Feeling Vengeful
A very long time ago, I was still living with my serially-intoxicated, religious dad. After he divorced my mom, we moved to a little road on the eastern edge of my island. Let’s call our new neighbors Kex and Bev. Kex and Bev seemed pretty okay, and we got along for a few months.
One day, Kex knocked on our door and asked my dad to move his car outside his house, as it was, at the time, parked in front of theirs. They had two cars. My dad had one. There were absolutely zero reasons to move the car because it did not block them in any way.
Nevertheless, my dad was in a pretty neutral mood, so he obliged. A couple of weeks later, my dad was in one of his intoxicated stupors, and Kex asked him to move his car forward a few inches. This really upset my dad, and he suddenly felt vengeful.
He stormed outside, walked up to their front door, and slur-shouted a demand at Kex that he move his car instead. Kex started beefing, and an argument riled up. Kex mock-headbutted my dad, stopping an inch before contact.
Then my dad, being Welsh, did the same thing back but followed through and he ended up busting Kex’s nose. He started bleeding and Bev came out screaming something about calling the authorities and all that jazz. It was just pure drama.
Now, my dad sounds like the worst of all of them so far, and that’s pretty true; he’s a total piece of garbage. Actually, he’s just completely terrible with no redeeming qualities.
But the neighbors actually took things to another level. The whole situation had turned into a stalemate. Kex never called the authorities on my dad. In fact, there was no communication between us at all anymore. If I left for school at the same time as Kex left for work in the morning, it was crazy awkward.
Everything seemed to have settled though, until one day, my dad, who was sober for a few hours, decided to do some gardening. He was tending to some weeds, yanking them out of the ground by their roots, when he suddenly tasted a slight metallic pang on his palette. He, being Welsh, spat onto his hand.
Blood. Then, he started coughing and a spatter of blood escaped. He ran to the bathroom and started spitting it all into the basin. Then, he started itching the roof of his mouth with his finger and moaning in pain, and his fingers came out with some of the blood.
He started gurgling water to wash his mouth out and eventually recovered. He pulled himself together. He called the emergency services, intending to get medical attention. Instead, a fire engine turned up. It turned out that they were the folks who dealt with dangerous chemicals.
They took samples from my dad’s mouth using a swab and then popped out to the garden to investigate. When they pulled back the bush my dad was working on, they came across a shocking scene—a load of white powder strewn everywhere. They found it on my dad’s gloves, too.
He’d not even noticed it through because of his visual impairment and because he was generally super ignorant. As I said, he didn’t have one redeeming quality. They sealed some up and went off to identify it.
A couple of days later, some vans turned up and the officers came in to inform us that the powder was a chemical agent for burning and weakening tree roots.
The officers then went into the garden to inspect the fence which was beside the bush, and of course, there was a little visible trail of the powder caught up in the wood’s rough surface.
They went next door to speak to Kex and Bev and sure enough, they found a crate of the very same chemical agent. One of them had sprinkled some over the fence with the intention of ruining our garden. As a result, my dad inhaled it and messed up his sinuses. Story credit: Reddit