Carolyn Harness - "The Redhead Around the Corner"

The Redhead Around the Corner

I love my freckles because I have to. They’re angel kisses on skin often burned by the sun. The sunburns always look sickly with pale skin. I hate my pale skin like my mom hates her rosy cheeks, flushed with rosacea. My mom loves cranberry sauce, vibrantly dark like the scarlet hair color I moisturized my scalp with when I was fifteen. Fifteen was hard because I wondered if blood vessels would splatter as nice as the ink pen in my diary after he got bored of me. My diary is a field journal, more observations than pain. I record the glaze in my aunt’s eyes when the laughter died in her dressing room and the surprised look on her face as accusations fell from her own lips. It wasn’t what I expected on a wedding day but the term “Junior Bridesmaid” was made up for my benefit so I stayed quiet. When that same silence breaks the furniture, I can’t tell if my grandfather is sad or content. He would lovingly cook us breakfast almost every morning we visited but some days I slept in, lured by dreams driving farther away than Alabama. Fear ignites goosebumps on my arms but I’m not sure if I’m more scared of going ninety miles per hour on the interstate or never leaving. Sitting in my bedroom, the warm tones contrast too much with the frost clinging to my eyebrows and fine mist drifting from my ears that melts like crushed ice on the hot sidewalk. Winter in Southern Illinois is tragic. The snow never sticks so the bleak sky flattens itself against the muddy remains of corn fields. HGTV would be appalled. Fortunately, I have a very clear idea of how I wish to decorate my dorm room. Something along the lines of calm blues with subtle white accents. I wonder if she would like it. Would she favor the odds and ends of my endeavors? Most of the time, I just believe she would. I stare at the picture of her stuck on my mirror and ask that she put in a good word with whatever mighty hands are shaping this pathetic world we dance on. Many days I trudge, selfishly grumbling over passing whims. It’s easy to trudge pleasantly in Alabama, sipping on sweet tea in simmering heat. My lazy pirouette falls short on the carpeted staircase of my grandfather’s house, leading me to scrape my leg. The sting is grotesque. Rounding the corner, I expect her to be in the kitchen, ready to tend to the bleeding shins and crocodile tears of her grandchildren. Her hair would make me envious, beautiful and soft like the voice my mother uses to sing lullabies. But that redhead is gone and I’ve forgotten again that her grave is too close to me and too far away from home. Home was never Kansas, Dorothy, it was your family. That’s why all the characters you dreamt were mirages of the people you knew. Yet I can’t quite decipher why Hollywood exchanged your silver shoes for red, picturesque as the pickup truck toting a snow kissed evergreen, my favorite holiday scene. In the glow of LED lights hugging our artificial tree, I can almost hear the lullaby she would have been singing to my sister, soothing us both to sleep.