Gabriel Jeroschewitz, July 12th, 2025.

Trust?

If you never trusted another person ever again, it would be understandable. I’d argue that avoiding people altogether might even be logical. Nobody would blame you. If they knew the hell you went through, they’d want to hide, too. I was thinking, though… what if, instead, you spent your life driving the heads of predators through a metaphorical, but no less satisfying, spike? Wouldn’t that be nice?

I’ve been watching Agnes for a while now. Not in a creepy, stalker way, mind you—more like one observes a fascinating, highly volatile, and inexplicably effective social experiment. Agnes, you see, went through… a lot. Not the kind of “a lot” that ends up on the evening news, but the slow, insidious agony inflicted by a thousand tiny cuts of societal disregard. Think of it: the neighbour who played polka music at 3 AM. The co-worker who consistently microwaved tuna casserole. The HOA president, who once fined her for having a ‘non-regulation’ gnome. Each a pinprick, but collectively, they forged Agnes into something magnificent, something the prompt of the universe perhaps hadn’t envisioned.

What if you became the threat, bringing hell to their doorstep instead? Doesn’t that sound like a lovely little plot twist? Rather than cower, wilt and shrink into someone meek and unassuming, Agnes took the biggest, deepest breath of her life and just… strategized. Her “scream” wasn’t a vocal sound, not initially. It was a well-indexed binder titled “Polka: A Comprehensive Legal Treatise on Nocturnal Noise Pollution, with Appendices on HOA Bylaw Violations About Obnoxious Instrumentation.” It landed on Mr. Henderson’s doorstep with the thud of a small anvil, followed by a cease-and-desist letter drafted with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. Within a week, the polka stopped. The silence that followed, I swear, vibrated at decibel levels that, in case of emergencies, could break glass easily–not from sound, but from the sheer, resounding absence of it. It was the sound of a predator’s head being driven, quite elegantly, through a spike.

What if, instead, you spent your life ripping out the repugnant, abominable hearts of as many abusers as possible? The ones that look like yours – the quiet, unassuming types who want to live in peace. And the ones that look like theirs – the oblivious, self-important ones who believe the world is their personal soundstage or stinky kitchen.

Could you take the tuna casserole incident? Mildred from accounting. Every Thursday. The smell would coat the office like a fine, fishy mist. People would gag, subtly. Pass out air fresheners, casually. But Agnes? Agnes saw an abuser—an abuser of nostrils, of common human decency. Agnes sidled up one Thursday as Mildred was about to press ‘start’ on the microwave. No scream, no theatrics. Just a polite, almost too polite, smile. And then she began. In excruciating detail, she outlined the chemical composition of trimethylamine, the compound responsible for the ‘fishy’ smell. She presented a printed diagram of the office’s ventilation system, highlighting its inadequacy. She then produced a laminated chart of “Breakroom Etiquette for the Socially Conscious Colleague,” complete with footnotes citing HR policies, health codes, and a surprisingly eloquent quote from a 17th-century philosopher on the tyranny of the senses.

Mildred, her hand frozen mid-air, looked at Agnes as if she were an alien life form. Agnes wasn’t angry. She was just… informative. With the casual flourish of a magician, she then produced a small, airtight container. “For your leftovers, Mildred,” she cooed, “scientifically proven to contain even the most potent volatile organic compounds. Such a thoughtful gift, wouldn’t you say?” It was like watching a surgeon remove a cancer, only the tumour was Mildred’s pride, and the organ was her tuna casserole’s heart. The office smelled only of stale coffee for the first time in years. Let’s throw parades in Agnes’s name and make these abusers infamous. Let’s publicly broadcast their every depravity. Let’s throw dead roses at their feet – a coronation of who the blame and shame always belonged to. The office breakroom now features a large, laminated sign: “The Agnes Protocol: No Fish or Offensive Odours. Penalty: Public Discourse on Chemical Compounds.” It’s a work of art.

What if, instead, everything evil in the world was made afraid of you? Would that not be the ultimate form of retribution? Don’t let anyone convince you that revenge is only fueled by hate. Agnes was never motivated by hate. Her heart, if anything, seemed to swell with a profound, almost furious, love for order, for quietude, for the unspoken social contract that allowed people to be.

Her masterpiece, however, was the HOA—the infamous gnome incident. Agnes had a perfectly tasteful, hand-painted ceramic gnome with a little fishing rod. It was blue. Mrs. Periwinkle, the HOA president, insisted it was “non-regulation forest-dwelling folk” and demanded its removal, citing Section 4, Sub-section B of the “Approved Garden Ornamentation” Addendum. That was the last straw.

