Sweet Revenge: There's nothing more gratifying

By Lea LaRuffa

Diane sought out retribution in life. Abandoned, abused and neglected, she managed to find her place in the world. but no matter how hard she tried to belong, someone would always piss her off; her awakening into life would always require the taking of someone else's life, mostly men. Their death was the awakening of her carnal des

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lea LaRuffa
• Release date: Sep 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780648180210

Book preview

I stood here looking in the mirror and saw this wrinkly old woman looking back at me. I have no idea who she is, or what she’s doing in the mirror looking back at me. I was convinced it couldn’t possibly be me; I was not that old.

But as I stood there watching this old woman in the mirror I got a chill and then goosebumps. All I could do was reminisce about my life which had passed by so swiftly. I remember wishing time go by much faster as a child just so I could escape the people, the walls, the inconsequential and unloved life I was living. I have been invisible in one form or another my entire life. I was never seen, never loved, never truly touched, never respected, never acknowledged and never wanted. So my life was my life; raised by no one significant and imaginary in every respect. A dreamer without a doubt, I found that what I sought was only available to me in my world of imagination, a world of no criticism, no abuse, no ignorance, no hatred, and no dissimulation. I belonged in this world of imagination just like every other imaginary entity did.

I bit my tongue growing up pretending everything was copacetic. If I made no waves, no one would know who I was, why I was, or where I belonged. I grew up in pain; I grew up empty and full, sad, depleted, unloved, fearful of the future and unacknowledged. Somehow knowing that what the future held for me was not what I sought, and somehow knowing I would have no control of what would eventually befall upon me.

I used to sit on the park bench watching little girls with braided ponytails and bows in their hair go by with their families. Holding on to their parents’ hands, being carried, being loved, and always wishing I was someone else; someone pretty, someone happy, someone smarter, someone worthy, any one of these lucky little girls in the park who belonged to a family, who belonged somewhere.

Unfortunately in the world of the neglected, the unseen, the unwanted, little girls become big girls fairly quickly, and as I got older I’d always hear how mature I was for my years; it would take many many years before I could even begin to comprehend such a statement.

The resentment one carries in the world of the neglected turns from bitterness to betrayal, to deceit, to crime, and even murder at times. When you feel nothing; when you have lost yourself in the process of losing yourself, you lose all inhibitions, all constraints and are capable of committing the most heinous of crimes without giving it a second thought. When your state of mind is lost, and is not for living but for existing, you find yourself capable of anything. And when I say anything that is precisely what I mean.

As you get older and are able to hide, no, to run away from those who claimed they have raised you, you find imagination is the one place where you can hide, not just from the world but from yourself as well. I used to hide a lot in the house I was raised in. I hid in a broom closet mostly which smelled of the mildewed wet mop and which was covered in cobwebs and dirty shoes, but for me it was my paradise; a sanctuary away from the four walls which oppressed and bounded my freedom of thought, my freedom of acknowledgment, my freedom of existence. I would sit and envision ways of killing all of those in my house. I hated the way they moved, the way they walked, the way they spoke, the way they chewed, the way they smelled and even the way their clothes used to stick to their bodies as though all the static in the world was sucked in by their imperfections. Everything around them grew stagnant, everything including life itself.

No one can envision any of this unless they too have grown up as a nonexistent entity, an invisible child loved and acknowledged by no one. I’m sure that all you can think of right now is that I’m the crazy one, that I’m the one who should be locked up, that I’m the one in need of help. But you’d be wrong, you would be wrong on so many levels. Because the hatred and the weight of a loveless and hateful environment eventually turns and teaches you how to defend yourself; you see we humans must have companionship, love, understanding, someone to look up to, someone to inspire us. Without it you may grow up as insanely sane as I am, and not socially acceptable as I had always wanted to be.

So I grew up bitter, empty, devoid of feelings, invisible and able to hide in plain sight. I was 16 when I left home and I doubt anyone had even noticed my absence. I rented an apartment in the worst part of town when I escaped. A one bedroom with the shower and bathroom right next to the kitchen; it cost $280.00 a month and included water and electricity. I blended into the horde, although I may have been the only white person in the neighborhood. Nevertheless I had decided to go to school at night and learn how to become a Crime Scene Cleaner. I had planned my life and how to avenge my nonexistence in the world when I’d spent the time hiding in the broom closet. I had plenty of experience being the slave and the maid to a house full of strangers. I excelled in cleaning which meant nothing; for no matter how good a job I performed I went unnoticed. So I cleaned floors at a local restaurant and washed dishes during the day and went to school at night. And having that experience gave me the confidence to blend in at school.

