By Peter Tennant

Artwork by Carole Humphreys

It’s the most popular theme park in the world, the place where you go when you need emotional catharsis. Within the themed halls and galleries of Revenge World Inc the most advanced VR and cloning techniques known to mankind make it possible to act out any and every imaginable scenario of retribution.

Spurned women castrate cheating partners and fling burning acid into the hated faces of their rivals. Disgruntled workers bludgeon their employers to death with baseball bats. Japanese tourists gleefully applaud as mushroom clouds blossom over the skylines of New York and London, while black men dress in white robes and hang rednecks from the limbs of skeletal trees.

Laughing RTA victims in motorised wheelchairs pulverise the flesh and bones of drunken drivers. Arabs and Jews, Serbs and Croats, Protestants and Catholics, all slaughter each other with reckless abandon.

At Revenge World Inc anything is possible.

Revenge is good for you. Revenge is healthy. Psychologists employed by Revenge World Inc have conducted scientific studies to demonstrate that this is so. The need for revenge is a cancer that, if not excised, will spread and corrupt the whole system. The courts can offer legal redress and financial compensation, but only at Revenge World Inc will they pour soothing balm on the wounded psyche. You come to Revenge World Inc with anger in your heart. You go away sated, a perfectly adjusted human being able to function once again under the restraints imposed by modern society.

But of course there are misfortunes for which it is not possible to obtain such easy closure, things like old age and terminal illness and natural catastrophe, events for which blame cannot be apportioned to anyone, except maybe God. And at Revenge World Inc they cater for even that eventuality.

I pick up my hammer and nails and join the queue for Golgotha.

THE END

Revenge World Inc first appeared in Roadworks Magazine in 1999 and is reproduced with their kind permission.