“Red” is about grief and loss and coming out of that grief through partnership and love. It was inspired by a prompt to write a piece about color.
The sand was burning underneath the feet of Miranda and Lile. The red dirt flowed in between the cuts of their toes and they were unable to tell if they were in water or on land. They had traveled as far east as they could afford to, and they had intended to reach the end of the world. When they found it they just sat and watched the sunset. The sun looked like it was on fire. “But it always does,” Miranda told Lile. “No matter where you are, the sun goes down slow at first and then all at once.”
It wasn’t the distant sun that lit up the sky and was fading down to leave them in utter darkness that confused them, but the hot coals of the earth below them that was shocking. “Have you ever felt sand this hot?” Miranda asked Lile. “Never in my life have I ever questioned the very stability of the ground we are sitting on as much as I do now,” she told him. “I fear it might fall beneath us at any moment.”
Red was the color of their skin. It was the color of their home they had left behind, and the color of the plane they flew east on. It was the color of the red-bean ice cream they ate on movie nights, and the color of the light that flickered on Bowery from the fading bulb that kept them up at night. And it was the color of the truck Noah played with the night he died, and now it was the color of the sand they were burning on.