"Carmella Cooks"

by Jude Bradley

          Red moves. It can’t sit still. It was her favorite color and everything she wore had red in it somewhere. You can’t look at red and think of nothing. It awakens, it tickles, it frightens. It’s the color of fire and anger; blood. It reminds us of the rivers of life coursing through us with every passing second. It proclaims beginnings and screams of endings. Her soul was red. Her ideas were red and they pushed her onward until she reached a yellow wall too vast and too tall to climb. Routine saved her sanity. The days had to be the same or the subtle taste of challenges and creativity would have driven her mad.  She closed them all and silenced their songs.

          But, in her tiny kitchen rife with clutter and dry heat, stainless steel and off whites she found red. Cans of plump Marzano tomatoes filled the cupboards. Shiny red peppers with their unreal, odd-shaped heads cocked and grinning. An erupting pomegranate spewed its horror on her arms, a tart droplet finding her lips. She smiled; cherries, raspberries, radishes and beets, strawberries. Bitter radicchio threaded with tendrils of red beside the white like holiday fabric. Stalks of rhubarb with their smell of dirt and poison trick her tastebuds and cry for sugar and hearty cranberries anxious to rupture in a pot. They saved her. They all saved her.

​