Red in the Year of the Wooden Horse

by Jeanne Mack

Etienne Girardet

November 2014

Cherry angiomas are usually found on people 30 or older, but I’ve had a red dot under my right eyelid since I was born. My mom once told me it was the intersection of capillaries, right under the surface of my skin, overlapping so tightly that eventually their coloration piled up to shine through. It was a round and painless miniature red spot. For most of 2014, I woke up each morning nervous that it might’ve shrunk or faded, nervous that I might have lost my fleck of red.

In our new apartment in Brooklyn, Alyssa’s things stayed in boxes. She was back home, with family — with her dad who’d just been diagnosed with brain cancer that his doctors said was likely terminal. I draped a scarf over her boxes and moved our stuff together to the bigger room — the one that was supposed to be for her. I started looking for a roommate.

***

Alyssa and I had known that 2014, the year of the Wooden Horse, would be full of turmoil for people born in 1990 — like we were. We’d sent each other links to Zodiac blogs that speculated how the turmoil would manifest. This was well before November hit.

I’d seen somewhere that the color red was a means of driving away bad luck. Wearing red could reverse evil and bring prosperity. A red belt, red socks, red necklace, red underwear — red of any kind, the site suggested. I let this information take root, deep inside my mind. I texted Alyssa the reddest things I could find.

If I wasn’t going to live with Alyssa, I wanted to at least find a friend of a friend — not a complete stranger — for a roommate. I posted pictures of the spare room on my Facebook wall and tried to sound witty and upbeat in the captions. Someone I knew from high school responded that a friend of his was looking for a place to live.

The potential new roommate, Paul, wore teal — not red, I noticed reflexively — the first time we met. Outside of a bar, about a week before Thanksgiving. He was on the phone near the door, and I recognized him from Facebook.

“Okay, I’ll call you back after, let you know,” Paul said to whoever was on the other end before he hung up.

My favorite red bracelet split in two on the subway; beads streamed off my wrist onto the busy train’s floor. I saw and heard them spill around people’s shoes, and under one tired woman’s loaded bags that she’d set between her knees. The beads rolled underneath the line of seats and I couldn’t pick them up. I watched the red scatter and go.

Red like bright cardinal feathers tucked, forgotten, into holly bushes brimming with red berries. Red leather gloves on polished women with matching red wool hats and my red ketchup spurting out faster than expected, dripping onto the picnic table in Madison Square Park where it was getting too cold to sit outside for lunch. I began to hold anything and everything red I saw or remembered in my head, folding and tucking and weaving it all together.

Paul had much less stuff than Alyssa or I did. His belongings fit easily into the smaller room, the one with the sliding window. On the wall near his bed, he hung a ridiculously oversized Texas flag that a friend of his had taken — which sounds nicer than stolen — from a model home. The flag’s red stripes were fading on one side from what looked like years of sun exposure.

Alyssa came to visit every few weeks and we slept in the same bed. She said she had to get out, away from her house, back to the city. Her family was eroding in front of her. We lay on our backs, side by side, not sleeping. I traced the outlines of red brake lights — red, red, red I counted — coming through the window, and asked about it. Is he in pain, does he talk about it, what’s the doctor say, what’s your mom think?

Red held more power than other colors. It could bring a line of cars to a halt, like at the stoplight in front of where I grew up.

I had so many questions for her. I wanted to know the answers to everything without having to ask her out loud. I’d never felt weird asking Alyssa anything before, I’d always just known the answers. Are you ok? She didn’t know how to reassure me that she wasn’t.

The roommate, Paul, and I realized we were both runners. We’d been at the same exact invitationals in college, racing along the same lines painted onto a red, rubberized oval, just minutes apart. So we ran together, our cheeks frozen — burning scarlet, and our breath fogging the air in front of us.

Paul and I ran the slushy, icy streets out to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, late at night when nobody else was there. It would’ve been completely dark without lit skyscrapers radiating from the edges of either shore. They gave us beacons of burnt tangerine light to orient our bodies toward. Wind whipped into and through our torsos and thighs the whole way back to the apartment.

