All That Is Red
Authors: Anna Caltabiano
A
LL THAT
IS
R
ED
A
NNA
C
ALTABIANO
Published in 2012 by New Generation Publishing
Copyright © Anna Caltabiano 2012
First Edition
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 9781909039278
www.newgeneration-publishing.com
C
ONTENTS
C
HAPTER
1
I closed my eyes and from where I stood on the cliff, I saw a brilliant view of the Red fields far below me. They seemed to welcome me and I eagerly leapt forward into their
embrace.
As I fell, the shackles of gravity released me. I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom, but, as I looked back at the receding cliff, I also felt a fleeting stab of regret for all I was leaving
behind.
The Red expanse reached up to grab me and pulled me into its comforting arms. As my new world came into focus, the undifferentiated Red around me resolved into flowers. They were poppies, as
tall or taller than people. And as I lifted my head, I saw that I was in a field of them, stretching as far into the world as I could see.
I drank the Red in with my eyes, as it seemed to fill every space around me and I noticed something moving through the long stretch of Red. I thought it was a lone poppy shifting toward me, but
as it got bigger and approached the cliff, I realized it was a boy.
Beautiful; that was all I could label him. His hair floated like a scarlet halo about his head, though he wore clothes that were either a faded Red or a White, which had become dirty and
stained. He was statuesque and his skin was like ivory, but as he came closer to me, I saw that his eyes were dull and unfeeling like gunmetal.
The boy looked about the same age as me. He was not a child anymore, but he was not yet a man either. Even so, he spoke the words of one hardened with age and shaped by a grim world.
“What do you wish to find here?”
“I ... I don’t know,” I stammered. For some reason, I couldn’t look into his eyes. I knew instinctively that if I did, he might have seen exactly what I wanted, and that
frightened me.
“Everyone wants something. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” A forced laugh erupted from his lips. “What is it? Beauty, wealth, fame ...”
I shook my head and looked at my feet. I had no desire for any of those things.
“Is it to be the envy of all? To be the most beloved in the world?” He scoffed; scorn burned his beauty black. “Each one of you thinks you’re different, but aren’t
you all the same? One wants all the gold in the world; the other wants all the silver. What do you seek that makes you so different?”
I forced myself to look up into his hard eyes. I was surprised when what I saw was a cool and collected calm.
“Any man would want wealth, and once he has acquired it, he would want the things he couldn’t buy with it. To deny that is to deny human nature. What is it that you wish to
find?” I replied boldly, turning the question back to him.
He pressed his lips together into a tight line and stood frozen as silence enveloped the two of us. It seemed to settle around us, as if a heavy fog from the sea had brought it. When he finally
uttered a sound, it was only a simple statement. “I need nothing.”
“But, surely, you must want something.”
I felt the hard gaze of his eyes on me, as he pondered what I had said.
“You’re a peculiar one,” he muttered, “the first who’s asked me what I want. But you still didn’t answer my question. What do you wish to find
here?”
“I don’t even know where here is,” I admitted.
This time, it was the boy who silently shook his head. “But what do you want?”
“I want to feel.”
C
HAPTER
2
“You want to feel?” the boy inquired.
I waited for him to ask me why I couldn’t feel, but that question never came. Instead, it started raining.
The rain was light and warm. It came from the air around us, not the perfectly clear sky. Each drop melded with another and became one upon touching my skin. They melted together and bathed me
in warmth. I wish I could have felt it. But I couldn’t.
The rain gradually got heavier, incessantly beating down on my shoulders. The pleasant warm sensation turned cold, as if winter itself breathed down my neck. With every blow the sky only
laughed, looking down on me mockingly.
You can’t feel. The rain chanted with every strike upon my back. Each sentence was punctuated with a blow that resounded in my ears. You can’t feel.
I clutched at my ears trying to block out the voice, but it echoed inside my head, growing louder with every reverberation. The voice cackled beside my ears, waiting for me to submit to it, to
submit to the fact that I couldn’t feel. My fingers dug into my head trying to shield my ears from the awful sound. But I knew I couldn’t. The sound was now trapped inside my ears. It
was inside my mind and a part of me.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Once more, all that beat down on my back was a gentle mist, and all that rang in my ears was silence. I waited for the tears, but they
didn’t come. I was incapable of crying.
I found myself curled on the ground, still clutching at my ears. My hands were tired and seemed old, stiff in their age. My knees creaked, as though they had lived through an eon. I opened my
eyes, because I was scared to leave them closed.
The first thing I saw was a pair of bare feet. Although they were calloused with the distance they had traveled, they were noticeably young in every way.
“You didn’t leave me,” I breathed. Surprisingly strong arms grasped hold of me and brought me to my feet.
