The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

MY NAME IS Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown.

Maruchan was so healthy and sweet natured and strong and, even though Garbagetown is the most beautiful place in the world, many children don’t live past a year or two. We don’t even get names until we turn ten.

But when I carefully pulled the thing out, it was a little beige capacitor with red stripes instead. Electric City! I’d never been half so far. Richies lived in Electric City. Richies and brightboys and dazzlegirls and kerosene kings.

But who made the garbage, rich and rank? The Fuckwits did, and we give thanks.

We never shared a womb, but on the other end of it all, we might still share a grave.

We dreamed different dreams now, my brother and I, and all my dreams were burning.

We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.

MY NAME IS Tetley Abednego and I am the most beloved girl in Garbagetown.

Presents are, in my opinion, the #1 through #3 reasons to get married in Garbagetown.

Aw. I kind of liked Deathslut. It was a bit pretty, really.

No MURDERCUNT, no BRIGHTBITCH, no DEATHSLUT. They were so creative. They used their imaginations on me. I always felt a little honored.

I wanna be death’s slut again. At least I was somebody’s slut.

This strange woman down in the dark kissed me and held me, and in between she whispered over and over: Shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay. And it broke me.

“I don’t think that’s exactly within the spirit of the law, kid. Are you sure you don’t want to stab me instead? It’d be over quicker. And hurt less. No one wants me.”

THE KING OF WHAT THE FUCK

Kisses are liars, like actors and writers. Sixty

And they told us in school that one of the Misery Boats was transporting rescue animals from a zoo so that’s why there is a small but not totally ignorable population of tigers, which I guess are cats anyway, so again, Garbagetown is crawling with cats. I’d never seen a tiger, but it’s very hard to argue with things they tell you in school, since they are big and you are small.

There’s a place in Toyside where you can pull one big tangled ratking of a string and a mountain of dolls scream at you with a sound like the death of joy while saltwater pours out of their mouths. I’ve done it twice.

Anarchy can be so cozy, if you bring enough pillows.

“Like looking after you. And smiling.” He smiled. “He ordered me to smile for you. To pretend that you are someone I love and do not loathe and wish I could see bleeding out of her eyeballs on the floor before me for as long as it takes to smile.”

Look at me, the Fuckwit Aladdin, trying to get the genie to come out of his lamp. And now there would be a magic question, which I would answer or I would not, in my princess tower, on my wild and enchanted island, in the middle of the night.

I’m just a trash girl in a trash world.

“Ten out of ten,” Mister said softly, and powered down without finishing, leaving Viola forever un-duchessed and maligned.

“Have you been running a quality assurance test on me all this time, Tetley?” she teases, laughing. But I keep eating snap peas and I don’t say anything back because when you really think about it, it isn’t funny. When humans meet other humans, that’s all they ever do forever.

Why do we have to be married? Can’t we just be trash together forever?”

It’s the fucking apocalypse! Everyone is depressed!

My love would sit in his castle and plot and scheme and march through the provinces of my home on foot or on the quieter tiptoe of the promise that he could cancel sadness and death, and I would just be Tetley, as I had always been, with Big Bargains and the infinite grandbabies of Grape Crush and my hibiscus and Mister and hope.

But other than that, I’m really a very happy person.

And just like that I am beloved. By a machine and a Martian and a ghost, but that is so much, so much.

“I’m sorry. I am just so alone. Everyone hates me.” “Why?” “Because I found you and now they have to think about you and know about you sometimes.

But she is sorry and small and alone and I have been sorry and small and alone and it appears I am now in the business of collecting small and alone things. I know how to take care of them. I know how to make them grow in a bucket.