He had found a new target. Like an obsessed, rabid cur, he pounced - snapping at her heels and tearing at her character. His bite promised nothing but infection. Once he got a grip on her name, he would ravage it beyond recognition.

Por Obra de Juan Manuel Blanes (1830-1901) - Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Dominio público, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3813733

She, on her part, had done nothing to warrant such attacks; she was merely minding her own business while maintaining a boundary. She had known about his reputation and extracurricular activities from the start and had no interest in him at all.

She was, like many others, simply unfortunate enough to have been shackled to this clod as a former schoolmate.

She had only been attempting to be civil, strategically cautious, lest she be mistaken as another one of his statistics.

He was operating under the delusion that these preys should be eternally grateful for his interest and should embrace his advances: single women should be fair game.

The depths of his nastiness didn't surface until a friend - a man who'd seen enough - finally broke his silence. It wasn't even mere gossip. It was a smear campaign. Plain and simple.

He had painted her with his dirty brush as a woman of loose morals and indiscriminate appetites - sullying her reputation and rendering her repulsive to any potential suitors. Vile aspersions, cast with vile intent.

Looking back, those earlier gibes about her finances hit differently. They were loaded with insinuation. He was hinting that her income was nothing but the spoils of vice, and that a woman like her had no real need for a ledger.

To his twisted mind, she had inflicted this hostility upon herself with her refusal to reply to his late-night missives, paying no heed to his attention. she was an insolent ingrate who didn't know her own station.

She became an effigy, a totem for his unbridled vitriol. He sought to besmirch her, dragging her through metaphorical mud just to watch her lose her balance as he sullied her reputation, piling on an amount of defamation that was as unwarranted as it was unhinged.

It was all projection, born of an abyssal nullity. Perhaps someone else knew why he behaved the way he did, but most didn't.

One might almost be tempted to imagine a tragedy behind it all - that maybe his mother was a sex worker who fell for a patron in some Romeo and Juliet fever dream, only to be abandoned the moment status and duty got in the way. A sad love story between a noble and a sex worker.

She was forced to give birth to him in the filth of a brothel. You could weave a tale of them struggling in the gutter, with a collective of kind-hearted sex workers taking turns to raise him, only for his mother to succumb to yellow fever - too desperate to stop working even as the infection ravaged her, pining for her lost lover, naturally - and meet her end in the dark basement.

You could say all of that, as if such a narrative could offer any absolution for his vileness.

Most people cling to the hope that such cruelty must stem from some tearjerking, tragic backstory. It is a comforting thought, that all monsters must be forged in fire. They want to believe in a reason, a tragic arc that explains the rot.

But the truth is far less poetic.

That kind of history requires a level of grit he never possessed. The reality was far more mundane: he was born with a silver spoon, spoiled by a father who looked the other way and raised by a mother who served as the undisputed Chairwoman Laureate of the town's gossip.

Perhaps someone out there would look for an excuse for him in his adulthood - assuming he was scorned or hurt by women along the way - but that gives him far too much credit.

He had been a jerk since childhood; clearly, he wasn't hardened by tragedy. He was simply a hardened monster.

In short, he was bitter. He was, in truth, a creature of a most wretched and hollow constitution. He ultimately proved that he didn't measure up to any standard; it was nothing more than the hollow, wretched pettiness of the smallest man.

Truth will come to light; his malignancy cannot be hid long.

Concurso de Arte y Escritura #186 y Ganadores de la Edición #185/ Art and Writing Contest #186 y winners de la Edición #185

Inviting @dreeyor to write his story.

©Britt H.

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