Revenge13 min read
Borrowed Land: A Writer's Appetite
ButterPicks17 views
I am Leanna Corbett. People know me by the way I write love that hurts and heals; they know me by the pale photos and the quiet interviews. I am the kind of writer whose life reads like a set piece—always measured, always collected. I have made a career of being a vessel: I take other people's pain, braid it into sentences, and sell the ache back to readers. That was my art and my armor.
"People call you cold," Quinn Patterson said once at a café, stirring his coffee like it was a medical exam. "They say you don't actually love anyone."
"I collect experiences," I told him, smiling like someone revealing a harmless hobby. "Collecting isn't the same as hurting."
"Isn't it?" Quinn's eyes sharpened. "Are you sure?"
He was a psychologist—exactly the sort of man who sits on the edge of your soul and catalogues the cracks. He still remembers some of my old lines by heart. He came to my signing that night because he couldn't help himself. He was the only man who had ever been angry enough to try to break my script.
"Leanna Corbett!" he shouted from the aisle, voice loud and ragged. "You used me. You used my work and my feelings."
The room is always louder than I expect when I am the center of it. Fans hissed, televisions flashed, security moved like a single organism. Quinn's hand flicked a gaze of accusation at me; then he lunged—badly measured—and a guard caught him by the shoulder. "You're a liar," he spat. "You make people feel because you can't."
I didn't flinch. My hand still held pens, and I kept signing like ink could varnish over guilt.
Then someone else moved through the crowd—a man in a baseball cap, a bore of calm in the storm. He looked like he'd been carved from shadow and ash. Half his face bore a map of scars, glossy and solemn. His right leg ended in a plain prosthetic. He carried himself with a kind of careful dignity that made him almost impossible to look away from.
I remember thinking, in a flash of pure opportunism, "He's perfect."
"He was trying to save me," Quinn kept shouting, as if trying to make me flinch. "You built a whole book with my wounds."
But the new man—Glen Felix—had already stepped between the guard and Quinn. He bent, hands fast and steady, and pressed Quinn down with a force that screamed trained muscle.
"You're hurt," Glen said quietly to me when the noise became background static. "Are you okay? You seem..." he glanced at the book in my hands, "familiar."
"Familiar?" I repeated, amused. I signed his copy on impulse. "To whom?"
"Glen," he said. "Glen Felix."
There is a curiosity that visits me like a moth when I meet something broken in exactly the right way. Half the rules of my life are to use what I see. "Could you sign this, Glen? 'To Camille,' if you don't mind."
He looked surprised. "Camille?"
"Yes," I lied. "She was a reader. She... she used to come to signings."
He held the book with hands that trembled almost imperceptibly. "Camille died," he said, so low I had to lean in. "She was my... my sister."
I watched his face carefully. Burn scars, a stiff prosthetic; hands that had done work you could not name. My mind moved faster than my pity. People like him are the ones readers crave in novels—dangerous in the precise way that draws heat. He became, in one breath, a character and then an entire plot.
"Would you come to the memorial?" I asked impulsively. "Tonight? I want to—" I paused and invented the rest. "I want to honor her."
His eyes filled, instantly. "They were my family," he said. "She was a little girl—Camille Bush. I can't... I couldn't get here when she—"
I had him. "Let me help. Let me do it properly. Let me arrange a ceremony."
Later, when we were in his car and he had told me a few clipped story fragments—an adoption, old threats, a life that moved like an echo—I watched him for motive and plot and rhythm. He belonged to the edge, to a world my readers could not stop reading about.
That's how it began: I decided to turn him into a story. I decided to be someone who loved broken things.
"Why do you want to do this?" he asked once as we stood inside the cemetery, wind pushing at us like a critic. "Why help a stranger's funeral?"
"I like to think it's not for nothing," I said. "It will mean something."
"It will mean to me." His voice shredded. "Camille was the only one who didn't startle away when she saw me. She thought I was handsome."
"You are," I said matter-of-factly. "You are, Glen."
The line between lying and telling became a path I walked across quickly. I made his space my story-lab. I smashed a few porcelain bowls at home until every vase and cup had a missing corner. I hung a print in my living room of a Venus with a broken arm. I read and re-read documentaries about paraphilias until my throat cramped. I made a list of the words my new persona would use—words that would make him trust me, words that would press his old wounds into narrative gold.
