Strong hands grab at her. She’s pulled out of bed, yanked kicking and fighting towards the kitchen. The massive pot is already on the stove, already hot… so hot, boiling hot. Looking away from it, she sees the face of her tormenter, so angry and wild and yet distant. This is somehow impersonal… whatever this person wants, it isn’t about her.

She screams in fear turning to agony as she’s dropped into the water, and then the lid slams down leaving her in darkness, darkness she awakes to, her powerful hind legs kicking the wall of the den, showering her mate with dirt when her nails don’t catch him instead.

“Ugh, the dream again?” he says, shaking a clump of earth off his fur. She nods, still mute with panic. “Honestly, I don’t know where you get those ideas from… we’re rabbits, not lobsters.”

Of those, it had taken almost an entire year for my inklings of suspicion to coalesce into certainty that my downfall had been no accident. I spent two years finding out who had been close to the action at the time and working out who among them would be most receptive to my approach. Another year and a half, I spent befriending one of the workmen, getting to know him and becoming his confidante, and then I spent a similar length of time picking the man’s brain with carefully worded questions at odd moments… I was careful not to reveal my true purpose, lest some warning work its way back to the object of my vengeful urges.

It had been tedious but necessary work. There could be no mistakes, I knew. I would only have one shot.

Once I knew the identity of my nemesis, I hadn’t set to work immediately. It had taken me some time to come up with a fitting punishment for the one who had taken everything from me… the poor doomed fool probably had not stopped to think how much his actions would cost me, but it was my intention that he have the opportunity to rue how much they had cost him.

In the end, my scheme was as elegant as it was simple. Well, perhaps it was more elegant than it was simple. It took me some time to assemble the necessary resources. Locusts are easier to breed than they are to train, of course, and my knowledge of organic chemistry while perhaps better than the average high school graduate’s was not quite up to the demands of my plan. It was hard to supervise the design and manufacture of the device that would form the cornerstone of my great work while taking the necessary classes, which only added to the delays. All the while I worked to get all six hundred and sixteen of the different venomous snakes cleared through customs, a task that would have been difficult enough without the diminished resources my fallen circumstances had left me with.

Finally, the day came when the device was complete and all else was in readiness. It was time. My vengeance would be swift in the coming and long in the lingering, and it would be sweet, oh so very sweet. There would be no reprieve. There would be no mistakes. I had planned for every possibility.

Every possibility, that is, save for one: my enemy dying peacefully in his bed.

Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served promptly.

When it was over, he was not sated so much as exhausted. She, on the other hand, seemed restless still. She rolled off of him and onto her back, where she lay atop the crumpled, sweaty blankets.

He wondered if he should say something… and what he should say, if so.

“Would you like to hear a riddle?” she asked him finally.

“Uh, okay,” he said.

“What do you have less of, the more you take?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Innocence,” she said, sitting up.

“Was that… was that your first time?” he asked, confused.

“Not exactly,” she said. She swung her legs off the side of the bed, turning her back on him in the process, and got up. “Would you like to hear about my first time? If you can call it that, I mean.”

“If you’d like to tell me,” he said.

“It was ten years ago.”

“My God,” he said. “You must have been…”

“Eleven,” she said. “Innocent.” She turned around to face him. “So innocent. Innocent and ignorant… they aren’t the same thing, but they go hand in hand so often, you know? I think that’s why the courts find people ‘not guilty’ instead of ‘innocent’. Because ignorance of the law is no defense, right?”

“I guess,” he said.

“And of course, not everybody who isn’t found guilty is innocent,” she said. She started to pace the small room as she spoke. “The man who took my innocence ended my childhood… ruined my life. I went through… well, I went through a lot of different things. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. But through it all, I had an idea that one day I’d get him back for it, pay him back in kind. I couldn’t steal his innocence, of course, but I could ruin his life.” She turned to face the man. “Ruin it with sex, like he’d ruined mine.”

“I… see.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” she said. “I wasn’t much older at that point, than I had been when it happened. Do you know what it’s like to make that kind of decision at an age when some girls are still… well, actually, I don’t know what girls that age do. I never got to find out, did I?” She laughed bitterly.

“What… what did you…”

“Well, that’s just it,” she said, and she resumed pacing. “There were so many different ways to go, so many different ways a life can be ruined, so many different things I could have chosen to take in retribution for my innocence. Health? That might be a little self-destructive, but what’s one ruined life, more or less. Financial security? Family? Reputation? Peace of mind? Any or all of the above? So… many… choices. And yet, none of them would really add up to what was taken from me. None of them equal what was done to me.”

“My God… I’m so sorry…”

“Please, don’t,” she said, holding up her hand. “Don’t speak. I need you to listen now. So you’ll understand why I watched you for so long, why I waited. I had to be sure, you see. I had to know… had to know I was making the right decision.”

“And do you think you did?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad… are you coming back to bed?”

“I will in a bit,” she said. “I think I’m going to put a robe on and go sit out on the balcony and enjoy the night air.”

“Would you mind if I joined you?”

“I’d like that, I think.”

“Do you think you’ll still think about him?” he asked. “About getting back at him?”

“I’d like to say no,” she said. “But I know that I will. Maybe less often. Maybe less… I don’t know, intensely. I can’t shut out the memory. I’ve just… chosen not to dwell within it, willingly. I hope you don’t take it personally.”

“You chose to be with me,” he said. He raised a hand to his lips and blew her a kiss from the bed. “You gave up your thoughts of revenge to give me a chance. I’ll take that as personally as I like.”

Unaccustomedly, she blushed.