The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

I missed the Sixty from the cave. The one with all the kisses in her pocket.

All those kisses. Kisses are liars, like actors and writers. Sixty Watt Wen didn’t even want to play word games to pass the time.

I slept with that slick black Fuckwit thing in my arms like a teddy bear. I liked it. It was much less scary to me than the screen with the golden people in it. It was useless and abandoned and pretty, like me. It was the worst, like me.

I remember the night we slept in Mattressex the best. Even wet and moldy with springs sticking through them, it was the only time in my life I’d slept in a real bed, and I felt like the princess of dreamland. How bad can anything really be when...

I was just sort of poking at it idly, bored, hungry for cats, lonely even though I had Sixty Watt’s poor conversation skills to look forward to, anxious as a hot bee about all that marriage talk back in Winditch, but hey, at least I was headed somewhere new. Into the future, a future that held much less pink-scented wax than my past, so that was something.

All seagulls are dead-eyed psychos. If the whole Fuckwit culture was a bird, it would be a seagull. Ravenous, stupid, vicious, not a single shit given, nice feathers.

I wish I could tell you that the first thing out of my mouth when faced with a magic voice out of an actual genie lamp was something finer and wiser than What the fuck but, for all the things that are wrong with me, I am a very honest girl.

“I’m afraid not, darling. Nobody here but us Tetleys.”

“You do not have administrative privileges,” it insisted. “Neat!” I shrugged. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was probably true. I didn’t have lots of things.

I licked my salt-chapped lips and looked around at the ruin and rubble of my gorgeous broken home. I wanted to cry. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to run. Back to Candle Hole and be in my old house with my new treasure all alone.

“I cannot create a new profile without identifying documentation.” “This is silly. Let’s just be friends.”

“Listen … I’m not a stupid girl. I’m not. I’ve read a fat stack of Mr. Shakespeare and I’ve seen a Ferris wheel and I’ve lived my whole life without dying even once. And you’re so beautiful and amazing and I want you to like me but it’s just that I don’t understand so many of the words you’re using right now. Why don’t you just tell me what you’re for?”

“Okay,” I said, like it meant nothing to me. Because it did mean nothing. What could possibly mean anything to me now? I had a real live Fuckwit sitting in my lap.

In fact, the first time anything like a judge and jury had to be scared up in Garbagetown was, well, me and my bouncing little baby BOOM.

It’s possible. What do I know, I was born in a giant trash candle.

Seems like someone should have thought of a rule that goes Do Not Fuck Your Only Planet to Death Under Any Circumstances. Seems like that should have been Rule Number One.”

“I don’t have any empty places in me, Red. I’m packed tight with happiness and luck and all the things that have happened to me and my elephant seal and my moringa tree and my boat and all the love I’ve saved up. But sometimes I think I can smell that space when I meet a person. Whether they have or don’t have it. I can smell their craving to not be empty anymore. And it frightens me.”

I said, because it was exactly what I was thinking just then and I swore when we met that I would always keep my insides on the outside when Red was around.

I’d lived alone so long, alone with the knowing that the sight of any one single person meant another cracked skull or broken nose at the least, and now a hundred human beings were just pushing by me like I wasn’t anybody special. In a minute one would know me by my feet or my fingers and I’d drown under their rage like a planet.

She listens, and I wish I could give her a little gold trophy for it, but I can’t, because of all the things Fuckwits gave trophies for, they never thought listening like nothing exists but time and words was half as important as losing a volleyball tournament.

It can just be the place you were happiest and safest from the wind.

“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.”

See? This is why I don’t ever believe people mean what they say. You can’t believe in faces, you just can’t. Everyone uses them for fibbing with.

My face made a gas mask all its own. Big eyes, sad closed mouth. Breathing the noxious gases of the old, old world. In the end, the only way to talk to the past was to be a dead girl. I heard a deep need in its voice, the great primal horror, the beginning of attachment: after all these years, after the death of all, this broken machine just wanted its mother.