Agnes didn’t cower. She didn’t wilt. She fought back. Retaliated. Showed no mercy. She became an advocate for every mild-mannered resident whose petunias were too purple, whose recycling bin was two inches too far from the curb. She went unapologetic. She was vicious. She came up swinging, not with fists, but with binders, precedent, and an encyclopedic knowledge of municipal codes and zoning laws. She discovered Mrs. Periwinkle’s own “non-regulation” bird bath (imported Italian marble, clearly not “federally approved bird-bathing apparatus”). She exposed the entire HOA board’s dubious accounting practices during the annual “Pest Control Fund” allocation. She found the forgotten clause that stipulated mandatory composting for all residents, which Mrs. Periwinkle had conveniently ignored for years.

It was a campaign. A war of attrition was waged with spreadsheets and legal citations. Agnes didn’t just castrate them metaphorically; she dismantled their bureaucratic structure brick by brick. She tormented and demoralized them with a relentless barrage of official complaints and public information requests. She hunted down the perverse injustices of their rule. She became their nightmare. Be their curse.

Agnes stood up at the next HOA meeting. She didn’t scream. She didn’t shout. She spoke calmly and precisely for forty-five minutes. Every word was a tiny, perfectly aimed dart. By the end, Mrs. Periwinkle looked like a deflated balloon. The gnome, incidentally, was not only allowed to stay but was declared a “neighbourhood treasure, promoting local artistry.”

You can seek vengeance, never motivated by anger or hate, but by a love so robust and resilient that it destroys those devoid of it. Agnes’s love for a quiet, sensible life, unburdened by petty tyrannies, was her engine. If ever you’re unsure of your worth, know this – no matter how hard they tried, they could never take what makes you significant. Agnes, fighting for her perfectly manicured lawn, her tuna-free air, her polka-less nights, ultimately, saved others. The neighbourhood is, dare I say, a utopia of considerate behaviour now. The office is a beacon of common sense.

I hope your survival is so fucking loud it reaches those who lost their voice but never stopped listening. Because sometimes, the most profound acts of comedic retribution are born not from anger, but from a profound, desperate love for a quiet life, and a burning desire to make people stop being so… annoying. And Agnes, bless her little gnome-loving heart, was the loudest survivor I ever had the privilege to observe.

Gabriel Jeroschewitz, July 17th, 2025.   Dedicated to my grandmother, Nora

My name is Gabriel. I’m the author of this sad little history, pieced together from my mother’s stories and the heavy, ghost-laden objects my grandmother left behind. My mother always said I had Nora’s eyes, which I took as a compliment, though I knew it was meant as a warning. Nora von Puttkamer, my grandmother, was a woman who saw the world through a different kind of lens, one that shimmered at the edges with things the rest of us pretend aren’t there.

In the late 1920s, beleaguered by a malady the family diagnosed as “nerves” but which I suspect was the chaotic blossoming of a profound soul, she was sent to Vienna. To Sigmund Freud. And for fuck’s sake, that was the greatest tragedy of them all. My mother told me stories of Freud’s office, and Carl Jung’s—both bohemian dens of intellectual ferment, cluttered with artifacts and antiquities, smelling of old paper and ambition. But where Jung’s collection pointed toward a universal, mythic human story, Freud’s, I’ve always imagined, was a museum of pathologies, each statue and relic a testament to a neatly labelled neurosis.

The most famous family story, the one trotted out after the second glass of wine, was about the slap. One day, my mother would recount with a grim satisfaction that Freud had gotten a little “fresh” with Nora. His clinical observations had strayed into the personal, the physical. So she gave him a good smack across the face, gathered her things, and walked out of Berggasse 19 forever. That’s why it would have been better if she’d gone to see Carl Jung. He would have understood. He wouldn’t have needed to touch the body to know the soul was on fire.

After Nora died, I inherited a large, sea-worn trunk. It wasn’t filled with jewels or deeds, but with the sediment of her life: pressed flowers brittle as moth wings, scarves that still held the faint scent of L’Heure Bleue and anxiety, and a single, leather-bound diary. It is from this diary that the true horror of her Viennese excursion unfolds. It’s not a horror of ghouls or goblins, but of a soul undergoing a sacred, terrifying process, being observed by a man with the wrong map.