Alyssa’s dad came to visit New York a few months before he got sick. He’d been giddy at the pace of the city — at the brightness and busyness. He’d snapped photos with a disposable camera from the backseat of a cab; when they were developed, the pictures were almost meaningless — a reddish blur of traffic and buildings.

Red like the ripest strawberries you’ve ever seen growing in a field far away from the highway, in rows, in Rhode Island. The memories of red popsicles in summer, red dye staining lips and gums and teeth. Red pens marking up my fourth-grade writing.

Alyssa’s dad had come to our seventh-grade class wearing a mullet wig to give a presentation on memory. I remember being shocked Alyssa didn’t seem embarrassed at all. It made me want to be best friends with her even more.

I flew to California on a trip that had been planned for months. Stayed with an ex who I couldn’t force myself to stop fucking and/or talking to and instantly felt sure I needed to not be there. I wanted to be back in New York. The ex went to classes and work and left me to go for runs through the sunny streets on my own. I tripped and fell on the sidewalk near Manhattan Beach and bright blood gushed out from the knees of both my legs as I walked back and it was exactly then that I realized that place and that person was nowhere near my home.

Paul didn’t respond to any of my texts while I was gone. And I didn’t even tell Alyssa I was there, until after I got back. I knew she hated that X.

I saw red as an ethereal shroud of protection. I imagined the color abstracted from any one specific object, floating around Alyssa or her dad as a vibrant cloud of purity, so strong and shocking it would scare away any darkness. It wasn’t afraid to get its palms smeared with evil.

The restaurant where I worked weekends had a wine tasting. Our manager brought bottles of red out with their labels covered. “Let the liquid into your mouth, let it swirl and cover your tongue, seep through your taste buds, flirt down the back of your throat and inhale the taste of it through your nose, then deposit the liquid into your spitting glasses.” No chance I spat back out.

Alyssa’s dad’s tumor was big. Aggressive. And based on what the doctors said, along with everything she’d read on her own — prognosis for survival was not more than 15 months. A year more likely.

We never said out loud, or in writing: he will be dead within a year. We couldn’t.

Red like the almost-venetian red Welcome written in cursive on our neighbor’s doormat. Lighter than crimson. Closer to coquelicot or rosso corso. Not quite carnelian, carmine, auburn, or oxblood. Maybe vermillion.

I ran more and more miles with Paul. On the Hudson River bike path to Columbia from Brooklyn, a Ziploc bag of gummy bears in his pocket and our metro cards in mine. Halfway up Manhattan in the dark we glanced across the black water and saw fire. An apartment complex in New Jersey crashing to the ground, so brightly. We stopped and sat on the cold cement path — eating only the red gummy bears and watching the flames on the other side of the river. Neither of us could look away.

Red like firetrucks, like fire hydrants, fire extinguishers. But not fire itself.

“A lot of it has collapsed,” the New York Times said the next day. “If it had been made of cinder block and concrete, we wouldn’t have this problem.”

I wasn’t sure about that last sentence. Things could always collapse, no matter what.

I painted my nails a different shade of red each time they chipped, painted over the last coat without bothering to take it off. I had a stratum of redness going down six layers deep.

I took the F line almost exclusively that year; I sat by myself beneath smudged windows.

The F line logo was orange, not red.

I went shopping for a friend’s birthday and found a red-painted Russian nesting doll and unstacked and restacked each shell of red in the store at least twice before buying it. I told myself I’d mail it to Alyssa as a surprise. I don’t remember if I ever did.

The year of the Wooden Horse ended before either Alyssa or I noticed — we were too busy, we’d stopped noticing the things we used to care about. It became the year of the Wooden Sheep, but neither of us bothered to look that up. We didn’t send each other a single Zodiac blog.

Red streamers decorated bodega windows for Valentine’s Day. Red teddy bears held red boxes of chocolate and red roses in their fuzzy paws.

I felt sick when I realized I’d gone a day or even two without thinking about Alyssa or her dad. Or talking to her. It wasn’t fair that I could forget her — not her, but her situation — entirely, live a normal life, and she was stuck there every second. The guilt of it made me slip further away.

