yes, for the love of god

A couple of nights ago, I was browsing for a new buy at Fully Booked when I stumbled upon a collection of short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. I remember owning a similar set, one that was given to me as a Christmas gift by my godfather. I picked the book up, thumbed through its pages and recognized a few titles such as The Gold-Bug, which is a detective form of narrative involving buried treasures and cyrptograms, The Tell-Tale Heart, which recounts the murder of an old man with a vulture eye, and of course, the timeless story of Montresor's killing of Fortunato in The Cask of Amontillado.

I was seven, or eight, when I first read The Cask. Like any normal kid, I found it difficult to appreciate the story at first considering that Poe used a lot of then-unfamiliar words like flambeaux, roquelaire, and Amontillado. While I knew that a cask is a container, I initially thought that Amontillado is some kind of creature. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was a kind of wine, and not a dinosaur.

As I read through, my grasp of Poe's work had become better. The more I understood, the more it piqued my interest. By then, I was painting pictures in my head; scenes like the part where Montresor started to wall up his frenemy, Fortunato. The latter laid down one brick after another, forming tiers that go all the way up -

"He's going to kill him. Oh my God," I remember exclaiming. I didn't know OMG back then.

And Montresor did. Poor Fortunato was buried alive; then burned to death. Montresor had his revenge for the supposed thousand damages Fortunate inflicted on him.

The Cask of Amontillado remains to be one of my favorite horror stories. Its take on the darker side of the human psyche sheds a brilliant light for the aggrieved.

Montresor stated:

"A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong."

Why suffer in silence when you can easily speak what's on your mind, and in the course, mend what needs mending?

As for those who are beyond retribution, the Fortunatos, wall them up and leave them for eternity. Life's better without them.