Red

When you first see her, the first thing you’ll notice is her hair. Red like flame, red like love, red like cherries and chapstick and death. After that, maybe her white skin, stretched so thinly over her bones that you can almost see the spasms of her muscles. And then, perhaps her eyes, a green that you’ve only read about in books, a green that looks like jealousy. You take in all that, come to terms with all that, and then you look at her as a whole and think, She’s an abomination. 

Then, you watch as she goes about her days, not moving like a normal person would, oh no. She prowls. She stalks. That’s how she moves. As if every last thing with a heartbeat and a breath is prey and she, a predator. Corners a child, steals his lollipop, sucks on it with malice dangling from a ear and her foot pressed against his chest. Drags a businessman into a dark alleyway where no one will hear his screams, and asks him how his day has been. He stutters, and then the knife is in his throat, so fast that he doesn’t even notice it until the pain bites. Never even had a chance to open his mouth, and she’s a tad disappointed. You can tell from the pout on her lips, not unlike one that a petulant child would wear. She likes it when her victims scream. Relishes it even, like hot chocolate on a chilly day. You observe her as she lies and deceives, steals and threatens, kills and smiles, and you think, She’s a monster.

But then you get to know her.You peel back her barbed skin and peer into her dead eyes and take a hold of her scarred heart and it overwhelms you. And you hear pink. The pink of her father’s tie as he throws her onto the streets, mouth stretched into a word you wouldn’t want your child to overhear. You taste teal. The teal of the river she lays next to, hair matted, clothes torn, eyes glittering with loss. You smell beige. The beige of the thugs’ boots, who’d encircled her on Christmas Day, and violated her until she’d shrunk and become half a person, a fourth of a person, a percentage of a person. And then there’s the red. The red of a new opportunity, the red of a new life, the red of a whole new person, one who is a predator amongst predators amongst predators. You drown in her colors and you think, She shouldn’t have ended up like this.