Issy Flower
The Red Thing I remember the way she dipped her hand into the water. It was curved, like a feather, and the water clung to her skin like diamonds on a necklace. She lifted the water into the air and whispered words over it. They were the same words we all had to whisper, but she made them different. She really did speak magic into them. The rest of us were just play-acting-- ten year olds with nothing better to do-- but she dipped her hand into Sally Robinson’s backyard bucket and cast a spell over everyone. The moment hung over us, enveloped us, and there was a sheet of glass separating us from the world. You could just about see it if you squinted. It flickered and glimmered in the little sun peeking through the rainclouds. Then, she drank the water, shook out her hand, and turned back to us, making a face like she’d eaten something sour. Her face puckered up and her features became as distorted as a peach stone. It broke the languid silence of the moment and shattered the glass, which fell over us and bounced off our skin like snowflakes. But it made us love her. She was one of us, deep down, ethereal as she was. I remember looking at her and willing her to love me too. Then she brought in the bike. No one in the neighbourhood could afford a bike, it was half the thing we cast spells for, so when she wheeled it up the dirt road we all took one full intake of breath. Thirty years later, I still recall every whorl and dip of that bike, even the way it caressed the space around it and made it something new, the same way she did. It was the most beautiful shiny-apple red, the colour of Valentine’s cards and butcher’s viscera, gloriously red, a red that wriggled under your skin and found kinship with the blood vessels inside. It had a real leather seat with a real leather smell and shining silver handlebars. The whole thing shone from the inside, was lit from the inside, glowed in contrast to the dull brick of our post-war houses. That glass hung over it too. 42