Paul and I were gifted weed by a neighbor at the pub down the block from our apartment — the one with the red awning. A nug folded expertly into a napkin. We laughed at the absurdity of it, our good fortune. We both went to the bathroom before leaving and while we were gone the waiter cleared the table. I almost begged to go through the trash, desperate to reclaim our luck.

I got another piercing and my ear turned inward, inflamed. Skin grew over the back of the metal clasp into a hard, leaking bump. I called Alyssa and cried, knowing that what I had to do was break through the angry skin to dig out the back and take the earring away. My fingers shaking on the phone, shaking as they traced the spot. I hated myself for crying to her.

Alyssa’s dad had brain surgery, to try and pry away the tumor, and the very next day he wanted to go for a hike. Just like the old him. A marathoner, a triathlete. Alyssa was determined to believe he wasn’t dying.

I used red lipliner to fill in the cherry angioma under my eye when I got ready for work in the mornings — to make it brighter, and more visible.

I dreamt I met a foreign diplomat and his wife on a bench in Stuyvesant Park and they wanted to take me far away, to Paris. They told me they’d pick me up in their town car and I wore an ankle-length red dress to meet them.

Alyssa and I stopped talking on the phone. We started going days, even weeks without being in touch. I made myself busy with three jobs, I didn’t want to call and not know what to say. It was easier to not think about it than to feel bad I wasn’t doing more.

Distant friends texted or emailed me wanting to know how she was doing, asking for updates on her dad, and I struggled to respond. I no longer knew exactly what she was thinking or feeling at any moment. I no longer knew her life better than my own.

I ate tomatoes every day after Alyssa had mentioned plant-rich diets can help prevent cancer. Then I read that some studies show that nightshades might be bad for you too — possibly linked to cancerous cells. Tomatoes are a type of nightshade. I threw out the produce in the fridge and went back to eating Starbursts. I ate around the other, non-red colors. I picked out the red ones and piled the wrappers neatly in a stack on the kitchen counter.

The nights that I took a taxi home from the restaurant were especially late ones, past one or two in the morning. But Paul was always up, the TV on, his eyes shooting open when I stepped inside. I sat down beside him.

When I walked home from the restaurant in spring after my dinner shift, the breeze turned cold and bit through any and all fabric. At the apex of the bridge, my fingertips were too numb to change the song playing in my headphones. But views of the bay bleeding into bight, becoming the Atlantic, dazed me. Everything blinked and spun against the charcoal sky.

I would have believed in those moments New York City was the end of the world, the last place before land stopped entirely, and there was only water. Maybe this was what flat-earthers had seen, this was what convinced them. I stared hard at what seemed like the edge of the dark water.

Paul was still awake when I got home.

Depending on the type of IUD you get, you either have unnoticeable or extremely heavy periods. I didn’t want additional hormones in my body; I opted against the unnoticeable period. Blood and lining fell out of me in unimaginable buckets each month.

I wandered the streets by myself on Easter, had it off from work. Each crowded corner had tubs of flowers sitting in an inch of water, and a person loudly hawking them. I remembered walking the streets with Alyssa, so deep in our own world we barely noticed any of the people around us.

Paul kissed me. In the middle of our kitchen, in front of the refrigerator.

I sat awake in bed after, wanted to call Alyssa and shout and maybe sing about it, but there was no way that would’ve been fair, right? Why rub it in that I was able to be happy? I didn’t tell her what had happened for weeks.

Headlines from the newsstand near my second job’s office blared — in what might as well have been red ink — “Bad Year for New York City.” By March 2015, there had been 59 murders, up 20 percent from 2014 in the first two months of that year.

There was no red at all in any of the pictures or photographs that illustrated the articles about violence.

I ran under the arch at Grand Army Plaza on my way to Prospect Park in the middle of the morning. I thought about the red headband Alyssa had almost always worn when we ran together and wondered whether she had it with her at home or not.

Paul and I went on a first date. I wore a tight skirt and brushed my hair and we took the 2 train to get there. He looked at me as we waited for the subway. I looked into the mouth of the black tunnel, searching for a sign of the train light’s glimmer.

The 2 train’s logo was red.

After the date we came home, then went to our separate bedrooms, and closed the doors. Slept by ourselves, just a few feet away from each other, one wall apart, my fingers itching to text or touch him.

