When complaints to HR fail, backstabbing and gossip only fuel, and jealousy and hate reach the point of boiling, women, forced to be coworkers, must settle grievances themselves. Not so that they may become friends, or so that they can once again work together in harmony, but so they can breathe once more – so that they can work a day’s shift without dealing with the loathing-induced nausea that plagues them both.
One battle may not settle it, nor may two, or even three. For some rivals destined not for peace, find themselves addicted to the release of hurting and punishing the other, for every slight, no matter how minor.
The very screams of their enemy comforting and enthralling them – their grimaces of pain and whimpers of the same soothing and exciting. Each seeking their sustenance and sanity by throwing themselves at one another, so that they may rip clothes, lock fingers, and do their violence.
And though their employment together may one day end, separated by time, prospect, or prosperity, they will never forget their rival – or how passionately they hated.
They together suffering the cruelest of twists and realizations. That neither of them will ever find another who provides them such a release. Another whose destruction makes every fiber of their body tingle and every ounce of their soul long.
Even though their search for as much will never end. For such rivals are one in a million, and such feuds held in only a handful under the sun.
I have a situation at work that has some of these characteristics.