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All That Is Red

Page 14

by Anna Caltabiano


  I rushed down the flights of stairs. With each level I passed, the noise increased and the Red came another step closer to victory. By the time I was on the ground, there was no doubt that the Red was going to win.

  The White was starting to retreat and members of it fled the city. Those who stayed and fought courageously, fought until their death. The Red was, ultimately, victorious.

  There were shouts and yells of delight as everyone realized that the war was over and we had conquered the White. The remaining unfeelings were banished. Most would likely never show their faces again.

  The ground was strewn with bodies and the gutters flowed with fresh blood. Our footsteps were painted for all to see with the pink mingled blood of both the dead White and the dead Red. The bodies all looked the same. I couldn’t tell which had been unfeelings in life and which had been members of the Red cause. They were all pale and in death, they were united.

  It was then I saw Gerrard and called out to him. “Were there many casualties?”

  “On both sides,” he said. “But that’s only what could be expected with a war like this.”

  “Devonport?” I asked, finding myself worried for her for the first time.

  “Right there.” Gerrard pointed and I saw her helping pile the dead bodies into a heap.

  “And Nalin?”

  “He didn’t come. He’s still on crutches. But he readied us for the war with the information you and the commander logged for us.”

  “The boy? He made it back?”

  “Yes and, as expected, he was perfectly fine. He told us of what had happened to you and he called for war early.”

  “Where is he?” I asked, already looking around for him.

  “Probably celebrating his new found victory.” Gerrard grinned. “I don’t know, but I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

  I thanked him and started looking for the boy on my own. I asked random people where the boy was, but no one knew.

  “He’s probably somewhere celebrating,” they all said. That made me look for him even harder, but he was nowhere to be found.

  At last, I found him by a pile of carcasses. “Was this what you wanted?” I asked him.

  “More or less,” he grinned. “I could probably have done without the blood though.” He started to laugh, but instead he grimaced.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he was quick to say.

  I looked at him. I knew him well enough to know that something was troubling him.

  “Nothing that you have to worry about,” he insisted.

  I looked at him again and it was only then that I realized there was blood on his shirt. “That’s not your blood, is it?”

  He was silent.

  “Oh, God,” I heard myself say. “Call a nurse ...” I started yelling, but the boy cut me off.

  “It’s too late,” he said. “Don’t ruin the victory for them.”

  “What are you saying? That gash on your chest can’t be that deep.”

  “But the one on my neck is.” When he turned to look at me, I saw the cut on the side of his neck. He had already lost a lot of blood. I knew he was right in saying that he didn’t have long to live, but I didn’t want to believe it.

  “We can get help. Maybe it’s not too late ...” But the boy and I both knew the truth. “There are so many things you haven’t done yet. You’re not old enough to die.” By now, I was just blabbering hysterically.

  “But I’m old enough to have lived,” he said. “And that’s what counts.”

  I wish I could have felt something at those words; sadness, terror, anything. But I was still numb.

  “You know, I finally killed The Pure One,” I said, telling him all the things I needed to tell him before he died.

  “I had a suspicion that you were the one that the prophecy talked about.” He grinned and I guessed he was trying not to think about the pain. “And did you find what you sought?”

  I tried to laugh, remembering the words he said to me so long ago. It seemed like the distant past, another lifetime.

  “No, I did what I was supposed to do, but I found something better. My humanity.”

  The boy smiled through his pain.

  “And what about you? You never found a name.”

  “I didn’t,” the boy said regretfully. “But maybe I don’t need one, as long as I can remember who I am.” And with that, his breath just stopped.

  He died, as if he had just stopped talking. It didn’t seem like he was gone. He was still looking at me with the same eyes, in the same way he always had. His eyes were filled with love and compassion.

  Though there were cries of celebration and victory, I didn’t feel as though we had won the war. How could I when I had lost the one thing that was the most important to me, the best friend that I ever had? It was the one thing I had never thought I would lose, but now, I realized I had lost a part of myself.

