The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

She bided her time. She was the sort of person ready to face the wilderness, a young woman certain she had nothing more to lose.

She took a rifle from the shelf. When the other women told her she was mad to go—surely she’d freeze before she reached the meadow—she said she didn’t care. She would rather die trying to live than simply give up like the rest of them.

He had no idea that the universe could be found in a single instant, a drop of water, a blade of grass, a leaf of an apple tree.

The bonfire was red and orange and looked like a sunset when she narrowed her eyes.

That was the country she was in most of the time, a place where people heard what she said but not what she meant. She wanted to be known, but no one knew her.

She wondered if dreamers knew they were in a dream while it was happening, or if they had no idea that everything around them was purely imagined until the dream had gone.

I heard something escape from her mouth, her soul perhaps, rushing upward.

A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart.

It was the kind of cake that could make you want things you hadn’t even known existed.

He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted to be. There was something wrong with him, some kind of emptiness, as if he had been turned into a shadow on the night of his accident, as if he had snow in his veins rather than blood. He remembered who he was, all right. He just didn’t feel a thing.

He loved New York, how it seemed to have its own heartbeat, how you could be on a crowded street and still be alone.

She’d always imagined the plants turned red because everything she felt had gone into them. She couldn’t hide her love away and so there it was for all to see.

“Often the people who succeed, in spite of the difficulties they may face, have one thing in common. They read…. They have hope because they know that once upon a time there was a boy or a girl, a woman or a man, who managed to survive.”