I was scanning a dusty consignment store when Alyssa called me crying, hysterically. She’d suddenly, all at once, become isolated and lonely and scared. She said she was miserable and exhausted and didn’t know what to do. My heart dropped when I heard her sobs and it stayed down as I wondered how I allowed her to feel that way. She wasn’t blaming me, she never said anything like that. But still, I felt I needed to apologize for being such a shitty friend. I opened my mouth but it would only let me say “I know, I’m sorry, I know, I know, I know, I’m sorry.” It wasn’t enough, we both knew that.

New York bloomed around me anyway. Poppies budged upward in the small plots of dirt gated off from the sidewalk’s pavement. Laceleaf cropped up in bouquets at florist stands. Spring was always my favorite season in the city.

Alyssa and I were losing each other, drifting the furthest apart we’d ever been. I’d text her and get no response. She was busy at the hospital, or spending time with her dad. But then she’d text me when Paul and I were lying in the sun on our backs on a grassy patch in the thawed-out park and I’d flip my phone over so I didn’t see it lighting up, tell myself I’d remember to respond later.

There was no way to talk the way we used to. About our pimples or terrible bosses or cute coworkers or TV shows. What was I supposed to do to help? How was I okay with not helping?

I saw a painting on the curb of a dazzling red violin and realized I’d never known what violins truly looked like before.

A package of mine got misdelivered and ended up at the UPS warehouse in Maspeth, Queens. Paul thought it was too late at night for me to go alone, so we both went and walked through the jungle-like humidity for over three miles to and from the closest subway. We got off the subway in Queens and my phone died and took our directions with it so we aimlessly wandered the dark streets until we found a hotel with a concierge who joked with us as he drew a shockingly accurate map. It was the most fun I’d had in months.

It drizzled warm summer rain and I opened my bedroom window and let it land on my books and the red leather journal lying on the sill. Alyssa and I had loved to pull our sneakers on and meet for runs along the river in the rain. I got my phone out to text her “I miss you!!” but then saw that was the exact same message I’d sent the past three times.

They poured chemo into his body in Boston and Alyssa was there the whole time, always by his side. She made the trip with her dad by car every few days, whenever it was time for a re-up on the poison.

I forgot to send her pictures of anything red I found. I could barely stand not seeing her, not talking like sisters. But it was inescapable. More and more silence passed between us.

We had run together every day before she left. No days off we told each other. Now I ran with Paul almost exclusively. Or by myself. Sometimes twice a day, just to feel my legs pumping and arms sliding, like at least I was in control of something.

I couldn’t bring myself to throw away anything red. It didn’t dawn on me this was how people became hoarders. The bottle cap of an iced tea I drank months ago was comforting in the bottom of my purse.

Paul woke up with a nosebleed in August and red droplets trailed from his bedroom door to the bathroom. Dripping down his fingers, his wrists, trickling off his elbows into tiny puddles on the floor.

I made a point to call Alyssa more. I wanted to be better.

Alyssa told me about a family vacation they all took to Florida, how it had been so nice and good. But by the time they got back from the trip, her dad’s mobility was limited. They put him in a wheelchair and I imagined Alyssa trying to bravely smile at him as it happened, seeing him slide even further from his healthy self.

One day, the walkways of Washington Square Park were covered in red chalk. Something about a pop-up boutique. I strode straight through the dusty color, hoped it would stick to the soles of my shoes and leave footprints of red wherever I stepped.

At the end of summer, I shrank away from Paul. I couldn’t come up with a reason why. I made myself scarce and sat for hours in the community garden where red zinnias dropped their fall petals into the dirt at my feet.

I missed Paul, even as I retreated. I didn’t tell Alyssa I’d stopped texting or talking to him. I missed her too.

Her dad fell into a coma.