I learned his habits without seeming to. I learned his fear of old phones with tinny ringtones, and his way of flipping a page when someone mentioned fire. I learned he had been an undercover for years; he didn't tell me this at first. He told me he worked quietly, received checks quietly, and that sometimes he slept with his clothes on. That was enough for me to stitch a character.
"Don't lie," Glen said one night while we drank lousy tea on my couch. "Don't make up that you're the grieving mother. I won't pretend to be someone else."
"I'm not pretending," I told him. "I'm performing. It's the same."
He nuzzled a thin smile. "Performing is different."
"Not to readers," I said. "To readers it's always sincere."
I took him in like a season—fed him, watched his scars, held his hand when his prosthetic went wrong. I arranged the plumbing trick that would leave his apartment flooded so I could appear as a savior. I laughed at myself for how smoothly Quinn and the rest of my past peeled away into plot.
"You never answered me," Glen said late that night, voice flat. "Why would someone like you want me?"
"Because," I whispered, "I like what you are. You're not whole and that's beautiful to me."
He blinked, not understanding me and then not needing to. He was grateful, and gratitude is a hook.
I learned to say sweeter things. "You terrified me once," I murmured, pressing a hand to his stubbled jaw. "But not in a bad way."
"You're safe with me," he said, believing in me the way lonely people believe.
When I staged the cheap old Nokia ringtone loop in my bedroom and slashed my finger for real to make the scene convincing, I watched him break into panic. He shook like a man on a thin ledge. "Stop it," he begged. "Please."
"Shh." I kissed him hard, greedily. "I'm here."
He kissed me back, soft and broken, and I catalogued the way his hands trembled. It was better than a sentence on a page.
Over weeks, Glen moved in. He cooked. He brought small, practical presents, and he told me small truths between shouts of fear: an undercover job long ago, an adoption of a girl he'd named Camille, a firefight that had burned him and left him with a hatred of certain sounds and an allergy to red. I wrote it down like a field reporter. When we kissed, it felt like performance in the thick of a run.
"You know," I said once when he woke at night shivering, "I always thought someone would smash a signing and ruin my day."
"You don't seem fazed by threats," he said, watching me.
"I learned to be calm," I lied. "It sells better."
The affair of my making became a rumor and then a novel in progress. I told Charlize Ziegler, my editor: "This one will be raw. It's called Borrowed Land. It's about rescue and appetite."
"Be careful," Charlize said over the phone. "Readers will eat it if it's honest."
"I will be honest," I told her. "In my way."
Glen kept trusting me. He loved the parts of me he thought were fragile. He believed I had saved Camille; he believed I loved him for some mutual hurt we shared. He could not know the drafts on my laptop were already building a web that would eventually catch him.
Then one night everything weaved outward like an accident.
At a routine appointment in a public hospital Glen had to go in for a squeeze at the site of an old scar. I followed him, feigning a compulsive interest in medical atmospheres. There, crying across the corridor like a broken glass, was Quinn Patterson.
"Leanna," he said without greeting. "You used him."
"I didn't." I kept my voice steady. "Quinn, you are on the wrong stage."
He sneered. "She uses hurt for profit. She took his life and sold it."
Glen didn't respond at first. He had learned to not show. When the words reached him, something like a new air formed in his face—fear, then confusion, then the way stunned people leave rooms.
"Did you publish it?" he asked quietly, too quietly.
"I didn't publish," I lied. "I only gave excerpts to Charlize."
"Excerpts went online," Quinn said, voice cold. "You posted it without thinking. People are reading."
The seconds after that were made of detail: Glen's hands going slack, a phone in his hand blinking with messages he could not read. Quinn walked away, satisfied. He left the idea like a splinter.
"We have to move you," I told Glen. "We have to change places. They might... they might find you."
He nodded, brittle. "They will find me anyway. I am not the kind who hides."
Days later, the world took notice. The wrong eyes found the wrong man. Bitter, violent men whose business was blood saw a novel and recognized a face. They began to argue on forums; they speculated; they threatened. Someone posted a photo—a scrap of a registry, a place name. The hunt bent like a blade toward Glen.
"You wrote about my life," he said when I came back from an interview. "My past is not yours to sell."
"It is now," I said, a little too quickly. "That's the bargain of writing."
He pressed his forehead to mine, then took the call: a voice hoarse, urgent. "They think I'm alive," he said to me when he hung up. "They think I'm hiding."
I watched him go out into the cold to wait for a bus that he might never get on.