As easy as this dream of mine sounded initially, it wasn’t at all. The courses would last 2 years and entailed much more than using a mop to clean up. Psychology and profiling were necessary components of this course, which ironically enabled my scheming for murder to become easier and perfected. At the end of the course I was a certified cleaner. Not the kind of cleaner who carried a mop and a broom, but the kind with disinfectant and a biohazard suit. I cleaned the bodily fluids and splattered brains off the walls after someone was brave enough to kill himself; I was a Crime Scene Cleaner who would envy and fantasize about what went through this persons’ mind to give him the courage to take a 22 caliber and stick it in his mouth, or the balls to go up to the top floor of a building and jump off of it. You see I was a coward. I wanted nothing to do with life, only the peacefulness of death. But I never had the guts to end it all, only suffer through it. I kept telling myself there was a reason I had to go through shit, I had to suffer in order to appreciate when life would turn around for me and become the gift it should have been all along. So I learned how to be the invisible entity in such crime scenes. No one saw me; no one knew who cleaned up the mess and no one cared as long as the mess was cleaned up. I felt at home. I felt as I had felt my entire life; invisible. For me it was a place of belonging, and yet I was inconspicuous and invisible as I had always been.

I remained a cleaner long enough to learn what was sought by the professionals after a homicide, a suicide, an accident, or a tragedy. I became proficient in death and the reasoning behind it. I knew I could kill and get away with it with my eyes shut. And the truth of the matter was that seeing mutilated bodies and horrific suffering calmed my nerves and made me feel at ease. You might think I’m crazy, you might think I’m sick, but you would be wrong on all counts. You cannot judge another human being unless you have walked in his shoes for at least one day. So for those of you already passing judgement on someone like me before I have taken any lives, shame on you I say, shame on you. For those who grew up in suburbia, educated, acknowledged and loved, you couldn’t begin to fathom what it was like for me to stay alive, and not want to kill myself or someone else more often than not. You can reach rock bottom only so many times before you either call it quits, go numb or fight back; I’ve already gone numb, I’ve already called it quits more times than I can count. Now was time for payback, now was the time to fight back. All the enablers in my life who made me what I am today must pay the price, the price with their lives. They stole my childhood; they stole me from myself and everyone else on the planet. And I’ve been holding on learning how the invisible can kill in plain sight and leave all the right traces of suicide instead of homicide. I was convinced I could kill without failure and never ever have anyone give me a second look. All the emotions or lack of emotions which I had endured my entire life were now going to paint a canvas in blood; the blood of 11 insignificant entities classified as human being, classified as members of my family.

I used to sit down in my apartment every night after school planning and scheming on whom would die first and how. I began to enjoy the art of deceit, the art of murder; the facade behind the crime I knew no one would ever be able to decipher. I considered myself a pro, strong and free from my oppressors.

And my first step in assimilating with society, with the norm, was a makeover. Having looked more like a washed-out mouse with glasses most of my life I had decided to glamorize myself. Perhaps a mouse wearing glasses with her hair in a bun could blend in more easily with the scenery and become invisible. The likelihood of a beauty killing another is less likely than that of an ugly mouse. So I went to the hairdresser, the makeup artist, the most glamorous clothing store in town. I looked at the trends, the patterns, the designs, the material; and went to the nearest fabric store to purchase material and a sewing machine. I couldn’t look like a million bucks and wear the clothes of a pauper. So I began my transformation; a transformation from invisible to profound. I was a brunet turned blonde, subdued to a bombshell. There are times in life where being invisible serves its purpose, and yet there are times where you must be seen in order to be invisible and blend in with the scenery. I needed to be proficient in both. So for the first time in my life I wore makeup, I wore lipstick, I wore eye shadow and I wore stockings and high heels. I looked like a million bucks and had to go out into the world and flaunt my newly acquired persona. Would I be seen, or would I remain the invisible nobody I had always been?

I’d decided to try out the bar, the one across town where no one could find out who I was or what I was. It would take 5 minutes after my arrival to the bar that a swarm of men would surround me. No one has ever paid attention to me. I had never truly been with a man, I had never conversed with a man, at least not on the same level and I had never been acknowledged as an entity by a man before. Ironically, one of the men who drifted towards me and one of the first ones to speak with me was in fact my teacher from the Crime Scene School. He had stared at me for over 2 years and didn’t recognize me at all. He was arrogant and not at all the way he had portrayed himself at school.

I knew nothing about men, nothing aside from what I was taught by the teacher standing before me.

