THE BOY IN THE RED RED ROOM
ria sebastian kealey
His room was not always red. He was sure of this. He could picture it – once, it had white walls and wood floors, and then he arrived. He entered that room and sat on that floor and looked at all that warm, blank light, and he cried. When he was finished weeping, he wiped his eyes and arose. It was only when he looked down to see a dainty rosette of red splayed out on the floorboard, then another – then another – that he realised his nose was bleeding. He looked at his hands and realised he had soiled his sleeve, smearing a broad rivulet of blood across it when he’d roughly swiped his tears away. No matter. He made a mental note to buy detergent.
He didn’t. The bloody streak rusted into his cuff permanently. He didn’t mind it. Sometimes he would wear that shirt and pretend he got these stains from working with his hands, like a mechanic. Yes, that’s it, he thought. I am the mechanic for some great organic machine. I tune and feed and fix it and I will never let it die. Then he remembered how pale and dainty his hands were, how slender his fingers, how uncalloused… he buried them in his pockets.
Still, he would repeat it to himself. I am the mechanic for some great organic machine. I tune and feed and fix it and I will never let it die.
The room was not always red. He was sure of this, because he could remember how it happened. He’d known what he’d wanted – clean, bright space, breeze, simplicity. But he found himself gravitating towards the crimsons and garnets of the world. The airy slash of a scarf. The warm brush of a maroon curtain. His mother’s painting, hung up in the corner above the cherry-wood desk. It was automatic – at flea markets his fingers would dance over racks of rags and snag on a texture, the object inevitably revealing itself as another riff on the theme. Red, born from pure sensation.
And it didn’t stop, this warming, with the soft kiss of cherry velvet or the caress of rust-toned silk. He found himself sweltering, tucked up in his den with blankets tacked over the windows and red light emanating from below his door. He found himself squinting at the sun and wondering why it stung so white. He’d covered most of his walls by then – drapery and collage, shrines of William Blake watercolours ripped from secondhand art directories; still, glimpses of white walls gleamed like bones in a carcass. They didn’t upset him. He simply considered them unfinished, waiting patiently for Frankenstein to rob the right grave and fill their open wounds.
He felt he was patching up some great beast from the inside, staring up at a ribcage-cathedral and restoring the internal view to what it should be – red, and dim, and living. I am the mechanic for some great organic machine. Its flesh was made of brocade and dark wood and vermillion. He was its custodian; he was it. I tune and feed and fix it and I will never let it die. Its hungers were sensory, intimate. Its palette was growing ever-more cultivated. He lived. It fed.
One morning he woke in his red red room to the sound of knocking. There was a postman at his door. I’m not expecting anything, he tried to tell them. They didn’t care. The package wasn’t addressed to anything but his location. All they needed was for him to sign his name. He sighed, signed something barely legible, and retreated back inside.
When he opened that unassuming box, he found two things. One was a note written in handwriting that made his skin crawl, abrasively capitalised and carelessly scrawled – I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT HER BACK. The other was shrouded in newspaper and mummified in tape. He knew what it was without needing to look. He didn’t want to look. But his hands were moving, they were unwrapping, undressing her, they were revealing this mystery as no mystery at all, just an artefact of his history –
She was a porcelain bunny rabbit, blue forget-me-knots tattooed over her haunches. She was poised as if sniffing the air, so beautifully-formed you could almost see her nose twitch. She fit perfectly in the palm of his hand. He didn’t need to hold her to know this; he knew her heft, her ridges, her curves, by heart.
The boy did not want to touch her. He left her in the box, surrounded by a nest of torn paper, placed the whole thing on his dresser, and tried to go about his day. He would set her out of his mind, trudge down the street in search of more red for his bower. It succeeded for just a second when he saw it – one of the great Its, the kind that made him shiver in excitement when he spotted them in the back of musty antique stores or half-concealed in a heap on a market floor. This it was a floor lamp, as tall as him and crowned in a shade of burgundy brocade, dripping with golden tassels. It was sensual, imposing, almost erotic. He wanted it. He needed it.
– and then he thought about Her, sitting there innocuously while the light from his beautiful lamp reflected off of her glassy skin, and he shuddered. The joy was gone. He still paid for it, held it to him like a dance partner as he walked home where he could find its rightful nook and plug it in. But that night, as he completed his rituals and made himself snug, he could not bring himself to turn it on. I’m just savouring it, he told himself. Enjoying it as an object before I enjoy it for its light. In the corner, he thought he saw the bunny rabbit regarding him knowingly.
His room reddened. There were less and less flashes of those white wounds on his walls. The floor was bandaged by a wine-coloured rug, the furniture clothed in merlot and vermillion. But the bunny interrupted his cozy cohesion. She sat in the corner, minute and obstinate. His eyes snagged on her demure form over and over. Alone in his red red room, he dreamed of teeth.