The night he came back, I didn't open the door. There were too many people down the block, too many cameras. He knocked and knocked; the old Nokia ringtone inside my memory sounded like a hammer to his skull. He pressed his ear to his chest and whispered to the door, "Leanna, I promised to come for New Year. Please open."
I heard the sound of someone in the building telling a neighbor not to worry, that a drunk man was homeless. I heard Hank Semyonov's band playing across the plaza, the drums like a countdown. I could have gone down. I stayed upstairs with the TV and a bottle and a script.
"I waited," his voice whispered through the wall. "I waited and you were not there."
I opened the door and found him: blood smeared across his coat like bad weather, his prosthetic catching on the threshold. He had been hurt somewhere a long way from here. He sat down on the top step like it was a throne and like the throne had thorns.
"Glen!" I caught him, my arms useless. "What happened?"
He tried to speak and could not. His breathing was a shallow machine, and someone had called an ambulance. The neighbors came out and gawked like beasts at a zoo. They said insensitive things. Someone took a video and posted it.
"Is she here?" Glen asked me when the neighbor's whispers blurred into a fever.
"Yes," I lied. "I'm here."
They took him away. He never walked through my front door again.
The autopsy was a stack of reports with clinical ink. Ulysses Bradford sat across from me in a small office that smelled of coffee and law. "He was hurt trying to come home," he said. "He pushed himself, Leanna. Too far."
"Is it my fault?" I asked, which was both rhetorical and not.
"There's blame to measure," Ulysses said. "We are going after the ring. You should be ready for testimony."
The police began to pick up threads the way I picked apart characters. Their arrests came in waves, violent and professional. Evidence piled up. In courtrooms and on the steps of courthouses the faces of those men were shown on televisions and in newspapers. People cheered when racks of weapons were hauled into view. People wanted names and punishment now.
But that was not yet the end.
Weeks later, Ulysses Bradford called me into a press hall with a glass wall and too many reporters. The room smelled like cold coffee and anticipatory triumph. I sat with a notebook but no pen. The public's appetite for justice is a show as much as a need; I had built careers upon both.
"Today," Ulysses began, "we present the arrest and detention of the trafficking cell responsible for the violence that resulted in the death of Glen Felix."
A projector fed a reel of photos: burned houses, battered cars, ash-swept fields. Then the men walked in—an ugly procession. I watched them from the side, the way you watch the end of a play you've written, wondering if you should applaud.
"These men," Ulysses said, "are charged with multiple counts: trafficking, kidnapping, torture, and murder."
A mic passed down the front, and one of the traffickers—broad shouldered, arrogant—stepped forward with a lawyer's insolence. He smiled at cameras as if he were starring in a mock trial. "You have no proof," he said. "We're patriots."
"Silence," Ulysses said, and the man's boldness cracked a little. Someone in the crowd murmured. A camera closed in on his face, and all at once the man was ordinary.
"How does it feel to be caught?" a reporter shouted.
The man laughed at first, a raw sound. "You think you can humiliate me on camera? I'll be fine. I always am."
"Your victims disagree," Ulysses said steadily. "Your family members disagree. The community disagrees. You will be answerable."
The laughter curdled into small noises: a squeak, a gulp. One by one, Ulysses presented evidence—phone records, shipping manifests, witness statements. He put photos of Glen on the screen and played a clip of the man knocking at my door on New Year's Eve, voice hoarse, pleading. The room went very quiet. I felt my own breath loud.
"He's dead," someone whispered.
One of the traffickers—bald, eyes like a trapped animal—got up, face rigid. "This is theater!" he barked. "You have nothing!"
Ulysses fixed him with a look that was not harsh so much as steady. "You were recorded. You threatened, you tortured, you offered bribes. We found your ledger. People cheered when you came into town. You said you were above the law."
"Not true!" he howled, vein popping. "You can't do this—"
A young woman in the crowd started clapping, slowly at first and then more loudly. "Shame!" she cried, and other voices joined. "Shame on you!" The sound multiplied. Cameras swung back and forth, catching faces and reactions. There were reporters taking notes, phones held up like little accusing eyes.
The traffickers' faces began to change—pride retreating, then panic, then a small squeezing of denial. The bald man spat words that were less and less sentence-shaped. He pointed at Ulysses. "You don't... you don't have the whole story."
"We have witnesses who will testify," Ulysses said. "We have names, we have ledgers. You will be prosecuted."
Then something happened that had not been scripted: one of the men started crying. At first it was a hiccup, then a wet noise from the back of the throat. His hands shook. "No," he said to the crowd, "we were just trying to survive."
