All That Is Red Read online

  ALL THAT

  IS RED

  ANNA

  CALTABIANO

  Published in 2012 by New Generation Publishing

  Copyright © Anna Caltabiano 2012

  First Edition

  The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 9781909039278

  www.newgeneration-publishing.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

  CHAPTER 1

  I closed my eyes and from where I stood on the cliff, I saw a brilliant view of the Red fields far below me. They seemed to welcome me and I eagerly leapt forward into their embrace.

  As I fell, the shackles of gravity released me. I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom, but, as I looked back at the receding cliff, I also felt a fleeting stab of regret for all I was leaving behind.

  The Red expanse reached up to grab me and pulled me into its comforting arms. As my new world came into focus, the undifferentiated Red around me resolved into flowers. They were poppies, as tall or taller than people. And as I lifted my head, I saw that I was in a field of them, stretching as far into the world as I could see.

  I drank the Red in with my eyes, as it seemed to fill every space around me and I noticed something moving through the long stretch of Red. I thought it was a lone poppy shifting toward me, but as it got bigger and approached the cliff, I realized it was a boy.

  Beautiful; that was all I could label him. His hair floated like a scarlet halo about his head, though he wore clothes that were either a faded Red or a White, which had become dirty and stained. He was statuesque and his skin was like ivory, but as he came closer to me, I saw that his eyes were dull and unfeeling like gunmetal.

  The boy looked about the same age as me. He was not a child anymore, but he was not yet a man either. Even so, he spoke the words of one hardened with age and shaped by a grim world.

  “What do you wish to find here?”

  “I ... I don’t know,” I stammered. For some reason, I couldn’t look into his eyes. I knew instinctively that if I did, he might have seen exactly what I wanted, and that frightened me.

  “Everyone wants something. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” A forced laugh erupted from his lips. “What is it? Beauty, wealth, fame ...”

  I shook my head and looked at my feet. I had no desire for any of those things.

  “Is it to be the envy of all? To be the most beloved in the world?” He scoffed; scorn burned his beauty black. “Each one of you thinks you’re different, but aren’t you all the same? One wants all the gold in the world; the other wants all the silver. What do you seek that makes you so different?”

  I forced myself to look up into his hard eyes. I was surprised when what I saw was a cool and collected calm.

  “Any man would want wealth, and once he has acquired it, he would want the things he couldn’t buy with it. To deny that is to deny human nature. What is it that you wish to find?” I replied boldly, turning the question back to him.

  He pressed his lips together into a tight line and stood frozen as silence enveloped the two of us. It seemed to settle around us, as if a heavy fog from the sea had brought it. When he finally uttered a sound, it was only a simple statement. “I need nothing.”

  “But, surely, you must want something.”

  I felt the hard gaze of his eyes on me, as he pondered what I had said.

  “You’re a peculiar one,” he muttered, “the first who’s asked me what I want. But you still didn’t answer my question. What do you wish to find here?”

  “I don’t even know where here is,” I admitted.

  This time, it was the boy who silently shook his head. “But what do you want?”

  “I want to feel.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “You want to feel?” the boy inquired.

  I waited for him to ask me why I couldn’t feel, but that question never came. Instead, it started raining.

  The rain was light and warm. It came from the air around us, not the perfectly clear sky. Each drop melded with another and became one upon touching my skin. They melted together and bathed me in warmth. I wish I could have felt it. But I couldn’t.

  The rain gradually got heavier, incessantly beating down on my shoulders. The pleasant warm sensation turned cold, as if winter itself breathed down my neck. With every blow the sky only laughed, looking down on me mockingly.

  You can’t feel. The rain chanted with every strike upon my back. Each sentence was punctuated with a blow that resounded in my ears. You can’t feel.

  I clutched at my ears trying to block out the voice, but it echoed inside my head, growing louder with every reverberation. The voice cackled beside my ears, waiting for me to submit to it, to submit to the fact that I couldn’t feel. My fingers dug into my head trying to shield my ears from the awful sound. But I knew I couldn’t. The sound was now trapped inside my ears. It was inside my mind and a part of me.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Once more, all that beat down on my back was a gentle mist, and all that rang in my ears was silence. I waited for the tears, but they didn’t come. I was incapable of crying.

  I found myself curled on the ground, still clutching at my ears. My hands were tired and seemed old, stiff in their age. My knees creaked, as though they had lived through an eon. I opened my eyes, because I was scared to leave them closed.

  The first thing I saw was a pair of bare feet. Although they were calloused with the distance they had traveled, they were noticeably young in every way.

  “You didn’t leave me,” I breathed. Surprisingly strong arms grasped hold of me and brought me to my feet.

  The boy motioned toward the field of poppies and my eyes followed. In that one gesture, the whole world opened up to me. The Red that had covered the sea of poppies was gone. In place of the waves of Red poppies, brilliantly White poppies now stood swaying in the invisible wind.

