Daughter of the Telephone

The day I became the Daughter of the Telephone, the reds, purples, and blues threw stones at me. Grey ones, like they knew what I was made of. I lived in the grey house with no windows, where the only things I had were a bed, a table, and a mirror. Grey things, like me. Grey skin, grey hair, grey eyes. The child of the grey house, as if that explained everything. They hated me. I felt ugly. The ache in my stomach wasn’t hunger—it was emptiness, a cavity where something human used to live

The stones hit my skin like bullets, ricocheting off the epidermis and landing by my little feet. My lungs were grey balloons, collapsing in on themselves. I wondered if anyone else's breath tasted like smoke. They left little and large bruises, bright red and glistening with fresh blood.

Red.

It was the most vibrant thing I had ever seen, brighter than the blood in my vessels and the hues of my organs. It was my favorite color. The only color I wished to be. I wanted to carve open my chest, to peel back the ribs and extract the grey that had settled there like a sickness. To fill the empty with something vibrant, something alive, something that wouldn’t fade the moment it touched the air.

But when I bled, it didn't seem like blood anymore. It was pigment, staining my insides, filling the veins with something not human, not alive. It seeped into my marrow, tinting my bones with the color I craved, but it didn’t make me whole.

I carried the bruises, and the scars home that day. Inside, the house greeted me with its usual silence, but something was different. On the grey table sat a red telephone.

I stared at it for a long time. It didn’t make sense. Nothing in the house had color. Nothing had ever dared. I touched the receiver, my fingers tracing the curves of the handle. Red. It was a chill that danced across my skin, sharp and invigorating, yet it also felt unexpectedly smooth, like the walls of the stomach organ gliding over my fingertips. 

The phone rang.

I jumped. 

I picked up.

Beatrice. He called my name. 

Hello. I said, the cold receiver pressing onto the lobe of my ears. 

Do you want to be red? 

Yes. 

No hesitation.

I want to be 

Red.

I can give that to you. I can give you the red house and the red skin and the red life you’ve always dreamed of. All I ask is one thing in return. 

What.

Your reflection.

Take it. 

I didn’t think about it. I didn’t ask why. The bruises on my arms were vivid in my eyes, and all I could see was red. Beautiful.

Open the door. 

I opened the door.

Sitting on the grey doorstep were a box and a shovel, and a pair of pliers. I brought it in and shut the door on my way so I wouldn't see the red houses in the distance. I ripped open the box with an odd sort of hunger, and my fingers were bleeding by the time I held a bag of seeds. Rose seeds. 

Dig. He said. And plant.

I took the shovel, feeling its cold handle, and sunk it into the dirt beneath the floor. It was strange—this floor that had always been solid, familiar. Now, it felt false, like skin stretched too thin over the bones of something hollow. The shovel dug in and out of the flesh of the house, until all that was left was a hole.

I looked down into the hole, watching the dark soil pile up around me like blood clots, dark and sticky. My fingers were raw, the edges of my nails torn from scraping against the earth, but I kept going. There was nothing else to do.

Finally, after what felt like hours, I hit something. A sharp, unyielding crack echoed up the handle of the shovel, like breaking bone. I pulled back for a moment, breath catching in my throat. Beneath the surface, there was something solid. A mass. Something that shouldn’t have been there.

But I couldn't stop.

I threw the seeds on the soil, watching them scatter across the dark, their tiny forms swallowed by the raw, open wound I had created. And once they landed on the Earth I could not see them.

Shock.

My pulse was an arrhythmia, each throb out of sync, a discordant metronome in a world that demanded harmony. I picked up the phone.

THEY AREN'T GROWING THEY AREN'T GROWING THEY AREN'T GROWING THEY AREN'T GROWING

You idiot. He said. You must bleed over them. 

I grabbed the pliers, and one by one I pulled my teeth out. Their cold metal was a strange comfort in my hand, heavy and unforgiving. I could feel my teeth—their roots, their edges, the way they ground against each other like broken gears in a machine that had long stopped functioning properly. The air in the house was thick, and suffocating, but I didn’t need to breathe anymore. Not like before.

I placed the pliers around the first tooth, a molar at the back, the one that had always felt out of place. Grey. There was a sharp, gnawing need in me now, a hunger to rid myself of the parts that no longer made sense, that clung to me like foreign objects, unwanted and heavy. 

I spat out blood and teeth, watching as they mixed on the floor. 

The roses began to grow.

Smile!

It hurt. But I did it anyway.

The soil was fertile with blood and broken teeth, and perhaps that was why they thrived. Their stems twisted up through the earth, sharp and thorned as if they knew what they were meant to do. The petals, crimson and dark, bloomed with urgency and speed. In just a second the grey house was filled with red. Red. My favorite color.

I ran through the field of roses, laughing and crying and smiling. It hurt. A lot. The thorns ripped through my skin and clawed at my scalp. And eventually, when I got tired, I was red. 

Red.

But I was cold.

And it hurt. 

I looked in the mirror, and in it was nothing.

Nothing?

I picked up the telephone, the same color as my skin, and pressed the transmitter against my bleeding gums. My bloodstained lips.

I can't see myself. Tell me if I'm red or not.

...

TELL ME IF I'M RED OR NOT. TELL ME I'M RED.

...

And I, the daughter of the telephone, sat there in the bleeding soil, wondering if I was finally red or not.