All That Is Red (18 page)

I wondered why I hadn’t seen it earlier. He was the embodiment of love. He showed it through every one of his actions. He’d had his name and identity all along through his actions. I
had just put a name on it. Nothing more.

I realized just how limiting the human language was. Words can’t fully describe emotions. They can try to label them, but they can’t really define them. People use words to describe
things all the time, but maybe emotions are beyond their capacity.

I stood, looking down at a shell that used to be a human being. The body used to talk, think, and feel. Now it did none of that. Yet the boy looked as though he was only sleeping and he would
wake any minute now.

I felt the tears stream uncontrollably down my face. I felt it all, while the shouts of victory drowned out the sound of my sobbing.

C
HAPTER
17

“The patient’s awake,” people yelled above my head. “The patient’s awake.” The shouting sounded like battle cries.

I opened my eyes to the White wash of the plain ceiling above me. The walls were White. The floor was White. Everything was White.

“How are you feeling, Kate? You just won a war against death,” a nurse said. “If your mother hadn’t found you, you would have bled to death from the cuts you made on your
arms. Poor thing, she found you passed out on the floor from lack of blood.”

She walked over to my bedside table and placed a small glass vase on it. It had one single Red poppy and it stood out from all the White around it. It was a small island of solace in a sea of
unfeeling.

“You like the flower?” the nurse asked, catching me looking at it. “He dropped it off for you,” she turned, pointing to the door.

The door was already swinging closed, but I thought I saw someone out of the corner of my eye. I sprang out of bed, pulling the IV tubes out of my arm with one yank. I sucked in a breath at the
pinch of pain I hadn’t expected and raced through the doors blindly. I heard the nurse coming after me, yelling for me to stop, but I kept running down the hallway.

I stopped abruptly and the nurse caught up to me, pulling me back toward my bed. I felt her hands grip me and I let her drag me back, but it wasn’t because I had given up. I was completely
content with going back now. I had caught a glimpse of something round the corner. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked a lot like Red hair.

A
UTHOR
B
IOGRAPHY

Anna Caltabiano
is a child of the transnational cyber punk era. She was born in British colonial Hong Kong and educated in Mandarin Chinese schools before moving to Palo
Alto, California; the mecca of futurism. She lives down the street from Facebook in the town where its founders reside, along with the pioneers of Google and Apple. Her high school classmates are
themselves an eclectic mix; the lost offspring of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley magnates, aspirational internet entrepreneurs and Stanford philosophy professors. Her writing reflects her concerns
for her own generation as it seeks out salvation, meaning, and companionship in online communities, with pop culture as its shared language.

Having grown up in privileged suburban America, Caltabiano has always felt bewildered by the intense personal pain of which her teenage peers would complain. To her, such anguish seemed like a
betrayal of their good fortune; so what exactly was driving these kids lucky enough to be able to devote themselves entirely to self-fulfillment, as opposed to economic survival, to sabotage their
lives? Much of Anna Caltabiano’s recent literary focus has been applied to the increasingly common practice of self-mutilation.
All That Is Red
is her striking effort to explore the
ways in which the pressures and the banalities of modern adolescence combine, leading towards dangerous outbursts, designed to stimulate a physical response where an emotional one seems
insufficient.
All That Is Red
is Anna Caltabiano’s portrayal of two young souls searching for the intangible piece that is missing from their lives. Their responses to the challenging
predicaments in which they find themselves are typically, youthfully untempered, but no less vital in their contemporary relevance.