Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (10 page)

Introduction to “
Still Red”

Oregon writer Kara Legend grew up in the Midwest where she read so much her mother pushed her to go outdoors more. She writes that she “took to reading under the piano; fortunately, it was not an upright.” This marvelous story marks Kara’s first appearance in print. I’m certain it won’t be her last.

Still Red

Kara Legend

The stench from a stinking hulk filled Emily’s nose, thick and deep with rot. Her throat closed and her overtaxed lungs screamed for air. She halted, panting a little while she surveyed the thing. Nature had been busy. It was hard to tell now exactly what sort of critter had decided to die on this stretch of Oregon beach. Seal probably. It was losing shape and starting to liquefy. Grayish slabs of fat and flesh slid down thick yellow bones that jutted skyward like flagpoles. The smell had an overlay that was fishy and ordinary, but beneath the surface scent floated rich streamers of decay.

Familiar scents.

She’d learned the smells of death before she could draw her ABCs. Long ago and far away it had been, in the woods with the hunters in the time of stories. She remembered that, and she was grateful for that fact. There was so much she’d forgotten, days and weeks, entire stretches of her long life had vanished into the treacherous depths of her mind.

But not the story, never that.

She had lived with the story so long she’d forgotten where it ended and she began, or if there were such a thing as a borderland between story and history, between fantasy and reality. Her story was the singular constant of her lonely life, the thing that gave her purpose.

She clung to the memory as fiercely as she gripped her walking stick. The doctors said mini-strokes were erasing her memories bit by bit, that it was only a matter of time now before she forgot even her own name. What did they know? They were little boys and girls in white coats who thought they could protect people with charts stuck to clipboards because science explained everything.

Fools
.

They knew nothing of the way the world truly worked. She knew that life—the whole crazy mess of it—was made of bits and bobs of this and that, cut apart with round-tipped scissors and thrown high in the air only to settle to the tile floor where clever little hands sorted the pieces, arranged them on wide sheets of colored construction paper and pasted everything, taking care to press out each and every bubble until it was smooth and dry and flat.

What a pretty picture, Emily! I love all the colors you used. Is that you with your doggie?

No, bitch. Don’t you know a fucking wolf when you see one?

No, they never did.

That was another lesson of her long life: wolves offered death on a platter, all gleaming fangs and lethal claws. Most fools never recognized the danger until the very last second, when it was too late to do anything but scream and bleed and die. She’d seen that too often, and hated the way they bargained for their lives, all dignity abandoned in a frantic bid to save their cowardly skins. Critics could say what they wanted, but Emily had never begged—or, God forbid—
blubbered
.

Never that.

Blubbering was not only useless; it wasted precious energy. If, through sheer dumb luck, the fools managed to escape the wolf, they were still not safe because a hunter would track them down. Wolves and hunters: one followed another and that was the way of things.

Thighs burning and her feet sinking deeper into the sand with every step, she trudged toward the rocks at the foot of a sheer basalt cliff. About twenty feet away, the beach turned shiny with hard-packed sand where the tide rolled and foamed. She wouldn’t sink there, but she’d be closer to the water, closer to danger from the sneaker waves the activities’ director from the home had warned them about before she’d let them get off the bus. Lectured them in that serious-but-concerned tone young people used with their elders. Like they cared.

Emily was almost to the cliffs when she glanced over her shoulder and spotted the activities’ director, Becca, trotting after her, one slim arm in the air waving like she was trying to flag down a rescue helicopter. Emily’s stomach tightened.
Should have moved faster. Too late now.

“Miss Flannery, wait up!” Becca called.

Emily halted, leaning on her walking stick, breathing a little harder than she would have liked. Becca jogged to a stop, her pretty, tanned face flushed from exertion. She propped her fists on her hips and shot Emily a look that said,
you’re not behaving.

Emily pasted a bland, and what she hoped was a slightly dotty smile on her face. “Is there a problem?”

She watched Becca glance around the beach. The campfire with the rest of the folks from the home was far enough away to look small in the distance. A man and a woman walked together under the cliffs and big yellow dog loped around them in circles, ears flapping and tongue lolling. An older man in a baseball cap and baggy shorts stalked along the shoreline swinging a metal detector back and forth in wide sweeps. Business as usual.

Becca looked perturbed. “Where do you think you’re going? I thought we all agreed to stay together.”

It was the way she said it that was so irritating. As if Emily had no more of a right to independence than your average toddler with Becca standing in for Mommy. As if Emily hadn’t been a woman grown since before the birth of Becca’s own mother. As if there were anything that could happen out here that Emily couldn’t handle.

She tightened her grip on the walking stick. “I’m just taking a little walk.”

Becca reached and started to put an arm around Emily’s shoulders, but Emily stepped back. Becca reached for her again, but Emily stopped her with a hand. “I’m fine, really.”

“Let me help you back to join the others. You’re missing the S’mores.”

“I’m not ready to go back yet.” Emily gestured toward the cliffs. “I set myself a goal to walk all the way there and back. The doctors say exercise is important.”

“You’ve made it quite a distance. Far enough to count for exercise, that’s for sure. Why not come back now?”

“I brought my journal.” Emily cranked up the wattage on her batty old lady smile. She’d been told that smile could scare small children. She’d never tested it before on twenty-somethings.

Mentioning the journal seemed to have worked because Becca’s expression softened. Emily’s journal was a fat thing, the pages thickened with layers of gesso, acrylic paints and all sorts of collage materials. As activities’ director, Becca had spent weeks encouraging the residents to draw, paint and record events and stories from their lives.