I looked for red, like the stop sign on the telephone pole next to our apartment building, where Paul’s shirt caught on one of the infinite staples and tacks pushed into the wood when we passed it on our first run together. Red like the lining of the shoes that had been inside the package we retrieved from Maspeth. Red like the curve of the sun inversely peaking below the Verrazzano. Red like the sirens of the policeman who had pulled me over in Alyssa’s hometown less than a year after I got my license because I was on my cell phone. Red like the lipstick my Mom wore to church on Sunday mornings when we still went. Red like tulips shining in July light red like a woodpecker’s soft feathered head red like the tip of a match before it’s struck red like the fire extinguisher hanging behind glass in the hallway in Brooklyn red like my Christmas stocking red like the inside of a blood orange red like the suit of hearts or diamonds.

I was in the theater near union square seeing the movie about Steve Jobs — the one with Seth Rogen — when it happened. My phone buzzed and lit up, I left the theater to answer.

Alyssa’s dad was gone.

It wasn’t Alyssa who called. Another friend. His voice cracking as he explained.

I booked a bus back to where Alyssa and I had grown up for the morning after I heard, but I overslept and the subway was so fucked that I scrambled out to the street to get a $50 cab instead and then missed the bus by 8 minutes and sank to the floor of Port Authority near someone begging for change and wanted so badly to scream GODDAMNIT until my throat split.

Red like her mother’s eyes at the wake, red like the blush on my mom’s cheeks. Is Alyssa OK? Should we do something for her? everyone asked me like I knew. Red stained glass at the church. Making dull red shadows fall across us all.

I cried and hated that I was crying and swallowed and dialed Paul, crying again, and he dropped what he was doing. Bought me a train ticket from his computer right then and told me not to pay him back.

Red like the digital minutes ticking down on the highrise above Union Square when I walked out of the theater.

Alyssa had asked me to pack my black dresses and tights for her because she had nothing there that she wanted to wear. I brought her every piece of black clothing I had. It was the first time I felt useful. Carried it all in a red duffel bag.

The whole time I was at the wake, I wished I could hover outside my body, cut to the front of the line snaking down the sidewalk, bust Alyssa away from the receiving line. Pop her into my passenger seat, drive to our favorite bakery in her hometown, or better, our favorite ice cream place in New York. Get two scoops of red bean.

I drove down the streets that we’d taken to get to high school track meets and mutedly remembered the wave of nerves and giddiness that accompanied the bus rides there and back.

At the funeral, I sat with my parents who looked around with wide eyes while Alyssa cried as she entered the church and held both arms around her mother, who gasped and wailed.

I steered a rental car to follow the procession from the church to the cemetery, but lost the person in front of me along the way and somehow didn’t recognize the town I was in. I pulled into a gas station to ask the attendant where I was and a single-file line of a dozen other cars with their hazards flashing followed me into the parking lot — confusion on the drivers’ faces. Alyssa would have laughed so hard.

I came back to the city and went straight into Paul’s room and sat down on the ground, leaning against the wall, to talk. He was moving out. But we would start actually dating.

Eventually, I moved too. Wanted a new place. A fresh start.

I carted my things away, shuffled them to a storage place and into boxes. I separated the keys off my red keychain. Then I changed my mind and strung them back on, and left it all on the counter inside the apartment. I closed the door behind me.

On the sidewalk I turned and looked at the building, hating and loving the place. It was cursed. And not cursed. Made of bricks that weren’t actually red, but brown or purple. Most of them were chipped along the edges, and crumbling. I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

November, 2015

Alyssa wrote about the moment her father passed, about how she streamed outside after it happened. In the yard, she felt him everywhere around her, in the air, on her arms, against her hair. I knew what time of day it had been when it happened and I imagined the sun setting in front of her, resolute streaks through the sky. In my mind, the streaks weren’t red — in fact they didn’t register as a specific color. They didn’t consist of any color at all.

I let red go, it fell smoothly through my fingers. I threw away the bottle cap I’d saved for almost a year, I painted my nails green. Chartreuse. I stopped checking in the mirror to see if my cherry angioma was smaller, or dimmer. And red became just another thing to miss.

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Jeanne Mack lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., where she is an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, and editor-in-chief of Thin Air Magazine. She is the winner of the 2017 Charles E. Bull Creative Writing Award for poetry, and has work forthcoming in Mid-American Review as a finalist for their Fineline competition, judged by Diane Seuss. Mack has been previously published in Dime Show Review, Citius Mag, and Flag Live.