after “The Fallen Angel” by Alexandre Cabanel
What the average person doesn’t realize is how revenge works. It doesn’t come into being after the initial rage and disappointment and frustration cool. It’s not the logical mind rising from the gray ashes of emotion. Revenge is an emotion born at that first moment. Imagine Lucifer’s fall from the heavens. As he lands far below the docile and dovelike celestial beings a desire for revenge flames in his breast. I understand because I, too, have been unfairly ostracized. Those I thought considered themselves my friends, ones I knew I could count on for a twenty here and there, a fondle of their wives, they’ve formed a wall of backs to me. Spurned me! But I will have my revenge. Not once or twice, but regularly, as it burns ever fiercer within me.
Luanne Castle’s Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, Grist, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Fourteen Hills, American Journal of Poetry, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Thimble, MacQueen’s Quinterly, One Art, Lothlorien, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, Flash Boulevard, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Dribble Drabble Review, and Your Impossible Voice. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Luanne studied revenge from a young age under the tutelage of Emily Brontë by rereading Wuthering Heights many times.
