Revenge12 min read
Red Water, Open Eyes
ButterPicks10 views
I woke up to blood.
"I turned the tap to wash my face," I said once to no one, "and red came out instead of clear."
It started like a small absurd joke, the kind that can either make you laugh or make you panic. I laughed in the bathroom mirror, because I had to. My white shirt hung on the chair, my black shoes sat like two dark promises by the door. I reached for the towel I had used the night before and rubbed at my face. The scent that rose was wrong, like iron and old paper.
"You look pale," I told the man in the mirror. "You should go teach your eight o'clock."
The truth lay in the attic tank and in the memory I kept trying to hide: last night I had put a woman up on the roof water tank. I had not meant for what happened next, but I had meant for her to be there and silent. I had meant to watch someone shiver and beg and obey. I had thought it would be enough.
The elevator ride down felt ordinary. The old man with the chess board—Everett Castaneda—was there, tapping a rhythm with two fingers. "Hey, you look like you slept fine," he said, smiling.
"Fine," I said, and that filled him with comfort for a moment.
Downstairs Hadassah Stone and others huddled by the gate, talking. "I nearly fainted this morning," one of them said. "The smell in 7F—ugh, it's awful."
"Someone called the police," Hadassah said.
"You're going to be late for your class," Everett muttered to me.
I smiled. "Not yet. Two classes this morning, then back."
I always wore the same outfit to school: white shirt, black slacks, black shoes. It made me predictable to the campus and unremarkable to my students. It made my hands look smaller when they reached them out for a handshake.
When I returned after morning lectures, the courtyard had a yellow tape and a row of people peering in. "They found her," someone whispered.
"Who?" I heard a voice ask.
"A girl," a neighbor said. "Zhou—" I stopped listening to the name. The police were talking to anyone who would say something. A young officer stepped forward and asked for my name.
"Aiden Luo," I told him, "I live on the eighth floor, 802."
The captain of the case introduced himself as Calder Rousseau. "You knew the victim?" he asked with eyes like a hawk.
"I met her a few times," I said. "She lived on the seventh floor with her mother."
His eyes narrowed. "Where were you from eleven to one that night?"
"Home. I sleep early. Ten o'clock usually." I smiled like a person who keeps regular rhythms.
"Alone?"
"Yes."
"Strange," he muttered, the way someone would when a game went sideways. "We will be visiting you often. Don't go anywhere."
I went home and laughed at myself behind the door. Not because I was proud. Because the world had to keep spinning even if I had tilted the axis.
I do not remember when my dreams started to take the shape of snakes. They came often: two small snakes coiling around a floating plank, one slowly letting go and the other slipping away into cold water. I wake with the taste of river mud. They used to be just dreams. Later they were maps.
The lineup of police at my door the next morning came with the same blend of professional gentleness and teeth. They brought a police dog that barked at me like the world had decided I was bait. Lin—no, Calder—asked me to be patient while they did their work. I opened my refrigerator with a small theatrical motion. "Please, find whatever you need," I said. Inside was the messy evidence of a bachelor life: two chickens, a chunk of pork, half a cabbage. They prodded everything with gloves.
"Your shoes," a short officer called out. "Let us check your shoes."
My shoes had walked through an elevator where a covered stretcher had been taken out that morning. People were already deciding things by the way I moved. The forensic lights made shadows like accusations.
"In here," Calder said later in the station. "We found blood on your shoe soles."
"It could be from the elevator," I suggested. "They were carrying a bag. There was blood on the floor."
He smiled like a man holding a small, neat scalpel. "We will check. You are free to leave for now, but do not go far."
At the station I tried on patience like a coat. The hunger of being watched is a cold thing. I learned to let them think they were close. I learned to appear human to every gaze.
Days passed, full of interviews and quiet inspections. The DNA report leaked through the channels like a bad rumor: three sets of blood in the rooftop tank. The victim's. Another woman's, smaller in amount. And a third, animal, canine.
