The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

Yesterday, an old man hobbled up over a ridge of rusted bicycles and punched me so hard he broke my nose. By law, I had to let him. I had to say: Thank you, Grandfather, for my instruction.

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.

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.

What do I know, I was born in a giant trash candle.

“Yes, but why have a king at all?” “Someone has to make the rules, Tetley.” “Do they, though? They’re all dead, so none of their rules kissed them good night with a story or whatever you were going on about just then. 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.”

The nicest room you’ve ever lived in doesn’t have to be clean and white or full of translucent fresh monkfish slices with pea shoots delicately balanced on top. It can just be the place you were happiest and safest from the wind.

“And no one will ever tell you this, because they don’t even know how to be this honest, but if you’d stayed home sick and never gone to Brighton Pier, we’d still be the same flavor of fucked. You were right, there’s no dry land. There’s nothing to get back to. You were right, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. That’s what this means.”

“Eventually. But not soon.” “That’s what the Fuckwits put on their graves, you know.”

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.

“You fucking left us,” I hiss at this child on the other side of emptiness. “You just left us here like a bad husband or a shitty father or a twin brother or a continent. You don’t know me. We’re separate forever. Like the present and the future. Like dead and alive. I’m nothing to you. Go live your life. You had fun. You won. I hope you get bone cancer.” “I’m sorry,” Big Red Mars whispers, because she is just a person even though I want her to be a symbol of everything I have lost.