  The boy started making his way down the cliff. I scrambled to follow. He moved with such agility. It was mesmerizing to watch him clamber down the side of the cliff. He delicately placed one foot after the other, easily following the intricate choreography of some higher power.

  When he reached the ground, he waited for no one, not even me, and continued walking toward the White. He passed the brink of the poppies, startlingly White against his scarlet hair. Only then did he pause to look back at me, his eyes daring me to come closer.

  I surfaced at his side, afloat on White poppies that gathered around my knees. We were drops of color in a pool of White. Floating next to each other, the world held its breath to pause and watch over us. Cradling a single poppy in his hand, the boy leaned down, gazing at it as if it were his whole being. As I, too, bent down, our heads met over the single poppy and I noticed watery droplets of Red glistening on its petals.

  A Red pearl on the tip of a pure White petal trembled at the boy’s tou
ch. It shook and quavered, until it could take no more and could only succumb and fall. Softly curving over the contours of the single petal, it merged with another Red droplet and plummeted into anonymity.

  Leaving them naked and White, the rain had washed the Red away from the flowers. It was as if they had been left hard and unfeeling, stripped of their emotions.

  I impulsively glanced at my wrists. It was an accident really. I hadn’t meant to look down, but once I saw the angry lines tracing down from my wrists and spilling onto my arms, I was once more filled with the need to feel. I didn’t care what it was, even pain, as long as I could feel it.

  “This was you,” the boy said, still cupping the poppy bloom in his hands. Experiencing what I could only describe as a sense of numb guilt, as I peered at scars that had never felt the sting of a cut, my head instantly snapped back up. The boy’s voice held no note of accusation in it, but his words seemed to blame the poppies’ absence of color and feeling on me. If only he knew about all those times I had tried to make myself feel.

  The boy gestured at a river of Red snaking its way through the poppy field. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed it before. It coiled around the floor of White, stretching to the White glimmering horizon. It was the only sliver of Red in an entire world of White.

  I couldn’t explain the instinct I had. It was almost as if I thought that all of my answers were to be found at the end of the Red path. The strange intuition was as close to a feeling as I had. Part of me knew it was delusional to believe this, but that didn’t stop me from running after it.

  I didn’t think. I didn’t try to feel. I just ran.

  One foot, then the next. It was systematic and for once, I was glad to be free of thoughts. I vaguely felt the dull prick of the grass reaching up to touch my bare feet. First the right foot, then the left, and then back again. But that wasn’t an emotion. It wasn’t feeling. It was a just a sensation.

  I ran with an intense desire to feel ecstasy. I ran with a need to feel heartbroken. I ran, because I yearned to feel enraged. But most of all, I ran, because I wanted to know what it was to love and to cry.

  For all the things that I couldn’t do and all the things that make people human, I ran. When I couldn’t run anymore, I walked, until I’d caught my breath and could run again. I would have done anything to get there.

  Minutes turned into hours, as staggering steps went on for endless miles. My legs could not carry me anymore. Shaking, they collapsed, begging my knees to go on for them. When they couldn’t, my whole body cried out. It craved emotion. It needed to feel.

  It was then, as my broken body suppressed a groan, that I felt a hand on my back.

  “It’s best we sleep here on the river bank if you wish to continue tomorrow.”

  It was the boy. He had chased me, just as I had chased the river of Red.

  We lay down opposite each other, our heads almost meeting in the middle of the space between us. If I had reached out, I could have touched him, and he could have felt me and told me I was real.

  “Why did you follow me?” I asked in a voice so quiet that I wasn’t sure he would hear it.

  “Did you know where you’re going?” he countered.

  For several seconds, I made no effort to respond. I knew where I wanted to be, but that wasn’t the same thing. “No,” I eventually mumbled.

  “Well, then you need someone to keep an eye on you,” he explained.

  “But, why do you care?” I softly wondered aloud, continuing to stare at the clear, dark sky above me.

  “Everyone needs someone to care about them,” he responded simply, as though he didn’t understand why I had asked.

  The boy was so close; right by my side, but there was an endless gap between us. A void of untold truths that we hid from everyone. They were secrets we built upon to paint our seemingly flawless masks. We kept our real faces hidden behind them. But now that one other person saw through a chink in that mask, we felt them crumble beyond repair. We both found ourselves hoping that maybe this person would be the one who could hear the plea behind our silent screams. For now, though, we both closed our eyes, seemingly oblivious to the other’s cries, but deeply thankful that we had found someone who heard.

  CHAPTER 3

  Bright lights danced on the inside of my eyelids. White. Red. Bleached. Colored. Dull. Vivid. They speckled and blurred in my vision creating shapes and images. They fused together and then melted apart. They were whole and broken all at the same time.