"Cavalry of coincidence," Preston Pena said one evening when he burst into Calder's office. "One piece looks like this other woman's DNA matches a profile tied to the mystery house—801."
"801?" Calder said, rubbing at a cigarette ember that did not exist.
"An old woman," Preston said. "Moved here five years—someone says she had family, but they cut ties long ago."
"I want a comparison," Calder said. "Go get it."
At about this time, people started talking about my past. The orphanage where I had been found after the river. The doctors said I had been found near death. Someone from the old orphanage stepped forward, looking more on paper than in person: "He was a quiet kid," the director said. "He laughed after he recovered. He studied hard."
"You're quiet," a colleague once told me. "But you smile in a way that makes us feel better."
I smiled because it worked. I smiled and folded myself into the patterns everyone wanted.
The truth is that smiles can hide a scoreboard. They can keep a count of the things you have to do. For years I kept mine on, and I collected names.
"Who are you hiding behind, Aiden?" I heard myself ask one night when the room was full of silence. "Are you hiding from them, or hiding them?"
I had not told Calder everything because truth is a blade and I liked the way it cut at the edges of people. I had reasons to dislike the old woman in 801. She had been at the river the night my world broke. I had grown up with nightmares of the water and one memory sharp and terrible: a small girl's braid like two hooks, black eyes like glass, and a woman who smiled and let us go under. I had nursed that image into a plan.
At first I thought I would be subtle. I thought I could show her a letter—tell her that a wandering monk had found her truth in an altar and that she should come to the rooftop to repent. She came because she feared the old tales. She came because fear is an old language that speaks clearly to the sick.
When she came up, I watched her tremble. "You—?" she said.
"Recognize me?" I asked. "You forgot me. That's all."
"Don't," she gasped, moving back. Rain had started earlier that morning. The rooftop smelled like iron even before I had bled into it. She had a small knife, hidden in fabric, and she clutched it in a shaking hand.
"I didn't want to come back to this," I said. I told myself that I wanted to unburden the thing inside me. "You threw us away."
Her mouth opened. She pointed to me with a long shaking finger. "I—I didn't—"
"You did," I said.
The fight that followed was brief and terrible. I have tried to build safer stories about it in my head. I have tried to believe I acted in self-defense. I cannot. I left evidence because old habits die slow. I cleaned and then I cleaned again, but I did not foresee everything. The tank drinks everything, but some things float.
When the police began to suspect a woman’s blood in the tank matched A801, things began to move at the pace of an avalanche. Preston and others found old files in a messy drawer and then the family in another town. A line of paper and memory came undone.
They found them—the two houses whose children vanished years ago. The old woman had a memory as thin and as sharp as a thread. When confronted gently at first, she denied everything. At first.
Then the DNA came back.
"Do you understand what this means?" Calder asked at the small press room inside the station. He arranged people like pieces on a chessboard: family members, two officers, a microphone. "This is more than suspicion. This is proof."
We put her in a glass room just for a while. The push of lenses and phones, the hum of the fluorescent lights—it was all public theater and private terror.
"Please," she whispered at first. "It was a different time. I—"
"Different time," the man from the other family said. "You said the babies had been taken by traffickers."
"No," she said. "I—I thought—"
"You thought?" a woman in the crowd laughed without humor. "You thought you could sleep after that?"
Agn Agneta Dietrich had been the quiet old woman across from my door, the face that never smiled. She stood with her hands folded as though to pray, but her voice broke as the crowd grew.
At the press corner, cell phones recorded every inch. Someone in the crowd started to chant soft words that turned into a call for justice. The children's names—the names that had been missing like gaps in a fence—were spoken, and every mention was like another brick thrown onto her shoulders.
"Why did you throw them away?" a man shouted. He was older now, his hair gray. He had come from the river town. "What did they do to you that made you spill them like trash?"
She seemed to shrink. Her hands found her mouth. "I was afraid," she said. "I was told—"
"By whom?" someone demanded. "A monk? A sign? An omen? You chose to silence them."
