If you search for revenge stories, you probably want something particular: a woman who has been talked down to, talked around, or quietly written off, and who turns out to know more than anyone at the table. Nobody has to get hurt. She just has to be right, and she has to prove it. We gathered five free stories that do this well, and each one reads start to finish on one page, in about 7 to 12 minutes.
They share a thread. In each, someone calls the heroine forgetful, outdated, fragile or confused, and what saves her is something she has known by heart for years. The five run from one family parlor out to an entire town hall, so you can pick the size of the room you're in the mood for. Our whole shelf of Revenge Stories has more when you finish.
1. The chair she signed: a first dinner in the wrong parlor
We start in a front room in West Alder, where Colette, 54, re-covers recliners, boat cushions and church pew pads. Her only child, Callie, 26, builds Windsor chairs in a rented barn. On October 17, Callie is marrying Ezra Lindell, a teacher from the old family on the common, and the first dinner is at the home of his mother, Phoebe, in a parlor crowded with heirlooms.
Phoebe seats Colette at the kitchen end of the table. Callie sits across from her fiancé with her arms folded, which is what she does when she wants a night to go well and is afraid it won't. Then Colette notices a wing chair in faded green damask by the fireplace, the left wing leaning a hair out of true. She knows that chair from the inside.
That's the setup behind “Please Don't,” My Daughter's Mother-in-Law Said When I Touched Her Chair. I Signed It in 2001, and it's why it makes such a good opener. The slight is small and very polite, a hostess telling a guest not to touch a chair. What stings is that the guest last touched it with a tack hammer in 2001, and nobody in that room knows she was C. A. Wrenn long before she was Colette from the cushion shop on Mill Brook Road. It runs about 12 minutes, and the stakes are a daughter's wedding.
2. The bus route: a new boss with a printout
Next we go to Verde Crossing, where Pauline Redding has driven Bus 7 for twenty-five years. She knows every kid, every corner and every pothole on her route, and she has a spotless record and a commercial license that stands between her and a pension she can't draw yet.
Her new, younger boss, Elliot Grant, slides a printout across his desk on a late September morning, with dust from a monsoon turning the depot lot pink behind him. A parent called, he says. Her morning run came in ten minutes late. He'd like to get ahead of it. He calls retirement "a well-earned rest," but Pauline hears what he means. The complaints are anonymous, they pile up, and they speak of lateness and missed stops. Her answer is a flat "I wasn't late."
The story is I Drove the Same School Bus Route for 25 Years — Until My New Boss Started Taking Calls From Ghosts, and the title tells you where Pauline's suspicions are heading. Its tagline sums up the whole contest: he said she was getting forgetful, and he forgot she notices everything. If you've ever been the person in a workplace who simply knows how things run, you'll recognize her at once. It's about a 12-minute read.
3. Forty years of nursing: a brother who is suddenly so helpful
The third story moves back inside a family, to a living room and a chair by the window. Valerie Beaumont spent forty years as a nurse at Island Hospital, most of them in hospice, sitting with people who could no longer say what they needed. She learned to spot neglect even when it's dressed up as care.
Then her charming, spendthrift brother, Roger, takes over their mother's checkbook and starts "helping" with her bills. Their mother's house and savings come to around $450,000. Valerie visits every week with groceries and company, and every week she checks the batteries in her mother's hearing aids. For six weeks in a row, they're dead. Roger tells her their mother is just forgetful. Then Valerie overhears him whispering to their mother about a "nice new place to live."
That's the heart of My Brother Kept Our Mother's Hearing Aids Dead to Steal Her House. He Forgot I Was a Nurse for 40 Years. This one is the most tender of the five, because the person being wronged most is a mother who can't quite hear what's going on around her. The tagline says Valerie could see the lie and only had to make her mother hear the truth. It takes about 11 minutes.
4. Her own shopping cart: a lawyer at Sunday dinner
Lorraine Dempsey is sixty-seven, widowed, and living in her paid-off Maryland home, where everything is orderly just the way she likes it. Then her son, Gregory, a financial advisor, brings a lawyer to Sunday dinner. Mr. Abernathy takes a seat in Frank's chair, which nobody has sat in since the funeral, and Lorraine watches him lean back in it.
Gregory sets a folder beside her good platter and says "power of attorney" over the pot roast. He fans out bank statements with yellow stripes across certain lines, and he points to a savings account that has dropped, and not slowly. He says he isn't trying to take anything from her. She tells him that bringing a folder to her table already is. She's about $450,000 in the balance, and her son is certain she's losing her mind.
You'll find her side of it in My Son Said I Was Wasting His Inheritance on Nonsense. The Proof Was in My Grocery Delivery History. The tagline gets at the gentle irony: he thought she was losing her mind, and he was looking in the wrong shopping cart. It's about an 11-minute read, and it's a good pick if you like your satisfaction served at a dinner table.
5. Town minutes back to 1824: the whole valley as the stage
We finish by stepping out of the living room entirely. Harriet Ainsworth has spent thirty-five years in the quiet basement office of the Havenwood Town Hall in Vermont, a town of twenty-one hundred people with one traffic light, one volunteer fire station and a Town Green ringed with sugar maples. Old Walter Miller hired her as Deputy Town Clerk in 1989 and told her that paper doesn't lie, and that if something happened in Havenwood, it's written down in black ink.
Harriet expected to be given the Town Manager job. Instead it goes to a slick outsider with a clipboard and a condescending smile, Marcus Thorne, who sees Havenwood less as a home than as an asset to be sold off. His first target is the town's history museum, and he means to evict it. Harriet's reply is in the title: she has the minutes from every meeting since 1824.
It's The New Town Manager Tried to Evict Our History Museum — Until I Pulled the 1824 Town Minutes, and at about 7 minutes it's the shortest of the five, which makes it the one to read when you only have a coffee's worth of time. The tagline puts the matchup plainly: he has a plan for her town, and she has the minutes.
How to choose among these revenge stories
All five give you the same pleasure, but they feel different in the hand, so here is one way to pick.
- If you want a family occasion with a wedding looming, start with the chair story.
- If you want a workplace standoff and an outsider who shows up with a printout, take the bus route.
- If you want tenderness mixed with the satisfaction, take the nurse and her mother.
- If you like a quiet dinner-table confrontation, take the grocery delivery history.
- If you only have a few minutes, or you want the whole town on one side of the argument, take the clerk.
None of these asks you to wait for an installment. Each is complete on one page, so you can read one before your tea cools and come back for another tomorrow. When you're ready for more, the full list of everything we've published is at all of our stories, and the shelf of revenge stories is always the best place to go next.
