I fancy redheads.
I revel in freckles.
She was molten, gliding, bubbling lava, and sweat beading her brow. It was 98 and humid on the steaming streets. The hovering overhead fan was merely symbolic, a soft hum against the chatter and ardor. With a flaming mane and an alluring face, she was a pointillist painting, distinct dots, specks, and flecks, red forever—blood spray at a picturesque murder scene, soon arriving.
Her name is unimportant, but it could have been Mary. Bloody Mary. Let’s just call her that.
I am orbiting her. I am in her circle. I am frightfully close to this red planet.
Then kaboom. The gravity of my situation becomes apparent.
Blackness, then the floor, then coming out of it—all those ankles, cigarette butts, peanut shells, and more red. Someone must have helped me to my car. I realized that when I pulled into the driveway. I stepped in the back door bleeding, a royal mess, my scepter bent, a bargain-basement King in a child’s crown.
I was trying to explain, and I sneezed, my nose still bleeding after the beating. And just like that, I exploded, my fraudulent words eviscerated in a bellowing rusty mist. The wall was white and pristine, with nary a nail hole, photo, or fingerprint. And the tablecloth. The curtains, too. All white. Virgins and pure. Lived in but untouched, unloved.
Repainting would be tomorrow’s chore. One of many matters in an inventory of lies to brush over.
All this over some words. Over Mary.
Over a redhead.
She never said she was spoken for. Her fingers were unadorned. Both hands. No silver. No gold. No tan lines of any kind, and she looked as if she bathed in the sun and those freckles—the Milky Way on a clear night. I could not count them if I wanted to, even for a million bucks or the promise of a first kiss.
Then I got sucker punched. Her husband had been running late and my hands were wandering, to be fair.
I’m a sucker for redheads and freckles. Believe it, as I’ve said. And I do have a way with words.
So, all that figures. That all figures…
My wife never got the blood out of the tablecloth. Or her memory.
She has blonde hair, my wife. And skin as white and pristine as museum marble.
My wife lights up the dark, she’s that white.
Her name is Cherry. I call her Red.
All of that, and none of that, though, have I ever figured out.