpled, not because of spectacle but because his scaffolding, his fleshy tough exterior, had been quietly obliterated. I drank his blood like a witches’ ritual during the red moon.

People later said the scene was monstrous; they said it was sudden, that the town’s air tilted in a way that made even ducks hush. They spoke about the sound that hung after; about the way the gate seemed smaller. Redder. Macabre. They whispered that whatever happened had not been performed for onlookers but executed with a surgeon’s coldness, swift, efficient, and final.

I never took applause. I walked away with the same suitcase of small life I had carried before: supper in a plastic bag, my arms bare and inked, the kind of calm that does not explain itself. He lay there, annihilated, broken as a thing that had been exposed as useless. And the only prayer that mattered was the one I muttered in the dark: may he never find escape from the hereafter.

There is a cruelty to that prayer that is simple and absolute. It is not the spectacle he wanted. It is the slow collapsing of a man into the space he had carved out for himself, the grave he had dug by his own bare hands, and found dark and cold.