All That Is Red Read Free

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.
    The little girl beckoned me, motioning me to the river. Compelled to follow, I found myself in the river. We waited. We all did. I held my breath and watched the water where it grabbed at my
ankles. I waited for the iciness of the White to disperse and for the White to wash off me as well. I waited to feel, but nothing happened.
    Suddenly, I ran out of the river, as if its waters had burnt me, and for all I knew they could have and I wouldn’t have even felt it. I wanted to cry; to feel my eyes burn with tears, but
I couldn’t. Instead, I was forced to stand there numb and cold, as the White gripped at me. I couldn’t escape it.
    I felt the girl’s hand on my shoulder. Her graceful feet made no noise against the colorless sands of the riverbank and it came as a surprise when I felt her fingers touch my shoulder. In
her eyes, a mixture of fear and worry swam about, as she wordlessly took my hands in her own small, childlike ones.
    I touched cold metal in a sheath of the softest leather and I tasted bitter irony in the fact that such an innocent girl could be holding such a horror; a weapon that had the potential to
destroy life. When I looked down upon the blade, its beauty astonished me.
    “It’s beautiful.” The girl softly placed her fingers on lips, silencing me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the blade. With perfect symmetry and alignment, its edge
was a flawless creation of mankind.
    A jolt ran through me, as I saw an image on the surface of the blade. I looked past the silvery gray to a pale figure with a blanched face. Its thin straggly hair grabbed at the face it held
drowning in the White air around it. The whites of its eyes were large and bloodshot. Suspended in them were two pinpoints of black, seemingly captured and trapped amongst all the White. I snatched
my hands away from the blade and if it hadn’t been for the little girl’s hands beneath my own, I would have dropped it in fright. Bubbling and fighting fruitlessly against what I did
not know, a scream was trapped in my throat.
    “You saw something.” The girl’s words weren’t a question.
    “Take it away from me,” I said, my words coming out strangled. Though I begged, she only pushed it further into my hands.
    “Take it.” She closed my fingers over the sheath and I felt my joints protest in earnest.
    “Take it. The choice is yours and will always be yours. It has always been yours,” she said. “Only you can help yourself. You know that. But, right now, they need your help
more than you know.”
    I stared back at her, expecting her to