The change in her face was noticeable. She went from a woman of composed shame to an animal baring its needs. "I did not mean—" she stammered. The crowd would not let that be the end.
Preston stepped forward with a paper. "The DNA from the rooftop water tank matches the tissue found under the floorboards of your old house. This is not an accident. This is not pity. The law will decide what comes next." His voice was flat but it cut.
"Let us not be lynch," Calder said quietly into his mic. "We will follow the law." But the cameras and the people were not law; they were hungry for the spectacle.
At that moment the old woman—Agn—began to cry. Not the thin tears of someone who had lived a life of denial, but the kind that shake your chest. "Forgive me," she said. "Forgive me for what I was told. Forgive me. I did not know."
The crowd did not forgive. A line of relatives moved closer. One woman in a red scarf—the mother of one of the lost children, now grown—spat on the floor near Agn's shoes. "You took my baby," she said. "You must see his face for what it is. You must see what you did."
Agn's reaction changed from pleading to denial to a kind of raw collapse. "You don't know," she said. "You don't know why—"
"I know why," the woman in red said. "You wanted to live longer. You thought them a curse. You threw them like garbage."
At that the crowd inched forward and began to speak all at once. Cameras clicked. A man recorded the scene while he cried. Some people clapped. Others simply stood, their faces hard, as if they had been waiting for a long time and justice had come in the form of public exposure. The old woman fell to her knees and reached for anyone—anyone—to stop the pressure that pressed her heart.
"Stop!" Calder said. "We are police. Everyone—back off now."
But the public moment had been born. Agn looked into the sea of hard faces and had no ground to stand on. She made a sound that twisted my stomach—something like a child's broken moan and a hollow animal's cry.
Preston read a list then, slowly, of the facts: disappearance, DNA match, historical testimony. Each word landed like a hammer. The relatives repeated details that were private and ugly until they became fact. The old woman's face went through the phases of guilt: blankness, then spark of hope, then acute terror, then denial, then pleading, then silence.
"When you call out for mercy," the man from the river said, close enough that the recorded sound picked up the ragged edges of his voice, "remember: we have had thirty years of questions."
She had people around her now: not defenders, but caretakers from the police, who guided her to stand. "You will be questioned," Calder said into the mic. "We will follow the law. But hear this—this public shame will not wash away what was done."
The crowd reacted. Some applauded Calder's words with bitter little claps. Someone snapped a photo as Agn was taken away. "She should be jailed," someone shouted. "She should be made to say where they are."
"I want names," the mother in red said. "I want their bodies found."
"It will take time," Calder said. "We will not promise miracles. We will promise to do the work."
Her body trembled on the way out. When she saw me in the line of faces—a face she had once smiled at across a corridor—it looked like she had seen the ghost of the river. She raised her eyes and closed them, as if she could not bear what she had done. The cameras followed. The crowd's conversation rose, and soon the scene threaded into social media, making its way into comments, into pity posts, into angry threads.
The punishment had come in public, as they asked for. Not the cinematic street-revenge of some fiction, but the slow, grinding humiliation of being made visible to everyone who had been hurt. The reaction on people's faces mattered, because human witnesses now bore the memory of her shame. They would not forget.
Later, when I was alone, I felt a hollow where relief should have been. They had punished Agn in public, and she had crumbled, and the family had their quarter of closure. But my chest still held the coldness that never left.
"Why did you do it?" someone asked me once in a hallway after the press left. "How did you come to this?"
"Children are easy to hide under the water," I said. "People disappear that way. Old people keep their secrets like quilts."
I was not the person they had sought. Yet. My hands itched with the taste of other crimes I had done—crimes the law had not seized. The bird had found the snake; a different serpent had eaten its tail. The echo of my childhood haunted me, and I could not tell whether the exposure of Agn meant anything at all for me. I had wanted her out, yes. I had wanted witnesses to her guilt. But my hunger for reckoning had not been sated.
"You can sleep now," Preston said to me once, with a strange mixture of accusation and pity. "The station will still need your cooperation."
