The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

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.

The only thing I want back from the Fuckwit world is this. This thing that has its grave in Winditch under the dead, burnt-out Home of the Tigers jumbotron. 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.

The Fuckwits in the magazines in Periodically Circus were elegant. They draped themselves on things and had long soft necks and superhydrated lips and smooth SPF one-million-and-one skin that never felt the full body slam of the windless, shadeless equatorial sun. They had bored expressions in their jeweled eyes and those expressions were somehow the most elegant parts of them, like the actual meaning of elegance was the boredom and not the beauty.

it’s very hard to argue with things they tell you in school, since they are big and you are small.

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.

The requirements to be a President or a Prime Minister, as far as I could tell, were to have at least 50 percent white hair and a deep, sincere frown and to be the sort of animal that is excited by the possibility of spending between four and twenty years being baked in a pie where all the other fruit is just a lot of people’s powerful hope or hate. I know a little about that flavor of pie, but I don’t have any white hair.

Enough stuff for everyone and then some because there’s way less commas in the number that means everyone now.

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

And maybe they did need him. Maybe Oberon looked at them deep and long and said in that voice of his, What if you never had to feel bad, ever again? And they cried and cried because that’s all everybody ever wants and put a crown on his head which is no price at all to pay, and maybe that’s how all of Fuckwit history started, with an Oberon and a promise and a crown nobody really understood until it was too late.

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.”

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.

This is why you died, you fucking Fuckwits! You had to lock everything up behind a million million pretend walls so no one else could get to it and have any fun and you could all be sneaky hoarding dragons all the time even though it doesn’t matter and no one cares and now there’s crabs in your skulls. Babies share, and you couldn’t do it. I was born in your toilet, I should at least get to use your shit even if I never worked for Sam-sung! You’re still making everything terrible for me, thanks a lot!

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. Don’t we all, always, forever. Even when we’d rather stop. Maybe that was one of the UN’s definitions of alive.

But it is my experience that you learn everything in this world out of order. You only know what you needed to know after it’s already done getting ruined all over you. 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.

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. I have hope for Garbagetown, not for some suckspittle scrap of dry dirt that wouldn’t give us half of what we already have.

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. I have leftovers.