  I inhaled the morning air. Crisp and clean, it seemed to be the complete absence of scent. My eyes opened to a White sky blanketing over me. It merged into the Red horizon, where the river continued.

  Reaching for something that I knew was supposed to be next to me, my hand stretched out, grasping, searching. Finding nothing but seamless flat ground, I got up. However, I was quickly overwhelmed by the White that surrounded me. I choked on the White air and gasped as it filled my lungs. The cold White filled me from deep inside and I felt a chill that spread through my skin as I adjusted to the White that was now inside of me.

  Adjusting to the White was easier than I had imagined. My body found no need to fight it and simply welcomed it, as if it had always been inside of me.

  I heard a similar gasp next to me and turned to see the boy gulp in the White air looking as if he were trying to resist it. His whole figure blanched ever so slightly, losing a shade or so of Red. When he met my eyes, his became wide.

  “You ...” He fought to tell me something. I’m sure he did. But the White silenced him and screamed over his voice. With his panicked eyes, the boy looked years younger than the one I had met yesterday. I found it hard to accept that hours ago this same boy had been the only solid thing I could cling to.

  There was something in me that desperately needed to help him. There was a connection between the boy and me. One that I didn’t understand, but I knew that it simultaneously ached and brought us together. I felt the White plunge into him, as he breathed the White air into his lungs. I felt all this, but there was still something in me that could bear to stand unfeeling and watch him cry out in agony. I saw his cry reach out to me, where it seemed to freeze in my hands: cold, still, lifeless, and unfeeling. It reminded me of myself.

  I looked on silently, standing motionless, waiting for the White to be finished with him. I waited until his cries died out and all that was left of him was a crumpled shell in front of me. His eyes were open, but blank. His lips were parted, yet silent. He breathed, but his breath was like ice.

  Only a day ago, when I had lain helpless, the boy stayed with me. Now, however, with our roles reversed, I contemplated leaving. In the end, I don’t know why, I stayed. I just couldn’t leave him.

  I never had any sense of time. I remembered months ago when I had told my mom that I was going to take a bath. I had spent over an hour in there. Thinking. Just thinking. All my thoughts and worries had swelled up beneath my skin.

  When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I had sought release and found it the only way I knew how. And it had worked. At first, they had only trickled out, but then they gushed; my thoughts had cascaded out of my body into the bath water around me. It had felt beyond amazing. It had been surreal.

  It had taken a knock on the door to bring me back to reality. My mother had asked what was taking so long. After convincing her not to open the door and assuring her that everything was all right, I had drained the rusty water and then cleaned the bathtub, all the while, telling myself that I would never do that again.

  I had known that I was lying to myself and that what I was doing was sick, but I had also known that I couldn’t just step away from the incredible feeling of release. Taking care to pick a shirt with long sleeves, I had looked down at my arms. I had known that it would only be a matter of time until I found myself in the same situation; again needing to feel.

  After that close incident with my mom, I never really could trust myself with time. I remembered that humans made tim
e themselves, but they only remember its existence when it suits them. Therefore, I can’t say when the boy got up. I only know that when he did, I heard a voice from behind me.

  “He looks awfully pale doesn’t he?” The voice said. With its tone of naivety, I imagined it belonged to a fairy-like little girl and when I turned around, I was greeted by one.

  She could be considered petite, but was not overly so, with the top of her head reaching my chest. Her ruby hair made her look both pixie-like and reminiscent of something from either a myth or a bedtime story. Her hair curled around her face and set off her dark skin. Two bright eyes, which were Red like her hair, peered out from beneath her curls and entranced me with their steady gaze. For some unknown reason, her eyes didn’t frighten me. Instead, they captivated me. I was afraid to look away, scared that they would disappear if I did.

  I watched, as her lips formed words before they were delivered to me on sweet breath. They reminded me of two trembling Red poppy petals unfurling against the rough wind.

  “You chose not to help him.” She seemed to reaffirm the empty guilt in the hollow of my stomach. Like the boy, her words seemed older than she appeared.

  I couldn’t defend myself, how could I? I didn’t have the words it took to justify watching him suffer.

  Thankfully, the little girl did not wait for my pitiful answer. She crossed over to the boy and pulled him alongside her into the river. Although he looked uncertain at first, he followed her without hesitation. Side-by-side, their feet, hers dark and his pale, entered the Red river and then disappeared under its surface. Laughing, she let go of his hand and I watched as he escaped the White.

  The White fog left the land in the early afternoon. It seemed to drain out of the boy. It left his body and slipped away into the river, where it churned and mixed with the Red and was washed away.

  The swirls of Red and White in the water looked chaotic. They each tried to overcome one another in a tense dance that seemed to end only when the White succumbed. The river sighed with relief and finally looked peaceful. Its waters were Red as they had always been, as if nothing had happened. As if I had imagined it all. Noticeably translucent after the ordeal, the boy appeared weak in the midst of the roaring Red.