The Rapunzels ONC 2024

4: Evil Red

 "Hide before Lexi returns!" Lulu scrambles off the bed. Her eyes are Venus round. She runs to me with such speed, she nearly falls on her face. "Now, Fia." The ferocity in her voice is a sledgehammer banging against my stomach. It fucking hurts.

Lulu grabs me by the arms. She's pulling and tugging until I am up.

Blood. It's everywhere.

The floor is stained. The area where I was sitting on is a blossom of evil.

I hike up my skirt and look down at myself. Grotesque crimson ribbons create a lacy design down my bare legs.

Before I can utter a word, before I can breathe a sound, Lexi waltzes inside. She's walking on clouds.

"Grandmother is such a stunning woman." Her hands are clenched at her throat. She sighs as she leans backward against the door frame. "Mother said she'd get me a real fur wrap like grandmother Alexis' when she goes to the Outside because I remind her of father's mother."

Lu is trying to hide the blood from our eldest sister. I think of wolves as she drapes a blanket around me. Wolves and blood and guns that kill them and fur wraps and the fact that I am a red flower in need of being hidden. Buried. Underground. Evil. Red. Evil. Evil. Red. Red. Red.

"What's going on you two?" Lexi flutters her lashes. She's returning to reality. The air is coated in copper. The fur wrap becomes pretty nonsense mother promised, they are words Lex will keep in a box hidden and safe in the It's Never Going To Happen part of her psyche.

"Nothing," we promptly say but the syllables slip and stumble over our tongues.

But Lex sees the blood and freezes. She stretches out her arm and points to the blood. A scream begins but dies in the back of her throat like vomit unsure of which way to go.

Lulu snaps at her and tells her to shut up.

"If mother sees the red..." Lexi's words trail off.

Simultaneously, two pairs of hands grab me like I am a disease–infested rat they need to rid of. They pull me out of the room and lead me through the hallway.

In the distance, I hear the familiar rise and fall of silvery notes from grandmother Colby-Carrington's favourite song, the one she greets us with when she comes for a Visit.

My insides are twisted. It's like someone's sucker-punched my intestines. I hate my monthly reds. Three days of banishment.

As my sisters drag me out of the house, I think of how mother hides her eyes whenever we tell her we're bleeding. How she hollers and howls like a banshee that if father were to know what we did, he would rip our skin from our bones.

"Run and hide!" she'd scream. "Hide until the Devil no longer desires you. Cursed! Defective! If you stay in the house, the demons will find you and drag you down to hell. Satan will take you as his own. He will –"

A gentle breeze touches my face as soon as we are in the yard. My mother's words fragment at the caress. Fuck you, mother. Fuck you, father. Fuck you, Devil, who I no longer believe in either. I think.

I am led to one of the guest homes—the places we use when the month's gone vermilion. The small houses are the only places my parents never go to stating that the stench of cursed young women makes their skin crawl.

Lexi pushes me roughly towards the door but Lulu stops her before she makes me fall.

"Enter. Now. Make haste. Before he...he..." There's urgency in Lex's tone. It sounds like she's about to cry. "We have to go back and clean up."

"The Devil can't get to any of us that quickly," Lulu chimes in. "We have some time. We'll get everything clean, spick and span. You don't have to shove her."

I mentally thank Lulu before I reach over and bring her head to my lips. She gets a kiss. Lexi gets what her grandmother calls The Bird.

Turning, I face the building. There's a little song slipping into my mind. I begin to hum because I don't remember the words.

As my sisters run off back to the main house, I slip into my cage and close the door.