Fifi versus the world

Adult's Writing

Some of my adult writing has won prizes or been shortlisted in short story competitions, as described in my Literary CV. I have also had a couple of short stories published.

Here's one of my adult short stories. Hope you enjoy it.

Red (Published in Issue #57 of Takahe magazine)

I met my muse in that most prosaic of places, the supermarket. I went in to buy a bottle of Chianti, and there she was: red from tip to toe. Hair like living flame, sunburned limbs, strawberry freckles. She wore a red cotton dress and red sandals. I fell to my knees and kissed her blushing enamel toenails.
"Is this man bothering you?" asked the manager.
My muse shook her head and he scuttled back under his rock.
"Your name, fair scarlet lady?" I asked her.
"Rose," she said.
Of course. I sighed. She was perfect.

I carried her bags outside into the heavenly summer. The pohutakawa had burst into blossom, and the heat pulsated off the pavement and stained the air with its intensity. I find beauty in every season. The russet leaves of autumn, of course. The red noses of winter that peek like scarlet field mice out of their hat and scarf burrows. Fields of flaming wild flowers in spring. But summer time is best, red oozes like sweat from its pores. Red is the most primitive of primaries. The basest of hues. Red is aggressive, punchy, a brawler. It's confident. It walks right up to strangers and says hello. Summer has it in spades.

I took Rose back to my studio, and spread out a red picnic blanket on the floor. We lay and feasted on summer fruits. I fed her with cherries, sweet vine tomatoes, and strawberries by the handful. We drank the Chianti that I had almost forgotten to buy, straight from the bottle. It ran down our chins and made bloodstains on our clothing. I broke open a watermelon and we crunched the flesh from it and licked the juice from each other's fingers. When we had gorged ourselves, I tore off her dress and covered the parts of her that weren't sunburned with jam, gooey handfuls from a giant jar. She was sticky in the summer heat. She lay flushed and sated on the blanket. I grabbed my paints and squeezed out tubes.

I painted a great canvas, with all her shades of red. She was the cocky carmine of a baboon's buttocks. The vermilion of devotion, the scarlet of desire. I spread the hues with my hands onto a canvas as big as the wall.
"Your painting vibrates like Van Goghs' wheat fields," she said.
"Red is the essence of life." I told her. "Never settle for grey."
"Come back to the blanket," she said. "Come and eat this jam off me before a giant blow-fly carries me away."
Instead, I started another canvas. She got angry.
"Stop painting," she demanded, her eyes flashing.
"Magnificent!" I cried, trying to capture her glow.
Her face lit with rage.
"Sublime!"
Her cheeks burned.
"Glorious!"
She leapt to her feet, pulling her dress back on over the jam. It stuck to her, a delicious raspberry-cotton sandwich. She stormed out before I could finish.

I went back to the supermarket every day looking for her. I haunted the radishes, I lingered by the beetroot, and I stalked the Burgundies and the Clarets. Summer's flush turned into the ochres of autumn, and I waited in vain. I took to sampling the tamarillos when no one was watching, biting them open and imagining that they tasted like watermelon juice mixed with sunscreen.

Autumn turned into winter, and only the humble rhubarb cheered my lonely vigil. Until one day, I took a wrong turn at the meat section and strayed past the fridges. There she was, a Lemonade Popsicle in her hand.
I gasped when I saw her, and her name froze on my lips. Winter had extinguished her fire. Her skin's summer glow had become glacial. Her freckles were milk drops on marble, spotlights on snow. Worst of all was her hair. Peroxide pale. An ice queen; her crimson crown had drained out and washed away. She was a wick with no flame.

White is bitter. White has no pity. White leaves without saying goodbye.

I crumpled at her feet, and my tears dripped onto her bleak winter boots, where they glistened like broken dreams.
"Rose," I sobbed.
"Oh yes," she said frostily. "The crazy artist."
"How could you give up on red?" My anguish shattered against her cool indifference.
Her pause held the silence of the artic, and when she spoke her voice was as cruel as her white leather heels.
"Actually," she said. "I prefer blue."

Copyright belongs to Tania Hutley. Please do not reproduce without permission. Thanks!