Page 303 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

Rivers of red flowed across the pages—in crayon, colored
pencil, charcoal, watercolor, oils. Formless and vague at first,
the shapes began to cohere from the bottomless crimson,
crowding the singular color into narrow streams moving
around emergent black figures. My mind mirrored the
images with forgotten recollections, and I heard the softest
words tumble from the broken spaces that once bridged my
earliest memories.
“I’m so sorry, tiny one. But what must be done must be
done, and you are a prodigy, this much I can see plainly. I’ve
made so many, but they were all just distorted versions of
the archetype, the source. You. Clearly, there will have to be
others, as I can never be sure, but you are the darkest flower
I’ve ever picked. Your eyes are older than the skin that
proffers them, burning through the eons, to arrive here, now.
Your every bone, each scrap of flesh, each dutiful organ—all
for the sake of those black eyes. But I found you first. Poor
child. You will never forgive me the terrible things I will do
to you. Nor should you. I can barely forgive myself.”
These were primal memories, buried beneath the earth
and frozen in stone. And yet here they were, naked and
wincing in the light of recollection. These drawings were
from the time before she came to me, and yet the voice .
. . it was the same, and it wasn’t. The mystery of her was
different, sorrowful.
Turning the page, I was confronted by a lone shadow,
small against the rising tide of scarlet and darkness. Each
subsequent drawing showed the red flowing into the tiny
silhouette, pouring down its minute throat. Finally, the little
thing had taken on the color of pages and pages of straining
shapes and the red that drowned them. Of course, the tiny
shadow was me. And the red was bloodshed, a sea of it. It
had filled me up—become me. Made me.
Suddenly, the room changed, the silence flinched.
Something moved against the carefully woven cobwebs
that outlined an absence that had endured decades. A voice,
306 | Mark Anzalone