The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

Smells like flowers vomited all over a New Car and then killed a badger in the backseat.

All they could see was green. Green leafy trees and green grass and green ivy in some park that was lying at the bottom of the sea. We dreamed different dreams now, my brother and I, and all my dreams were burning.

We are so lucky. Life is so good. 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.

Everyone uses my name for a swear word but it’s so completely fine. They don’t know I’m beloved. But I know and that’s plenty.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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

“I will tell you what I think. I think kings happen because some people have an empty place inside them that wants to be full and it will do anything to feel full and the first thing that makes it feel the opposite of empty it will chase forever and ever. And the weirdest thing about this place is that obeying fills it up, but making someone else obey makes it slosh up and splash all over the floor.”

I can smell their craving to not be empty anymore. And it frightens me.”

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.

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.

“But what does the X mean? Why does your arm say nothing matters?” Babybel Oni stared uncomfortably at the floor. “Because it doesn’t,” he whispered. “But I don’t want to know that. I can’t know that. I can’t just walk around every day knowing that. It’s too much. Too horrible.”

“What do you want, then?” Babybel Oni glared at me with those bright, glassy eyes. “Ease,” he said pleadingly. “I just want things to be easy like they used to be. I wanna be whoever I was going to be. I want to use up a whole toothpaste tube and throw it away with three-quarters of it left in the bottom because I’ll just buy more tomorrow. I want to put my clocks forward in the spring and complain about it. I want to have to watch what I eat because it’s so easy to get fat. I want to go where everybody knows my name. I want to be a Fuckwit.”

I wanted to yell at it: 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.

Can you imagine there being so many people that you could just murder one and nobody would know who did it right away?”

“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.

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 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.

“It’ll run out eventually, though, won’t it?” I said gently. “You can’t ever make any more. When it’s gone, it’s gone. None left for anyone.” “Eventually. But not soon.” “That’s what the Fuckwits put on their graves, you know.” “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he insisted. “And that’s what I’ll put on mine.”

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.

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. I have enough for them. Even if I don’t have enough for me.

There is a full cup of fatalism in the recipe for Homo sapiens sapiens, and some of us are very much more comfortable with the world ending than it going on. And of course, if you are born into the worst-case scenario, it just feels like home.

She is the part of humanity that will love anything, find meaning in anything, build a new civilization out of anything, because it’s a compulsion with us.

The oceans can erase our cities, but they cannot drown our existential malaise. That shit’s waterproof.

For surely this world is trash, but some of the trash does shine.