The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

My blood dripped onto her, but in my head I was lying on my roof made of two big church doors in a gas mask listening to a man sing to me that he’s never done bad things and he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy.

It’s my own little joke, even though the punchline is sadness. I think a joke like that is a present you make to yourself, so every time you say it, even if it hurts, you get a very cohesive feeling out of it, because the past you and the present you are talking to each other, and it’s nice to have friends.

Garbagetown is always in. Garbagetown still, Garbagetown forever.

The beautiful reek of my big rubbish heart spreading out for miles on the infinite sea.

I lie down next to my present and look up into the sky. All those trashstars, poured out everywhere with no restraint, no manners, no sense of the future.

But you know what? I am indeed feeling lucky. I almost always do. That’s me. Tetley, the lucky punk. You wouldn’t believe how lucky. It would take your breath away.

Hole. I used to wait every day for someone to come and punish me for something really spectacular I did when I used to be young. To instruct me on the subject of my own badness. With fists. With electrical devices. With worse.

hours. I started laughing at one point, and I don’t remember very much after that because someone instructed the back of my head pretty hard—but I couldn’t help it! It was supposed to be such a violation of my personal sovereignty—you could tell they really, really wanted it to be—but it was just so fucking awkward.

No one can get too deep into mourning a loss of personal sovereignty when it smells like cinnamon cookies, and cranberry jelly with the can-ridges imprinted on it, and freshly cut and stacked lumber all over the place.

Also the side of my head was bleeding more than the recommended daily allowance.

I didn’t know what to say to him. You can only love and need and miss someone so much for years and years before language just washes its hands of the whole business. We used to be part of each other and now we were nothing, and nobody’s brain knows how to square that.

“I love you, you mad little firebug,”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” “Forgiven,” I whispered, and he kissed my forehead but he didn’t say anything, the way you don’t say anything when a kid says they want to be an astronaut when they grow up. It’s kinder to let them think it’s possible.

In the years between getting my name and the business with Brighton Pier, when my life was just busy being me and nobody cared whose slut I was because I was my own slut, thank you sir and kindly, I practically lived there.

All the hair dye diluted itself into the sea a long time ago and I hope the jellyfish enjoyed their time as platinum blondes, I really and honestly do.

Memory-petrol. Which is all petroleum ever was, when you think about it. A planet’s memories of when it was young, burned up to keep warm and keep going.

I didn’t have any one bit of her heart, but I had her dress.

Humans are trash; therefore we are holy. Humans are filth; therefore we are blessed. Amen.

I found it after my father ran off wherever fathers go when they don’t want you anymore.

Oh, I know they were all the worst kind of death-guzzling monsters, sick and swollen as blood blisters, stupid, hungry, toothful voids in the shape of people, but they must have loved one another so fucking much.

Imagine having so much energy to spare after finding food and shelter and clothing and some tiny goddamn scrap of company that you figured you’d make a beautiful silver cup, not because some kid did the best job, but just because she tried the hardest. I try the hardest all the time, and everyone’s just permanently fucking mad at me. Imagine having that much left over that you give one single ghostly shit about the eighth-best daffodil.

Down there in the dark under the mountain, my hair still sticky with blood, red scars up one leg and down the other, I just couldn’t fathom that much love. Those kinds of resources.

I want to have that much left over. I want to have enough left over that it matters to me who has the best smile at the volleyball tournament.

Maybe somewhere in all that dragon hoard of positive thinking, there was the trophy I should have gotten for blowing up their wicked engines in Electric City. I tried hard. So goddamn hard. I participated the fuck out of that day.

“Go away. I’m nobody. I’m the eighth-best daffodil. I’m Gretchen Barnes.”

I opened my eyes to what I already knew I’d see: a young, angry person crouching above me with huge dark hurt eyes. I’d put that hurt there. Nobody else. It was my hurt. I owned it. I’d seen it plenty of times before. I was old friends with that hurt.

“Well,” I said softly. “You’re here. I’m here. What are you going to do to me? Burn me? Cut me? Choke me? There’s some fresh skin on my back if you want to leave a mark. Anything you want. That’s the law. It’s okay. I forgive you.”