"Survive by killing," a woman yelled. "Survive by bleeding us dry!"
The entire room leaned in. A boy from the suburbs that had no idea of blood yelled "Cowards!" Some clapped. Others took pictures with phones and sent them outward into the world. A woman who had once been held by these men stood, shoulders quivering, and pointed her phone at them. "Look at them," she said, and made a face like vinegar.
"Cameras, evidence," Ulysses said, pointing out of habit. "We will try them. The law will do what the law does."
One of the men collapsed into a chair, face white. "Don't!" he whispered. "Please, no—"
A reporter asked the inevitable stupid question: "Will this bring Glen back?"
There was no answer for that, and people murmured, grief and triumph entangled. Some cried. A young woman near the front held a badge up and said, "He didn't have to die."
"His death is on your hands," Charlize, my editor, said to me quietly later, when we stood at the edge of the mob. "All of us who touched him had a piece of complicity."
"You think that punishments can heal?" I asked, watching the men being led out in cuffs.
"No," she said softly. "But they can make the world less rot."
Outside, people pushed closer. Someone threw a shoe in the direction of a man as he was led away. He flinched, eyes wild. His reaction passed through stages: arrogance, surprise, denial, fear, and finally the flatness of a man reduced. People took pictures of him with their phones, the images already launching like small conscience missiles into the world. A teenage boy shouted "You monster!" and the trafficker looked as if he'd been slapped by history.
There were cheers. There were silent, broken faces. A cameraman kept filming, because the world wants to see the fall.
But witnessing someone's public undoing does not resuscitate the dead. It simply allows the living to align their moral compass and clap.
I left before the crowd thinned. The city had an exhausted expression, as if it had been scolded into better behavior. I went home and sat in the dim of my living room with the broken Venus on the wall. Its severed arm caught the slant of late light and cast a small, accusing shadow.
"Do you feel lighter?" Charlize asked me on the phone that night.
"No," I said. "I feel..." I searched for the word. "Full. Like a room after a feast. The plates are still on the table."
"Then write it," she said. "Write it as it was. Not as you wanted it."
I tried. I tried to scratch out the truth and name all the parts that belonged to me. I put the piece about the Nokia ringtone in a chapter and left it there like a loose tooth.
"Why did you stay?" people asked afterward. "Why didn't you open the door that night?"
"I didn't deserve to," I wanted to say. But truth is a slow, thorny thing. People want a crisp answer. I gave none.
Glen Felix's funeral was public. People came with candles and pens. Someone left a boot with a child's drawing tucked inside. Cameras were there for the spectacle, journalists there for the line. I stood at the edge and watched them carry him; his face looked small and honest in death.
If there is a punishment scene required by story, the traffickers' public unmasking was it: cameras, witnesses, shame, the arc from swagger to pleading. It was long enough for the crowd to mark them with a new label: criminal. They were stripped of pretense under floodlights. They moved through the stages the rules require—smugness, shock, denial, collapse, begging—and the crowd reacted as a chorus: gasps, photos, curses, flashes. I watched the sequence and felt both clean and dirtied.
After that, the world turned inward. Charlize asked for the manuscript. Ulysses asked for testimony. People asked for apologies. Quinn tried to feel superior and failed because he had been the first to pick at a scab. Hank Semyonov sang a song about bridges and never called me again.
Then I deleted the entire manuscript. I burned the printed chapters I had kept in a drawer and watched ash grease the sink. The word "forgiveness" is a theater prop; so is the word "repentance." In the end there were only empty rooms and my notebook with two lines of song I couldn't stop humming:
"Borrow a land for him to rest; borrow his ordinary life."
I stood at the border where the mountains meet sky and felt an emptiness like an ache. It was bigger than my talent. My appetite for broken things had led to a real man's end. That knowledge is a weight that will not be argued down by a perfect sentence.
I thought about Glen's last knock, the way his fingers had rapped in rhythm with a song I would never play again. I thought of the old Nokia ringtone that had been a cue to his terror. I thought of the Venus without an arm hanging crooked on my wall, and of a funeral where a small boot lay next to the mound of flowers.
My last act—if an act can be called that—was to go where he had gone. I wanted the cold to be a solvent. I wanted to step off the stage and let the curtains close.
When I left, someone found two lines on my document and sent them like a relic to Charlize. They were the song lines, and they were enough to make people talk about the story forever.
I had been a collector. In the end, I was collected.
The End
— Thank you for reading —