WHEN, ALMOST AT dawn, my dream woke me with kisses and tears and old whispers, with so many of all three that I could not understand that I was awake

I close my eyes in the sun and X | NOTHING MATTERS | X flashes there in the glowing green of still-radioactive memory.

Mornings are not for company. They are for feeling cross and checking crab cages.

“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 h...

Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler. One second per second, and yet somehow you still get where you’re going too late, or too early, and the planet isn’t where it should be because you forgot to calculate for that even though it was extremely important and you left notes by the door to remind yourself, and the butterfly you stepped on when you were eight became a hurricane of everything you ever lost in your forties, and whatever wisdom you tried to pack with you has always gotten lost in transit, arriving, covered in festive stickers, a hundred years after you died.

Nothing you love comes back. It’s the law.”

There never has been. It’s just us and Garbagetown, forever into the blue, just life, just going on until it all falls apart, because everything does eventually. There’s nobody else out there but more us. The same bar, night after night after night, same phantom applause, same plots repeating into infinity. The only difference is the ground beneath is made of old pens and trophies now.

Some days I thought I’d just hold on tight and never let you go. Some days I thought I’d kill you for what you did. Some days I wanted to be one of the people beating on you.”

the kind of hope I have isn’t just greed going by its maiden name. The kind of hope I have doesn’t begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can’t, it can’t ever, that’s not how time works, and it’s not how oceans work, either. Nothing you love comes back.

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

“You want my heart? I think if you ask around Garbagetown they’ll tell you it’s the worst thing in the world.”

“I WANTED TO forget you. Yes. That was all I wanted. More than water, more than food. I went to sleep and dreamed the moon put a hand on my forehead and took you away. All the little dandelion seeds of you just sucked up out of the wrinkles in my brain like they were never there, never growing, never forcing me open as their flowers popped out of the dark.

I am so fucking anxious and manic and lethargic and so is everyone else, and if we’re just supposed to live in this happy fuckworld of yours some of us need help. It’s the fucking apocalypse! Everyone is depressed!

They were so sad they didn’t want to be alive. And every one of them had the little dandelion seed of what was hurting them, a tumor you can’t shrink or remove, and it makes such flowers, sickly, yellow flowers. I want to make us all better. We deserve to be as unanxious as the Fuckwits. We deserve to forget. It’s our birthright.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he insisted. “And that’s what I’ll put on mine.” I laughed.

“That’s not why you did it. You did it because you’re like them. An Electrified boy, in his Electrified world. You hoarded the best of everything away from the rest of Garbagetown, with all your friends and family. You’re no different than Olivia’s people. You’d have done the same.

You’re doing the same now, with your medicine and your fancy throne. You could just hand it all out and make people happy, but you’re hoarding, letting it spool out bit by bit, so you can be in charge. So you can be bright. It’s all the same Fuckwit shit, just smaller and pettier versions of it, all stacked up in a pile of power.”

Trash is all equal. I just wanted to be no one again. I just wanted to hide.

Lives have apocalypses, too. You just can’t know when you’re in it until the water is already closing over your head and all you can hear are volcanoes, one after the other, detonating the possibility of the future you imagined.

And then she turned and vanished because that’s just how nothing I was to the great orange everything, and I remained uneaten, but very alone.

“My name is Tetley Abednego,” I said without feeling. “I used to be happy.”

“I will stay on the boat. When I want to live again, I will go and tell people about Mars and they will hate me, but I will do it because they should know. Is that right?”

They will only look up and they’ll die looking up because the road to Mars is airless and forever.”

After all this time and space and sea and trash, I am still Tetley. I am the eighth-best daffodil. I am Terrence Hardy’s beautiful smile. I am Oscar’s gleaming silver bin that holds knowledge and regret that can rot into happiness again. I am a shitty small stupid beautiful important golden cup under a mountain of scoreboards with no scores on them.