The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

MY NAME IS Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown.

Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears.

At night, from far away, Candle Hole looks like a firefly palace. When the wind blows, it smells like cinnamon, and freesia, and cranberries, and lavender, and Fresh Linen Scent, and New Car Smell.

Maruchan was so healthy and sweet natured and strong and, even though Garbagetown is the most beautiful place in the world, many children don’t live past a year or two. We don’t even get names until we turn ten. (Before that, we answer happily to Girl or Boy or Child or Darling.) Better to focus on the one that will grow up rather than get attached to the sickly poor beast who hasn’t got a chance.

I was born already a ghost. But I was a very noisy ghost.

Maybe I’ll name my hibiscus flower Murdercunt. It has a nice big sound.)

I got a lungful of what Diet Sprite down at the Black Wick optimistically called “cognac”: the thick pinkish booze you could get by extracting the fragrance oil and preservatives out of candles and mixing it with wood alcohol the kids over in Furnitureford boiled out of dining sets and china cabinets. Smells like flowers vomited all over a New Car and then killed a badger in the backseat.

People wanted to marry me here and there but I didn’t want to marry them back so they thought I was stuck up. Who wouldn’t want to get hitched to handsome Candyland Ocampo and ditch Candle Hole for a clean, fresh life in Soapthorpe, where bubbles popped all day long like diamonds in your hair? Well, I didn’t, because he had never kissed me with a gas mask on and he smelled like pine fresh cleaning solutions and not like scorched ozone at all.

“If God turned up for supper and brought all the dry land back for dessert, it wouldn’t be half as good as one day on Brighton Pier,”

“When the ice melted and the rivers revolted and the Fuckwit world went under the seas,” Papa whispered through his weeping, “a great mob hacked Brighton Pier off of Brighton and strapped engines to it and set sail across the blue. They’ve been going ever since. They go around the world and around again, to the places where there’s still people, and trade their beauty for food and fuel. There’s a place on Brighton Pier where if you look just right, it’s like nothing ever drowned.”

“My name is Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh and I am the Master of Brighton Pier!

This is it. This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not ever, not even for a minute. 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.

I used to have an elephant seal cub named Big Bargains. Now I have a great big spotted seal-loaf who rarely wanders far from my portside bow these days. She thinks I am a gentleman-seal, which is quite awkward for me sometimes. But she thinks that because she runs on very ancient programming that tells her so, and you can’t argue with eight hundred pounds of old-fashioned worldview.

I have a little moringa tree coming along in a 15-gallon paint bucket sandwiched between the pilot’s wheel and the blue vinyl jump seats. It’s twisted and lumpy and crappy. It should grow huge and fabulous, but it got planted in a plastic bucket meant to hold satin finish exterior latex paint in #4L61 Breakfast in Tuscany instead of in Southeast Asia, so it never will. I relate mightily to my moringa tree.

I ended up naming the hibiscus Dorchester. 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.

There are some things you just can’t ever get back. Years. Gannet birds. Husbands. Antarctica.

I tried to get up, but the happiness in my chest was so heavy I had to lie down again. Also the side of my head was bleeding more than the recommended daily allowance.

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.

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

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

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.

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.”

Water makes lozenges and gelcaps and tablets and extended-release soft capsule suppositories dissolve away into nothingness and regret and a tidepool in which one solitary starfish can experience a fleeting moment of relief from depression and gastrointestinal irregularity.

Inside I caught a peek of a stained stretcher balanced on two defibrillator carts being used as a bar by six or seven people with clean hair and all their teeth. Three taps: Clear Hooch, Brown Hooch, Robitussin.

I’ve got a feline mignon with your name on it, sweetheart.”

I’ve read practically all the murder mysteries there are. 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.

It’s the fucking apocalypse! Everyone is depressed!

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.