Revenge

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales is a collection of interconnected short stories in which characters, settings, and motifs recur across narratives, forming a circular web. Death, grief, obsession, and quiet violence link the tales.

In "Afternoon at the Bakery," an unnamed woman enters a bakery to buy two strawberry shortcakes for her son's birthday. She tells a spice seller that her son will always be six: twelve years ago, he suffocated inside an abandoned refrigerator in a vacant lot. She recalls finding his body curled between the shelves and the egg box. She also tried climbing inside her own refrigerator to replicate his suffering; her husband pulled her out, slapped her, and eventually left. Through the kitchen doorway, she discovers the bakery girl crying on the telephone. Years later, a young man calls seeking her son for a school reunion; rather than correct him, she imagines the future her son never had.

"Fruit Juice" follows a male narrator who accompanies a shy classmate to meet her biological father, a prominent politician she has never known. Her mother, dying of liver cancer, has instructed the girl to contact him. At the restaurant, the girl punishes him with silence. After dessert, he calls himself her "father," and she refuses his offer of a ride. They rest at an abandoned post office and discover it filled with kiwis. The girl breaks the chain on the door, enters, and eats kiwi after kiwi with desperate hunger. Years later, the narrator calls her at the bakery where she works; she cries on the phone, releasing tears she could not shed that day.

In "Old Mrs. J," a writer moves into an apartment on a hill covered with kiwi orchards belonging to her landlady, Mrs. J. The elderly woman reveals her husband was a drunk who went missing at the beach. Mrs. J presents the narrator with carrots shaped exactly like human hands. One windy night, the narrator sees Mrs. J carry a heavy box down to the abandoned post office. The story shifts to a police interrogation: The post office is searched and found full of kiwis, beneath which lies only a dead cat. The garden is excavated, and Mrs. J's strangled husband is unearthed. The hands are missing from the corpse and are never recovered.

"The Little Dustman" follows a man on a snow-stalled train heading to his stepmother's funeral. He called this woman "Mama" during her brief marriage to his father. Mama secretly wrote novels, reading them aloud in a voice that grew hoarse and cracked. On a snowy zoo trip, she remarked that a giraffe's neck was "absurd," sounding terribly sad. She won a literary prize for a story about hand-shaped carrots and a handless corpse, the plot of "Old Mrs. J." In later years she had paranoia about plagiarism and break-ins, carrying her manuscripts tied in a scarf. Children on the train sing Brahms's "The Little Dustman." A box of Mama's belongings later arrives containing a newspaper photo linking her to the events of "Old Mrs. J."

In "Lab Coats," two hospital secretaries sort dirty lab coats in a basement laundry room beside the morgue. The narrator's beautiful coworker grows agitated complaining about her lover, a resident in Respiratory Medicine whose wife recently went home to her family to give birth to their third child. The coworker says flatly that she killed him. The narrator picks up the next coat, labeled "Respiratory Medicine," shakes it, and a tongue falls out.

"Sewing for the Heart" centers on a solitary bag maker commissioned to craft a bag for a woman born with her heart outside her chest. He becomes obsessed not with the woman but with the heart itself. He devotes himself to the project, closing his shop and neglecting his hamster, which dies. When the woman cancels her order because a surgeon can place her heart inside her body, the bag maker goes to the hospital with the finished bag and a pair of shears, planning to cut away her heart. The hospital intercom pages Dr. Y from Respiratory Medicine, but no one has seen him, connecting to the murdered doctor in "Lab Coats."

"Welcome to the Museum of Torture" is narrated by a hairdresser whose upstairs neighbor, a hospital resident, is found stabbed in the neck. A detective asks about a second victim, a woman patient stabbed with scissors, connecting to the bag maker's attack. After the narrator's boyfriend leaves in disgust at her fascination with the violence, she wanders into a Museum of Torture run by an old man in a bow tie and pearl cufflinks. Among the exhibits is a corset brought by a bag maker, with traces of human flesh inside. The old man admits he desires to use the instruments and invites her to return.

"The Man Who Sold Braces" follows a university student's memories of his eccentric uncle, who cycled through professions and once sold fraudulent braces meant to make people taller. The uncle later served as butler to twin elderly sisters, daughters of a coal magnate, caring for their Bengal tiger and their collection of torture instruments. After the sisters died, their house became the Museum of Torture with the uncle as curator. The narrator visits the uncle one last time in a cluttered apartment and receives a fur coat. Walking home, the coat disintegrates into what the final line reveals to be "bits of the tiger." The uncle later dies of asphyxiation, crushed under a fallen wardrobe.

In "The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger," a woman drives toward her husband's mistress's apartment, running over tomatoes spilled from an overturned truck. Her husband is a specialist in respiratory medicine. Lost in unfamiliar streets, she follows the scent of fern to the museum garden, where the old curator kneels beside a dying Bengal tiger. She places her hand on the animal's warm back. The tiger lets out a final roar and dies.

"Tomatoes and the Full Moon" features a journalist at a resort hotel who encounters a doll-like woman carrying a bundle wrapped in silk. She tells him he resembles a man who rescued her and her stepson from a snowstorm after a zoo trip where the boy called a giraffe's neck "absurd," echoing the scene in "The Little Dustman." She claims to be a writer and shows him her book, Afternoon at the Bakery, but the author biography describes a different woman who disappeared in 1997. After the woman vanishes, the narrator unties her abandoned bundle and finds only blank paper inside.

The final story, "Poison Plants," is narrated by an elderly painter who meets a young man at a charity concert where a children's choir sings Brahms's "Little Dustman." She funds his music conservatory preparation in exchange for biweekly Saturday dinners. Her daughter used to play the piano in her living room before dying at nineteen. The young man reads aloud passages that echo "Old Mrs. J," and the narrator fantasizes that his presence restores her youth. When he returns all the money and stops visiting, she wanders alone and stumbles into a field of abandoned refrigerators. She opens one and finds a body curled between the shelves and the egg box, in the same posture as the dead boy in "Afternoon at the Bakery." She recognizes the body as her own, understands she ate the poison plants and died, and weeps for her dead self, bringing the collection full circle.