Seeing Red

Red. He’d seen true red in his lifetime, had gone without drinking or vice for a week to save up enough to buy a tube of red pigment, and when he’d first dared to squeeze a dollop onto his palette, his world had turned upside down.

No one had ever told him red could be alive -- or dead.

“What have you done?” He looked up at Søren, blue eyes solemn. Then he looked back down at the blood on his hands from where he’d pressed them against the wounds in Nick’s lifeless body.

Søren lowered the gun with shaking hands. His eyes were still wild with the chemicals. “He owed me money, man. You get that, don’t you? I know you were a good kid, Nicky, but --”

“I’m not Nick,” Dylan said. “He is.”

The red kept drip, drip dripping from Nick’s body. In the first few moments, when Nick had been gasping for breath, trying to say his brother’s name, the red had been alive, but now...now it was dead, and sticky, and getting cold.

Someone else - Torin? Brain? - said, “The cops are coming.”

Dylan said, “I’m not leaving him.”

“I gotta get the hell outta here --”

Dylan lifted his head, pinned Søren with a glare. “No! You - you’re staying right here, understand?”

Søren started to back up, and for the first time, Dylan understood what it meant to see red.

He was still seeing red when the police pulled him off his cousin thirty seconds later. He still had red on his hands when they took him down to the station, and he didn’t know why the red was blurring and browning and drying, and he didn’t know why he was crying.

(284 words)