Revenge

Home for a funeral, I pop into my local of yesteryear.

I recognize that boozy bleary-eyed pig face propping up the bar.

Wilkins, the school bully!

Wanker!

How he’d tormented me forty years ago, but clearly he remembers me not.

How I’ve fantasized about going back in time and standing up to him!

But now he has aged, badly, looking like a grotesquely inflated beach ball with his vast beer belly, all muscle turned to flab.

I fantasize about following him out at closing time and beating him up but desist, for life has already done the job for me.

From Guest Contributor Ian Fletcher

Mr. Flanagan’s Lawn Gnomes

Mr. Flanagan's yard was famous for its lawn gnomes. Every child on the block knew the tiny mischief-makers loved to drag unwary passersby into the yard and subjugate them to all manners of horror.

Bobby O'Shea supposedly disappeared while picking crabapples straight from the branch. Seamus Kennedy refused to say how he got his broken foot, but Mr. O’Leary had forced him to deliver groceries to Flanagan’s front door the day before. The gnomes bullied away lunch money and tricked children out of their shoes.

In hindsight, using Flanagan’s hedge as our homerun fence was almost certainly a bad idea.