The Girl in Red

by Christina Henry

People didn’t often surprise her because she always expected the worst of them.

Red thought she had everything all figured out. But she’d forgotten one thing, the most important factor in all those apocalypse books and movies that she loved so much; it was never the Event—illness, asteroid, nuclear war, whatever—that was the problem. It was what people did after. And people always reduced to their least human denominators when things went bad.

Grandmas didn’t die from stuff like that. Grandmas went on and on, enduring year after year, shriveled and worn but somehow ageless. Grandmas outlived grandfathers and after they grieved they just rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. Grandmas knew how to do everything (except maybe with their smartphones—they would need a little help there but in this new world smartphones were just garbage anyway, so that meant grandmas were now without flaw) and get through any crisis. So of course Grandma would be there at the end of the road.

three times for anything makes it a spell, a curse, a whisper of magic that can’t be undone.

“We all die at the end,” Mama said. “What we do before the end is what counts.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’”

“Why is it that assholes just go on and on, even when the world would be a better place if they just dropped dead?”

“Do you think I don’t know what kind of men this world has wrought?” Red said. “Every woman knows. And those men existed before everything fell apart.”