Emily was proud of her journal because it detailed her story—her real story—not the lie she’d lived the past seventy years. She let the walking stick fall to the sand, opened the volume and flipped to the page she wanted then turned it around so Becca could see.

The art spread across both pages and featured a drawing of a cave set into a sheer black cliff face. Just inside the mouth of the cave, a small girl sat with her knees pulled up to her chest and her long red hair streaming over her body like a cape.

Becca’s hand drifted over the colored pencil on gesso image. “You finished that page just the other day.”

“Yes,” Emily said, “it’s the last one.”

Becca frowned. “Why the last one? You’ve got plenty more pages in your journal and we have four more sessions.”

“I know, but I’ve finished my story.” There was one more step left, but explaining that would only confuse Becca. She didn’t know how the world worked.

Emily pointed at the cliffs again. “Up ahead there’s a cliff that looks just like the one I drew. I’d like to go there and sit for awhile with my journal and look through it while the sun sets.” She shrugged. “I know it’s silly, but if you’ll humor an old woman, I promise I won’t stay long. I’ll be good.”

A shout rose up from the group back by the campfire. Becca glanced over her shoulder then back at Emily and shook her finger. “One hour, no more, or I’m coming after you.”

“One hour,” Emily echoed.

Before she set off, Becca bent. “I’ll take this back with me.”

“No, I need my walking stick. It helps keep me steady.”

The muscles in Becca’s trim arms flexed as she hefted the thing.

“I don’t care. I need it. The only way I can hurt myself with it is if I fall down. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

Becca hesitated, and then handed it over. “Don’t make me regret this.” Emily mumbled suitably appreciative nonsense until Becca headed back toward the group.

It took her another fifteen minutes to reach the cave. There she found a flattish sort of rock where she sat, leaving the walking stick close at hand and placing her journal in her lap. The sun rode low on the horizon and the tide, while still out, was beginning to turn. When her hour was up, the waves would be rolling about her ankles. The timing was a guess at best, but there was nothing left to do but hope she’d got it right.

The wind whipped her hair and lifted her skirt.

“I am not afraid of the dark places,” she whispered, “and I am coming for you.”

She opened her journal and read her story for the last time.

***

This is the true story of a girl named Red. In some times and places she was called Little Red or Red of the Hood. Stupid names, if you ask me. Nevertheless, I am that girl; rather, I was that girl once upon a time in a land far, far away.

Or not.

I don’t expect you will believe my story nor do I expect you to place any trust in my words. Go ahead—call me a liar—I won’t be offended. After all, it’s only a story and a few pictures, badly drawn. Nothing more.

I was called a liar long before a hunter tossed a hood over my head, and I don’t care about names. Now that I am no longer young by any definition, my only allegiance is to the truth because there is no truth but the whole truth. So take what you will, I am still Red.

My woodcutter mother and evil stepfather abandoned me in the woods with some hunters from whom I managed to escape.

Eventually.

But not before I learned things no child should ever know, the things men do in the dark, and long after I learned how a big man’s hands fit about my small neck. This is the truth I learned in the woods: vision dims and blood roars in the ears when precise pressure is applied. The little girl body goes limp.

These are the true things I know. This is the true story that is mine to tell, paid for in blood and pain and time.

The important thing, however, the thing storytellers always forget or gloss over in their rush to get to the sexy part about wolves and girls is that I was never stupid enough to be fooled by a disguise. I was never a pushover, never the little ninny, tra-la-tra-la, prancing through the woods with a basket.

I fought back. Always.

When I was very small, my puny fists and pitiful kicks only excited the hunters. In time, I grew. I waited for my moment, and in time, it came.

One night while the hunters snored, their naked bodies stacked like thick white logs, I escaped through a rip in the tent and ran through the dark woods. A dog collar flapped about my waist. Sticks and thorns tore at my feet until they bled.

A pack of feral trial attorneys found me and took me in. They raised me as best they could, although they really didn’t know what they were doing. They’d spent much too long in the dark woods themselves and had forgotten the ways of civilized people.

At least, that’s what I told myself. In reality, I think they were afraid of me.

You see, during those long nights in the tent with the hunters, I’d learned to kick and fight and scratch and bite. Later, whenever anyone tried to discipline me, I fought back no matter what the infraction. I fought back because for me, nothing had changed. It didn’t matter that I’d escaped and was no longer chained with the hounds.

I was still in the dark woods.

Still hiding under the dark green canvas.

Still smelling rotting leaves and mud.

Still and listening for the squeak of rubber boots. (Dreading the rising shadow of a man’s shoulders against the firelight and his hard hands, and then when it came and no, oh no, it came no matter what, it came, and I was nothing against that tide, the wave of sensation that dragged me down and down, down deeper still, deeper than breath into the dark places where there was no more breath, no more air, no more…)

And then from the stillness, breath came again, and the dreaded light. Another day followed by another night. Again and again.

Still, I fought.

Even after I escaped, when anyone came close enough to touch, I transformed into a whirlwind of elbows, feet and nails. I snarled and screamed like a wild thing. No one touched me without a battle.

The pack tried not to blame me for my feral ways because they understood: Little girls lost in the dark woods fought back or they died. The trial attorneys had been hunted themselves. That was how they’d been exiled to the wild, however their memories of it had faded with time. They longed to go back to the world they’d lost. They dreamed of returning to the bright cities of their youth and how their friends would exclaim and throw lavish parties to celebrate their arrival.