October 19, 1928, Vienna is a city of ghosts. They cling to the damp coats of the living. Dr. F’s office is warm, but it is a sterile warmth. He watches me from behind his desk, a little god behind a mahogany altar. He has artifacts, yes, but they feel like captured animals. Lifeless. He asks about my dreams of the flooded ballroom. He says the water is a symbol of latent desire. I tried to explain that it wasn’t a symbol. The water was real. I could feel its cold silk on my ankles and see the chandeliers glittering beneath the surface like trapped stars. The water wasn’t desired; it was memory. Not my memory, but the world’s.

Here, reading in my dusty study decades later, I felt a familiar chill. Jung understood this. He understood that you can’t have depth psychology without history, without the “deep history” that flows through us all. Nora wasn’t dreaming of her repressed psyche; she was tapping into something vast, an archetypal flood. But Freud, with his psychology of consciousness, could only see the individual, the immediate, the sexual. He was a brilliant cartographer of a single, small island, utterly blind to the ocean that surrounded it.

November 2, 1928. Today, I told him about the wood grain. On his desk. When he speaks, his voice is dry, and the grain of the wood begins to flow. It moves like a slow river, the dark lines swirling into eddies and whirlpools. I told him it frightens me, that the solid world feels… porous. He lit a cigar, the smoke a foul cloud between us. He said I was projecting my fluid nature, my “hysteria,” onto the inanimate object. He used the word ‘inanimate.’ But it isn’t. I see the spirit in it. The tree’s life is still trapped and dreaming in the wood. It is not me. It is the wood itself.

This entry made me put the diary down. My God, she was living it. The unus mundus. The unity of psyche and matter that the alchemists sought, that Jung revered. There was no division between the inner mind and outer matter for them. Nora was experiencing this unity not as a philosophical concept, but as a raw, terrifying reality. The walls between her soul and the world were dissolving. She was in the nigredo, the alchemical opus’s blackening, dissolution stage. She needed a guide, an alchemist, to help her contain the process and move toward the albedo, the whitening, and the purification. Instead, she got a clinician who told her she was sick.

The alchemists knew their work was oriented toward a goal: the creation of the Stone, the integration of the self. It was a transformative process, not a cyclical sickness, which Freud saw only.

November 28, 1928, He speaks of my father. Always my father. He believes he cast every shadow in my heart. Today, as I described the feeling of my skin turning to silver dust in the sunlight, of seeing the golden veins in the marble floor pulse with a faint light, he fell silent. Then he leaned forward, his eyes small and wet. He spoke of sublimation, of transmuting carnal urges into these… fantasies. He believes my soul’s work is a gilded cage for my unspent passion.

He does not understand its simplicity—the res simplex—the simple, impossible thing. That the gold in the stone is the same in my spirit is not a metaphor. He thinks I am building elaborate castles of the mind to hide from a simple truth. But he is the one who is blind. He lives in a complex world of theory and diagnosis, and he cannot see the simplest thing: everything is one.

The final entry before the slap is brief, the handwriting a frantic scrawl.

On December 5, 1928, He tried to illustrate his point today. As he spoke of the body’s base desires, the root of my ‘condition,’ his hand fell upon my knee. It was not a gesture of comfort. It was an act of… reduction. He was trying to pin my soaring, terrifying soul to a simple piece of flesh. To prove his point. To say, ‘See? It all comes down to this.’ In that moment, the river of the wood grain, the gold in the marble, and the ghost-water in the ballroom all rushed into my arm. It was the world’s anger, not mine. I struck him. The sound was like a book falling shut. The spell was broken. I saw him, a small, frightened man, amidst his dead idols.

She never wrote in it again. She left Vienna, but the alchemical process was interrupted and misdiagnosed, and she never completed its work. It curdled inside her. She didn’t find the Philosopher’s Stone; she didn’t achieve the psychic totality that Jung knew was an unreachable ideal but a worthy goal. She was left in the chaos of the dissolution, her parts scattered. She spent the rest of her life as a woman haunted not by ghosts, but by the shimmering potential of a world she could no longer bear to see, its unity a source of terror rather than wholeness.

The horror of Nora von Puttkamer’s story is not the slap, nor the “freshness” of a famous doctor. It is the horror of being seen, but not understood. It is the terror of a sacred transformation being labelled a sickness. For all his genius, Freud was deaf to the music of deep history. He saw a broken machine and sought to fix it. Jung would have seen a crucible and known how to tend the fire. For my grandmother, that difference was everything. She was an adept whose opus was ruined because the laboratory master believed gold was just a shiny yellow metal. He could not grasp the simple, terrible truth: it was also her soul’s substance.