  I felt a wetness running down my cheek. It was a tear. Another one followed it and yet another. I was crying. I felt the burning behind my eyes and in my throat. I felt the heaviness deep within me. Most of all, I felt a sadness so acute and painful that my whole body racked with it.

  It had taken this great loss to learn what I had always subconsciously known. I wasn’t cold and unfeeling like The Pure One, I was human. Although I had thought I couldn’t feel emotions, I had felt them all along. They weren’t something you underwent like an experience. They were a part of you, something you could never lose, as long as you kept your humanity.

  I reached over and closed the boy’s eyes. I would be the last person he ever laid eyes on in this world. The last person he looked upon with such love. And that was when I realized his name. He was Love.

  I wondered why I hadn’t seen it earlier. He was the embodiment of love. He showed it through every one of his actions. He’d had his name and identity all along through his actions. I had just put a name on it. Nothing more.

  I realized just how limiting the human language was. Words can’t fully describe emotions. They can try to label them, but they can’t really define them. People use words to describe things all the time, but maybe emotions are beyond their capacity.

  I stood, looking down at a shell that used to be a human being. The body used to talk, think, and feel. Now it did none of that. Yet the boy looked as though he was only sleeping and he would wake any minute now.

  I felt the tears stream uncontrollably down my face. I felt it all, while the shouts of victory drowned out the sound of my sobbing.

  CHAPTER 17

  “The patient’s awake,” people yelled above my head. “The patient’s awake.” The shouting sounded like battle cries.

  I opened my eyes to the White wash of the plain ceiling above me. The walls were White. The floor was White. Everything was White.

  “How are you feeling, Kate? You just won a war against death,” a nurse said. “If your mother hadn’t found you, you would have bled to death from the cuts you made on your arms. Poor thing, she found you passed out on the floor from lack of blood.”

  She walked over to my bedside table and placed a small glass vase on it. It had one single Red poppy and it stood out from all the White around it. It was a small island of solace in a sea of unfeeling.

  “You like the flower?” the nurse asked, catching me looking at it. “He dropped it off for you,” she turned, pointing to the door.

  The door was already swinging closed, but I thought I saw someone out of the corner of my eye. I sprang out of bed, pulling the IV tubes out of my arm with one yank. I sucked in a breath at the pinch of pain I hadn’t expected and raced through the doors blindly. I heard the nurse coming after me, yelling for me to stop, but I kept running down the hallway.

  I stopped abruptly and the nurse caught up to me, pulling me back toward my bed. I felt her hands grip me and I let her drag me back, but it wasn’t because I had given up. I was completely content with going back now. I had caught a glimpse of something round the
corner. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked a lot like Red hair.

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

  Anna Caltabiano is a child of the transnational cyber punk era. She was born in British colonial Hong Kong and educated in Mandarin Chinese schools before moving to Palo Alto, California; the mecca of futurism. She lives down the street from Facebook in the town where its founders reside, along with the pioneers of Google and Apple. Her high school classmates are themselves an eclectic mix; the lost offspring of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley magnates, aspirational internet entrepreneurs and Stanford philosophy professors. Her writing reflects her concerns for her own generation as it seeks out salvation, meaning, and companionship in online communities, with pop culture as its shared language.

  Having grown up in privileged suburban America, Caltabiano has always felt bewildered by the intense personal pain of which her teenage peers would complain. To her, such anguish seemed like a betrayal of their good fortune; so what exactly was driving these kids lucky enough to be able to devote themselves entirely to self-fulfillment, as opposed to economic survival, to sabotage their lives? Much of Anna Caltabiano’s recent literary focus has been applied to the increasingly common practice of self-mutilation. All That Is Red is her striking effort to explore the ways in which the pressures and the banalities of modern adolescence combine, leading towards dangerous outbursts, designed to stimulate a physical response where an emotional one seems insufficient. All That Is Red is Anna Caltabiano’s portrayal of two young souls searching for the intangible piece that is missing from their lives. Their responses to the challenging predicaments in which they find themselves are typically, youthfully untempered, but no less vital in their contemporary relevance.

 

 

 


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