Between justice and revenge

The drip of blood never sweeter than anticipation. The August air thick and honey before the rain. The last time Asha walked the streets of this neighborhood the cold sting of a night two Decembers a ago she thought she was leaving for good. Now she returned with nothing good in mind.

Crickets chirped and fireflies readied for flight,the kind of summer evening at twilight you remember riding your bike through as a child. The only difference from this and summer nights of youth was Asha’s mother wouldn’t be calling her in befor dark. Asha did have that anxious feel of school around the corner stirring inside her.

She walked the alleys and drank the air. When she left she promised she wouldn’t see his face again, not at a family reuniom, not at his funeral. But she never was the girl who followed through on things. It didn’t matter of course, nothing of her present life did.

The only thing on Asha’s mind since spring was the death of her little brother. The police had reopened the case and named her mother's longtime partner a person of interest. She suspected from the day he disappeared that Daniel was responsible for her brother’s disappearence. The police questioned Daniel multiple times. Asha’s mother responded with fits of anger followed by leaving the room with a sunken chest if Asha raised a question about what Daniel was doing the day Christopher became a missing child.

Now with her mother long dead and the police telling her Daniel was officially a person of interest, Asha wouldn’t wait any longer for justice. The divide between justice and revenge is a pebble when children are involved. The police waited nearly twenty years to define Daniel as a person of interest, Asha wouldn’t wait another twenty minutes to administer justice.

She gripped the tazer in her rucksack and dropped it deep into the bag. No. There would be no tied man answering questions. She ensured the revolver was still in the rucksack and stepped on the weathered, faded blue porch.

Asha knocked on the door. The house creaked and shuffled behind the front door. Ghosts of her racing up the porch stairs to Sunday dinner, Christmas lights hanging from the porch railing, Christopher playing cards on the top step. She chased the ghosts from her mind.

Asha pulled her green hoodie taut around her face. She readied the revolver. The door opened. “It was you,” she said, her voice like a nightmare walking in the daylight.

A single shot, footsteps.