I've got a taste for revenge and, quite frankly, I am killing it.
Not the heroic kind, with capes and moral speeches. The domestic, surgical kind - the kind that slips salt into a casserole and watches the proud host twitch. I like to watch people who loved themselves too much unlearn that love in small humiliations. It's methodical. It's tasteful. It's mine. The town still calls it the year of Alex. He stood on the dais that spring with the sort of smile that convinced everyone the world was exactly how he wanted it: bright, groomed, flattering. They clapped. They wrote glowing columns. My name was in one paragraph - the one where I was "no longer employed" - and then never again.
They think I disappeared. They think the breakdown did what breakdowns do: swallowed a person and spat out a cautionary tale. I disappeared on purpose. People like Alex forget to look past headlines. They think the messy child is gone. That's when the work becomes fun. The first thing I learned in revenge school is this: humiliation is slow. Pride does not fold from one public reveal. It frays, stitch by stitch. So I started at the edges - the trivial, the believable. A wrongly printed citation in his next op-ed. A misdelivered invitation that placed him at the wrong table the night his board decided on promotion. A scholarship check rerouted for the student he pretended to champion. Little, feasible errors that looked like the world's ordinary apathy.
The second rule is patience. Even the cleverest man will not blame a ghost for a typo. He blames himself, then his luck, then the printer, then me - but only if I let him. If you push too fast, people circle the wagons. If you push too slow, they barely feel the pressure. My tempo was a metronome: a tremor under his sneakers until his confidence tired and the smile cracked. They never learned about the nights I sat cross-legged in my living room, rewriting the timeline of his life with an old laptop and a pot of tea gone cold. They didn't see the lighter side either: my friends, the small conspirators I coaxed without confessing everything. There is a danger in being alone with an ache. Some of us make confessions to strangers on buses; I made plans with strangers at tea shops.
The phone buzzed. A message. One line. "Alex missed the meeting." That, to someone else, would be ordinary bureaucracy. To me, it was the first small fissure.
I smiled, which surprised me. There's a pleasant, almost ridiculous clarity to pressing a domino and watching the chain begin.