Then the girl kissed me and kissed me and I kept still, knowing that a hidden knife was coming, inevitably, up between my ribs or in my kidney, but it never did. She just kissed me again. And again. But not lover’s kisses. Dry, friendly, joyful kisses. Like we’d known each other all our lives and fate had kept us apart, but no longer, no longer. She kissed my forehead. My cheeks. My hands. My chin. Even my nose, like a teasing grandfather before he steals it. 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.

SOMETIMES WHEN I am 100 percent loneliness by volume, I pat Big Bargains’s head in the water and whisper to her the same thing that girl whispered to me when she got tired of kissing me and holding me while I shook like a loose wire.

When she whispered it, it was a simple promise. When I whisper it, it’s so many things at once, each word might as well be a leather-bound volume of the encyclopedia of my whole wet blue obsessively sorted life.

I eat, I perspire, I sleep, I excrete, I regret my choices, I yearn for the past. I have a very full schedule.

She’s the best person I know. She is nothing at all like me. She is beautiful and clever and wise and she knows about science the way I know about Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Webster and she never, ever raises her voice even when I have obviously upset her, which is a very good trick when you think about it, and I have never met anyone else who knows how to pull it off. Even Maruchan and Goodnight Moon, for whom I rot in love forever, aren’t half as good.

And I hate her. And I love her. And I hate her. I calculated it in my head and came up with solid numbers: I hate her 66 percent of the time. I love her all the rest.

The day I met her I knew I was never gonna be the girl from before I heard her voice ever again. But that’s okay. I could just watch the old Tetley floating away over the sea until she was drowned and gone.

Big Red Mars is the only person in the great dumb post-boomtown universe who didn’t put a hurt on me the day we met. What I did matters less to her than a dried-up ink cartridge with nothing left to print.

It feels nice to be new to somebody. To not have anything d...

It makes her feel all sour inside to keep secrets, but I don’t care a bit. That’s what I mean about Big Red. I’ve been sneaking and creeping so long I forgot how to hold my head up straight. I think maybe she was born with an extra organ. A little secret second pancreas that’s just so full of sweet it tops her up when everybody else has run flat out.

For one thing, her parents love her, so she’s basically a space alien to me.

After Goodnight Moon I never thought I’d care about anyone’s hair again.

But you can’t ever imagine what you’re going to care about when you turn into the version of you that’s waiting on the other side of five years from now. That’s a stranger waiting to ambush you, and all you can do is plant your feet and try not to get thrown.

I wait, all patient and loyal like I’m a good dog or a good person or both or neither.

I lie down on the foredeck under that mess of stars and she finally shows up and lies down too and we whisper to each other and where our whispers pool together it gets so thick and soft between us you could plant flowers there and they’d grow like madness.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Red?” I say so quiet. I am already grown up and whatever I am going to be I already am forever. But Big Red Mars still has time. She st...

Who cares? That’s Fuckwit talk. Nasty little hoarders. St. Oscar says SCRAM to all that. Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can’t anymore and be trash separately.

Each family hands over the best and worst thing they’ve got in a chest, and if the bride and groom are satisfied that what’s in the chest is both good and bad enough, it’s full steam ahead. It’s symbolic. They have enough left over for symbolism. It says that everyone brings the best and worst of themselves to a marriage and to their children. Everyone loses something and everyone gets something.

his name was NORM, and they were all screaming, screaming that word, screaming for the normal world, the perfect, sopping, toasty, golden bright NORM that I could never even touch, and the voice kept singing, asking me if I’d like to get away, get away from all of it, and that’s all I wanted, to get away from the golden light and the golden dead and the golden singing about everyone knowing my name because I knew what it was really like when everyone knew your name and it had no gold in it, not even a sip.

I laughed. I think that’s really the best option when someone is being ridiculous on such a geological scale. “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.”

“Does that mean you forgive me?” She picked at the corner of the metal chest she’d carried all that way on her back like a penance. “No,” she said finally. “I can’t, I never will. But I accept you.”

I think a lot about those words Sixty Watt Wen said to me in the cave and I think I don’t really know anything at all about marriage, even after having done it, but that was the only thing anyone ever said to me that made any sense as a wedding vow.

And then there was you, and all those beautiful people went away to say their parts without me and they’ll never come back.” Oh. “Get your things,” Sixty Watt Wen spat at me. “You’re not allowed to say no. Remember?” Ah. There was the knife, after all. Up under the ribs in the middle of a kiss, quiet as a dead screen.