The boy motioned toward the field of poppies and my eyes followed. In that one gesture, the whole world opened up to me. The Red that had covered the sea of poppies was gone. In place of the
waves of Red poppies, brilliantly White poppies now stood swaying in the invisible wind.
The boy started making his way down the cliff. I scrambled to follow. He moved with such agility. It was mesmerizing to watch him clamber down the side of the cliff. He delicately placed one
foot after the other, easily following the intricate choreography of some higher power.
When he reached the ground, he waited for no one, not even me, and continued walking toward the White. He passed the brink of the poppies, startlingly White against his scarlet hair. Only then
did he pause to look back at me, his eyes daring me to come closer.
I surfaced at his side, afloat on White poppies that gathered around my knees. We were drops of color in a pool of White. Floating next to each other, the world held its breath to pause and
watch over us. Cradling a single poppy in his hand, the boy leaned down, gazing at it as if it were his whole being. As I, too, bent down, our heads met over the single poppy and I noticed watery
droplets of Red glistening on its petals.
A Red pearl on the tip of a pure White petal trembled at the boy’s touch. It shook and quavered, until it could take no more and could only succumb and fall. Softly curving over the
contours of the single petal, it merged with another Red droplet and plummeted into anonymity.
Leaving them naked and White, the rain had washed the Red away from the flowers. It was as if they had been left hard and unfeeling, stripped of their emotions.
I impulsively glanced at my wrists. It was an accident really. I hadn’t meant to look down, but once I saw the angry lines tracing down from my wrists and spilling onto my arms, I was once
more filled with the need to feel. I didn’t care what it was, even pain, as long as I could feel it.
“This was you,” the boy said, still cupping the poppy bloom in his hands. Experiencing what I could only describe as a sense of numb guilt, as I peered at scars that had never felt
the sting of a cut, my head instantly snapped back up. The boy’s voice held no note of accusation in it, but his words seemed to blame the poppies’ absence of color and feeling on me.
If only he knew about all those times I had tried to make myself feel.
The boy gestured at a river of Red snaking its way through the poppy field. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed it before. It coiled around the floor of White, stretching to the White
glimmering horizon. It was the only sliver of Red in an entire world of White.
I couldn’t explain the instinct I had. It was almost as if I thought that all of my answers were to be found at the end of the Red path. The strange intuition was as close to a feeling as
I had. Part of me knew it was delusional to believe this, but that didn’t stop me from running after it.
I didn’t think. I didn’t try to feel. I just ran.
One foot, then the next. It was systematic and for once, I was glad to be free of thoughts. I vaguely felt the dull prick of the grass reaching up to touch my bare feet. First the right foot,
then the left, and then back again. But that wasn’t an emotion. It wasn’t feeling. It was a just a sensation.
I ran with an intense desire to feel ecstasy. I ran with a need to feel heartbroken. I ran, because I yearned to feel enraged. But most of all, I ran, because I wanted to know what it was to
love and to cry.
For all the things that I couldn’t do and all the things that make people human, I ran. When I couldn’t run anymore, I walked, until I’d caught my breath and could run again. I
would have done anything to get there.
Minutes turned into hours, as staggering steps went on for endless miles. My legs could not carry me anymore. Shaking, they collapsed, begging my knees to go on for them. When they
couldn’t, my whole body cried out. It craved emotion. It needed to feel.
It was then, as my broken body suppressed a groan, that I felt a hand on my back.
“It’s best we sleep here on the river bank if you wish to continue tomorrow.”
It was the boy. He had chased me, just as I had chased the river of Red.
We lay down opposite each other, our heads almost meeting in the middle of the space between us. If I had reached out, I could have touched him, and he could have felt me and told me I was
real.
“Why did you follow me?” I asked in a voice so quiet that I wasn’t sure he would hear it.
“Did you know where you’re going?” he countered.
For several seconds, I made no effort to respond. I knew where I wanted to be, but that wasn’t the same thing. “No,” I eventually mumbled.
“Well, then you need someone to keep an eye on you,” he explained.
“But, why do you care?” I softly wondered aloud, continuing to stare at the clear, dark sky above me.
“Everyone needs someone to care about them,” he responded simply, as though he didn’t understand why I had asked.
The boy was so close; right by my side, but there was an endless gap between us. A void of untold truths that we hid from everyone. They were secrets we built upon to paint our seemingly
flawless masks. We kept our real faces hidden behind them. But now that one other person saw through a chink in that mask, we felt them crumble beyond repair. We both found ourselves hoping that
maybe this person would be the one who could hear the plea behind our silent screams. For now, though, we both closed our eyes, seemingly oblivious to the other’s cries, but deeply thankful
that we had found someone who heard.