The butcher told him it would take a few days to fill his order. On a particularly bitter morning later that week, they handed him a package tied neatly with brown paper and twine. It was heavier than he expected, sagging in his hands. And the pelt? They handed him another package, this one lighter and softer under his touch. Thank you. He couldn’t help but feel, as he hurried home, that the lumps under his arm were some bastard babe, sure to attract judgemental stares. Nobody looked. He retreated back into his den.
He was trembling as he undid the ties, the damp paper leaking small droplets of blood and viscera onto his kitchen counter. He’d never seen a rabbit carcass in the flesh. He splayed it out, its impotent limbs flopping at unnatural angles. But the delicate rose of its flesh was beautiful. The butcher had skinned, cleaned and prepped it for him, so he had no need to deal with fluids and offal. What he had in front of him was a rabbit reduced to meat – no animation, no instinct, just a body readied for consumption.
He returned to the smaller bundle, the pelt. This wasn’t fuel, wasn’t food – this was the distinction between the creature and the world, separated from the being it protected. He laid it flat, skin-side down, and ran his hands over it. It was impossibly soft. He choked back a sob, and pressed his palm into it more firmly. There was the slightest amount of movement between the outermost layer of down and the tissues that once connected it to muscle, a miniscule shift when he petted it that hinted at the animal it had been flayed from. It felt viscerally real in the face of all the philosophy he’d projected onto it. Thank you, I’m sorry, he murmured, and again: Thank you, I’m sorry.
He had a ritual to complete.
It started with preparing to roast a rabbit. He rubbed the carcass with salt and lemon, stuffed its cavity with rosemary, thyme, and sage, brushed it in olive oil, and laid it belly-down in the oven. The pelt needed to be fleshed. He had learned this word in the time he’d spent agonising over how to be rid of the bunny, researching exorcism, cleansing rites, grief… he landed on butchery, but he wanted it sacred. He had no intention of tanning the hide; he wanted it to rot. But he wanted it to rot cleanly, so it needed to be fleshed.
He’d wanted a bone tool for it, but they were hard to come by. What he did have was a knife, unsuited to the purpose but acceptable as long as he moved delicately. It whispered as he moved it across the skin, scraping away any meat, fat, connective tissue. With each pass, the creamy white and pink of the underside of the pelt gave way to more and more cool, iridescent skin. He knew his eyes were so used to pools of red that they perceived any hint of another colour more potently, but he could swear that the skin had the faintest tinge of blue.
When the pelt was clean, he went to collect the bunny. She was perched exactly where he’d left her on that first day before she became a haunting, surrounded by a paper burrow on his dresser. He could smell the rabbit roasting in the next room, its heady animal scent making his mouth water. Her elegantly-painted eye appraised him.
He was alone in his red nest with her. He had to explain, confess, atone for what he was about to do.
You don’t belong with me anymore. He paused for a response, and received none.
You interrupt my redness. You are a great question mark hovering over my instincts. You belong to my history and infect my present.
She, in her blueness, said nothing.
The rabbit was ready. Shredding the meat off the bones burned his hands, but he offered a prayer of gratitude for every singed fingertip. Thank you, I’m sorry, thank you, I’m sorry. Eventually he had a pile of fragrant meat on one side and a stack of bones, shining with fat, on the other. He scrubbed them under the tap until they shone not with drippings but with their own pure, innate whiteness. Then he gathered the bones, the pelt, and the bunny, and walked out into the night.
He’d dug the grave already. Next to that hole, the darkness making its depth exponentially greater, he knelt in the dirt and laid the pelt down. He placed the bones atop it, femur, spine, skull. He saved the ribcage for last. It had been hard to isolate – after picking the meat from its bones, he’d had to snap its joints, feel that sickening crunch under his hands, to be able to hold its ribcage alone. But he had it now, and he took a moment to hold it above his head and peer at the moon through its empty cavity, the fragile arcs of its ribs tenderly framing its luminosity. The bunny was in his lap, her porcelain body reflecting the moonlight uncannily akin to the skeleton’s gleam. He knew this was their last exchange.
He nestled her in that ribcage, her rigid form taking the place of the creature’s once-beating heart. She did not blink, did not twitch, as he folded the pelt over her and bundled her up with the bones and lowered her into the earth. All he could see now was a misshapen heap, a porcelain bunny hidden in its heart.
Thank you. I’m sorry. His spade scraped the soil.
Thank you. I’m sorry. The dirt thudded so softly against the fur.
Thank you. I’m sorry. If he squinted, he could imagine it was asleep in its den.
Thank you. I’m sorry, and one last shovelful tucked her in.
Returning to the doorway of his red red room, he hesitated. In the rosy glow of his domain, the dirt under his nails was dark and ugly. But this room was his, and found no fault in him. He crossed the threshold. The dresser that had held the blue impurity now waited, breathless, for something new. Tomorrow, he promised it, and collapsed into bed. Tomorrow I’ll feed you. He slept, and his dreams were hungry.
