Red's Heart

Red had asked me a long while ago, why I was the way I was. And I had told her. I had spilled my deepest and darkest secret, hoping that it might drag the fear out of her in an irresistible surge. To press that terror deep into her bones so that my mere presence would have her quivering. And it did. For a while.

The girl in red had become strangely engrossed in the girl named Sarah. More so than it seemed natural. And I loathed it.

Red had taken to calling herself Sarah. The name would whisper from her lips as if she were engraving it into her head. Her stupidity angered me. Her attempts at becoming the girl of the sun had my temper seething in animosity. My snarl ripped through her thoughts. Red’s incessant whispering swallowed in an instant as she gazed at my rage and I flashed my teeth at her.

A soft breeze blew specks of ice around the girl with the red hood. Jack’s frost danced around her in frozen kisses. Red’s knitted heart slipped from the cloak bouncing merrily against her chest. This girl of the beautiful night was not of the sun. She belonged in the darkness. She belonged in the shadows.

My amusement was fuelled by her frightened retreat and a shiver ran down my spine as her eyes began to water. She was as petrified as when she had watched me rip the man’s spine from his body, and oh, I had missed it. The desire was already pumping through my veins. My head tilted back, breathing the delightful perfume of her fear.

My stupid, beautiful Little Red had convinced herself. She was convinced that she had become Sarah. And Red knew that the girl with sunshine locks did not have a happy ending.

The night I had told Red of my terrible secret, she sat at the edge of a precipice. I stalked the trees. I had followed her, as she’d known I would. Slipping through the trees like a ghost, my eyes trained on my prey dressed in red.

The night was particularly beautiful. The moon glowed a rusty crimson in a clear black sky. A rare sight but one that I relished. There was an old Vikingr myth that I had heard. When the moon was red, they believed that it was being eaten by a wolf. How ironic that my story would entail a night like this. Red’s whisper had drifted on the breeze. A simple question, yet her voice was hesitant, as if probing me as to whether it was appropriate for her to ask. I merely tilted my head, my lips widening into a toothy grin.

Long ago there had been a girl. A girl with hair of sunshine and a voice as sweet as a harp’s melody. The girl’s name was Sarah. And I had loved her.

We spoke often of a life together. A life beyond the ones we lived, and off into a land far away. Oh, it was a time where my dreams had been just that. They had been figments of a strange and grotesque life and though it had frightened me, my sun was never too far away.

Until I dreamed of a magnificent red winter.

My sunshine girl could not brighten the darkness that clouded the evil thoughts residing inside me. And so I pushed the girl away. Pushed her so far that I could not catch her in time. Instead, a man saved her. A man she would whisper was her knight.

On the night of a red moon, my beautiful girl of light had become the red sun. They say she was found so deeply pooled in her own blood that they hadn’t realised she was there. Thick crimson crusted over the girl’s wide eyes. The only organ left inside her body. Left inside her so she could see who had torn her open. So she could see that it was me who had reached inside and squeezed my arms into her tiny body, drunk off her piercing scream as I gathered up her organs and painted the white, white walls in red.

They called me a cannibal. A psychopath.

I was an artist.