For today’s Write Fifteen Minutes a Day exercise … a prompt that I really couldn’t answer.  I don’t have any toxic relatives that come to mind, and the one person who might qualify for the rest, I’d just as soon not write about.

So, instead, Roger Donne, the protagonist of my current novel, finally confronts (after a fashion) his bete noir, Colonel Edward Phillips.

You know that toxic relative or former friend who makes (or used to make) your life miserable? Write out dialog in which you finally tell that person what you think of her and why. Do not hold back. Do not edit yourself. Do not worry that anyone is ever going to see it. Just write!

*     *     *

“Well,” I said, then jumped slightly as a bit of the rocky cluster broke away.  “This is ironic.”

“What are you talking about?” Phillips said.  His back pressed against mine, sweaty through his fatigues and my own.

“You made my life a living hell for so many years,” I said. “Kind of funny we’d both end up in the real one.”

“This isn’t Hell,” Phillips grunted.

Someone through the thick, sooty smoke about us laughed.  It didn’t sound particularly human.

“I dunno, Colonel,” I told him.  “Pool of brimstone. Roaring flames.  Devils.”

“This isn’t Hell,” Phillips repeated.  He started to press me back, getting a little more space for himself, then stopped. “And I didn’t see any devils.”

“Open your eyes, Colonel.” I chuckled, surprising even myself.  “But why would you?  You never did see anything you didn’t want to see.”

“Not the time for a sob story, Corporal.”

“Retired, Phillips. Not under your command any more.”

“Once a soldier, always a soldier.”

“Says the man who hugged a chair at London HQ while sending guys like me out into the darkness.”

“You knew –”

“I knew nothing, Colonel.  I enlisted to fight Krauts.  I didn’t ask to get snatched up onto the Squad. I didn’t ask to get sent behind the lines and deal with werewolves and sorcerers and ghosts and vampires and mummies and all that crap. I didn’t ask to get involved in all that.”

Silence.  Something loud cackled, unseen. I felt a bit more of the rocky island give way, and Phillips pressed harder against my back, even as he mutter, “Neither did I.”

“Yeah, but you got to sleep in a real bed, sir.  And nobody was trying to shoot at you, or eat your face, or steal your soul. And when you managed to get back after a mission — not that you ever went on any missions, sir — you didn’t have your superior look at you like you were a cockroach, mock you, call you and your mates freaks. Sir.”

Sulfur bubbled and smoked.  “I didn’t –”  He trailed off.  “You were freaks,” he finally said, voice heavy.  “And I was the freak commander.  You have no idea what the other –”

“Pardon me for not being properly sympathetic to how your fellow officers and gentlemen didn’t invite you to sit with them at the Officers Club.”

He made a motion with his shoulders that could have been a shrug.  I wished I could have seen his face.  Or maybe not. Easier to let that anger, that hate, out when I couldn’t actually see him.

It passed my mind that maybe where we were was affecting how I felt.  Even if, it didn’t change those feelings. And they had deep roots, from the war, fifteen long years ago.