Six Notes on Red & a Red Note on Six, by J.C. Rodriguez

Red’s whole thing is that life is fleeting & so is he. He lasts as long as Big Red gum, goes down like a shot of Fireball, & if you’re not paying attention – steals all your Altoids. He just wants to know how many mints he can bite before everything starts to burn.

Red is the king of breakfast time. He holds court over bacon, bacon’s more energetic vegan brother, the chipped skin of apples in oatmeal, & even the leaky gross tomatoes on the bougie-ass tartines & yet, Red gives no fuck about conventional tastes. Red flavors hibiscus tea with cream cheese & cinnamon. I did a spit take the first time I drank it. 

Red thrives when he’s the molten center of attention & he knows it. He wants me (& everyone else we know) to stare forever & when my eyeballs start to burst, he brings me tear drops & tells me to water the blood vessel roots of my sclera tree. He seats me in a velvet recliner, puts a cold Shirly Temple in my hand & spills it all over. He asks if he’s a headache. I laugh & tell him I’ve shaved both of ours’ too many times to feel anything but a clipper.

When we were kids, we bled both our respective family plan minutes just to listen to each other play Final Fantasy. He tricked me into an early boss fight once, said the dungeon wasn’t scary, & at the end there was a shirtless scene & candy. There was nothing but a gravity-controlling demon. I can still hear Red laughing over the beep boops of Diabalos, crunching the bones of our first fictional crushes. 

Whenever the flowers in Red’s mom’s garden start to bloom, Red gets a phone call. Red’s mom is a terrible gardener. She is shocked any time the roses bud, but mostly terrified. She says she traded her green thumb for a mother’s touch & treats every surviving plant like an omen. Red always laughs off her concern.

Red’s mom says he started as a ball of clay, but over the course of time, people added bits to the knead: bags of saffron & spiced chai, grenadine & cough syrup, transmission fluid, chrysanthemum, even pepperoni drippings. She tells me my contribution was cinnamon. She thanks me for knowing her son.

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I take my mints from a clove-scented tin. They don’t taste like mint at all & the person I’m about to kiss is surprised that my blushes are visible. I don’t have it in me to say that my whole face just hurts a lot. A pink slip delivered to my cheeks would mean the emotional rent is due. But it’s been six months & I still can’t talk about loss. Not yet. I’m moving soon. To a small studio with a long hallway, just six walls that I can paint my favorite color & declare that in this home, no one is allowed to die. My mattress was shipped off already, but I still have a recliner. Red’s mom let me keep it. I pass out turned over, my hot cheeks against the cool velvet & every morning, I wake up a little more dry.

J.C. Rodriguez is a writer from Long Island. His poetry has appeared in places like Waxwing, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Brooklyn Poets. He is currently a first-year MFA candidate at Syracuse University & a slush adventurer for Interstellar Flight Press. Find him online at brownmoon.rip