The Girl Who Saw Red [Update: Published on Bright Flash Literary Review🥂]

by Hannah Janicke

There was a little girl named Lana.

She was bright, curious, and kind.

Her parents were first responders.
They told her, Never wear red.

They had seen too many
people arrested in red,
people dying in red,
families ruined because of red.

So they obsessed over it.
Every dinner, every story ended with the same warning:
Red will ruin you.

Lana, curious as ever, began to wonder.
She read about red in secret,
dreamed of it at night.

One day she came home
with a red bracelet hidden under her sleeve.

Her mother saw it,
ripped it from her wrist.
Beads flew across the floor like drops of blood.
She made Lana pick them up one by one.
She screamed until her face turned red
but never noticed.

Now Lana burned to know more.

By junior year, she found parties
where boys let her wear red.
She slipped it off before coming home,
but inside, she glowed scarlet.

Her father told her about a girl who died in red.
But Lana wasn’t listening anymore.
She was busy planning how to find more.

What could have been a phase became an obsession.
How to wear red and never get caught.
Where to buy it.
Who to trust.

When her parents noticed the look in her eyes,
they sent her away —
to a place where they chained her to a bed,
stripped her of color,
and injected her with a poison to get the red out of her.

They told her stories of people who died in red
while others bled quietly on bathroom floors
because they couldn’t stop.

When Lana came home,
she wasn’t cured.
Now, everywhere she looked,
all she could see was red.