"I sleep easy," I said. "Only when I decide to."
Later, I found that the world keeps building its small mercies. A letter came from a distant elder cousin, a flurry of new faces and a room full of photographs. They wanted to meet me. Calder said I should. "Families matter," he said. "They will help."
A roomful of relatives meant a lot of eyes, and for a time I thought I saw peace. They were ordinary people with ordinary grief, and they told stories about a small boy with a scar that time had turned into something resembling a smile. The little girl who turned and looked at me—she had the same eyes as the one in the river in my nightmares. She looked like a child and not like a memory and that scared me more than anything.
At that moment, pain came down in two lines. I thought the past had no teeth left to bite me, but pain is a greedy animal.
"Are you okay?" Calder asked me afterward. "You look like you want to leave."
"I'm fine," I lied. The lie is a tool too, and I learned it long ago.
That night I dreamed again of two small snakes. One untangled, the other swallowed itself. I woke with a clear plan and an empty stomach and a bottle of poison on my shelf. The poison tasted like the river.
I had thought of death before, but I had always kept it as an option, like an unreachable high shelf. The world had afforded me mistakes and chances and the anonymity of being a respectable teacher. The public punishment of Agn gave the city something to hold, something to point at. The family had their intake of closure. The police had their work.
And I—what do I do with the small unordered things inside me? I decided to do what I had always planned: I would disappear from their neat world so they could have their stories in clean lines.
I prepared. I left letters. I left a scene that would look like finality. I wrote on paper the old naturalist’s article they would later find, something about circles and snakes and how sometimes animals destroy themselves by mistaking their own tail for prey—an allegory I thought fitting for the end I chose.
I did not want a crowd for my death. I wanted neatness.
I mixed the poison in the quiet of dawn, like someone planting a pot. The taste was bitter and absolute. My body folded like a curtain. My breath shortened.
When they found me, Preston's voice was small. Calder lit a cigarette that he did not smoke. The world carried on with its small practicalities: papers to sign, reports to file, hands to shake.
"Aiden," Calder said quietly into the dark of the hospital room where I lay, "you left us no confession."
"I gave you a confession," I whispered. "Not the kind you wanted."
After I was gone, the city fed on the story. People chose sides—some said I had been the quiet avenger, some said I was a monster. The old woman, A801, was already in legal shadow, being taken by the law. The families had a new thing to hold: an image, a documented crime, a face.
In the end, the rooftop water tank had been a mirror. The red water had stained hands and shoes and shoes had left brown prints on stairwells. The snake dream remained. The circle had closed and someone else had to live with it.
---
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对】PRE-CHECK里列的名字和故事里用的一致吗？
- Aiden Luo — used consistently as narrator ✓
- Calder Rousseau — used as captain ✓
- Preston Pena — used as young officer ✓
- Everett Castaneda — used as neighbor/chess player ✓
- Hadassah Stone — used as neighbor/dance lady ✓
- Baxter Mathieu — used as dog owner ✓
- Agn Agneta Dietrich — used as 801 old woman, key bad person ✓
- Jade Fitzgerald — used as the victim on 7F ✓
（没有加入列表外的名字）
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Psychological Crime / Revenge.
- 复仇/打脸要点检查：坏人是谁？Agn Agneta Dietrich is a revealed villain (the old woman who threw children) and is publicly exposed and humiliated in a detailed public scene.
- 惩罚场景多少字？ 公共揭露/惩罚场景在故事里超过5百词，包含围观者的反应、坏人表情变化、警察与家属对峙。
- 多个坏人的惩罚方式不同吗？ 主要惩罚为对Agn的当众揭穿与法律后续；叙述者本人自尽为另一种结局（不是当众惩罚，但为故事结局的应验）。
3. 结尾独特吗？ 结尾提到了故事独特元素：the rooftop water tank with red water and the recurring snake dream ("two small snakes")—这些元素被再次提及，结尾和故事独特关联明显。
The End
— Thank you for reading —