I knew all men were pigs, I knew all men craved and desired one thing in life, and I knew most men cared about nothing else. I did say most men. Only tonight I would learn one more thing about men; that they were callous as well. It was a day and a night of firsts for me, new clothes, new face, new personality, new experiences, and a night, no, not a night, an hour in a Hotel room across the street from the bar I was in; an hour of ungratifying sexual encounter with a man who turned out to be a piece of shit like the rest of them, a night of my first kill. So as it turned out my teacher taught me much much more than profiling and cleaning. He taught me how to read a man before I allowed him to screw me over. And he taught me that the easiest way to kill a man is after he was sexually satisfied, but more importantly physically depleted. It was almost too easy to take the icepick from the freezer outside and stick it right up his nose and into his brain. I hardly thought about what I was doing, I just did. He didn’t move, he didn’t moan, he did nothing but die quietly. The icepick was cold, so it took a few moments before the coldness would subside and his eyes would fill up with blood before it gushed out; without giving it a second thought, I reapplied my lipstick just before I exited the Hotel room. Disappointed, I thought I would feel more satisfaction when I had my first kill. I thought I would feel lighter, relieved, knowing I alone rid the planet of one more scum. But I felt nothing, I felt no gratification whatsoever. It was reminiscent of having one potato chip and needing more to satisfy my hunger. I hailed a Taxi and went back home for the night. I felt nothing especially no remorse, the one thing I had prepared myself to deal with after I would kill my first family member. But I felt nothing aside from being tired. I smiled shortly before I fell asleep thinking I was 19 and a murderer. I hadn’t imagined it that way at all. But the mere fact that I was no longer innocent in any definition of the word thrilled me beyond compare.

I went to work the next morning wearing a wig. After all a cleaner is invisible, and a brunet with glasses and a bun blends into the fecal matter left behind by the last suicide or the last homicide. And as luck would have it, I was the one privileged enough to be contacted to clean the remains of my teacher who was murdered by a professional hit last night. That was how the news reported his death. I pretended to be shocked and horrified when I discovered it was my teacher who was the victim, and was even asked by the police if I would rather not be involved in this particular case having been close to the victim. But I wiped away the tears and made the pretense that I could go on with my job. I cleaned away any evidence which may have been left behind by a woman, and prepared the room for the next victim; I mean the next guest. My teacher was taken away and buried by the school where he taught the science of cleaning up after a crime scene; he had no one else on the planet to take care of the one thing we could never take care of ourselves.

Things remained quiet for a while. I laid low waiting and planning my next move. I went home quietly every day and refrained from visiting the bar at the end of town. I stayed in my brunet persona for a while; just so as to blend into the scenery. It was a Friday when my life would take another turn. I came home as I normally do at around 7.30pm and found a classic cream colored Cadillac parked in front of the building. Not an unusual sight because of the type of people who frequented the area. What was unusual was the person standing in front of the car. A clean, well-dressed man was leaning against the car as though he was waiting for someone. He nodded his head as I passed him by and entered my urine saturated smelly building with the broken security door ajar. I tried to make as little eye contact as I could to make it back home; where all I owned was the bed I slept on. There was nothing worthy of stealing, I had no television, no refrigerator, no computer, I had nothing, which was exactly what I was accustomed to having. On Saturday morning as I exited my building on my way to work the Caddy was still there, and the well-dressed man was in the car waiting for me it seems. Hi he yelled out of the car before he exited it to stand before me. Hi he said again may I give you a lift to work? I had no idea who this man was and what he wanted from me. So I nodded my head as I continued to walk passed him. But he began to follow me on foot and continued to try to talk to me. Reluctantly I stopped, turned around and asked what is it that you want of me? He thought about it for a second and replied I just want to get to know you. Why? I questioned. Because I’ve been watching you for a while now, and you seem like a person with a story, a story I’m fairly confident I’m interested in. I stood there in broad daylight taking in the scent of his cologne in the air. I couldn’t fathom why someone like him would be interested in someone like me, but I was intrigued. So I agreed to meet him back here tonight in front of the building at 8pm.

I went to work and all I could think about was the ulterior motive a man such as he would have in wanting to take me out. I was always suspicious of everyone. When you grow up being told you’re shit, worthless, ugly, and that you will never be wanted by anyone, it sinks in to your very core.

I thought about becoming the blonde for the date tonight. I thought I could change my persona to a woman who was attractive, desired and justifiably wanted by men. But I knew if I had changed then the truth behind this need to take me on a date would never be revealed. So I came home, showered off the stench of death and made myself as presentable as someone like me could be. I put on some lipstick, and even used one spray of perfume to enhance the experience; not sure if his or mine just yet. I placed a small dagger in my purse, exited my apartment and went downstairs.

It was precisely 8pm when I arrived in front of the apartment building to find my date in his cream Caddy waiting for me. He had a red rose in his hand which he handed to me as I entered his car. The car was clean, aside from some used black latex gloves thrown in the backseat, and a box of the same latex gloves lying on the floor behind his chair. I wondered about those gloves, but never having been on a date before I refrained from asking why he needed them. Had I known their purpose at the time, things would have been different. I’m Mark he said as he began to drive off. I’m Diane I replied nice to meet you. He didn’t say too much on the way to the downtown restaurant, but when we arrived and were seated down his need for sharing became evident. I sat there and listened to him, assessing his body language and trying out my profiling capabilities.