Today on Midwest Weird: “Red Velvet” by Aarushi Bahadur.
Aarushi Bahadur is a senior at St. Paul Academy in Minnesota. She’s a Scholastic writing award winner, a student journalist, a theater kid, and an ardent vinyl collector. Her work has previously been featured in Iris: Art + Lit Magazine.
Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Episode Transcript:
This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.
We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Today’s episode: A short story by Aarushi Bahadur, titled “Red Velvet." Read by the author.
When she comes to herself, she is barefoot. To her left: the road, winding and ribbonlike, plunging down into the valley. To the right – the horizon – is nothing but fields of corn. The sun has gone down but the sky is starless.
She raises her hands. The flesh is soft. Her hands move to her body. She is wearing velvet. This is a dress she does not believe she has ever owned.
She thinks back –
There was a darkness. There was a darkness.
Unmoored, she takes a step. Gravel comes loose beneath her heels. Below in the valley, town. Moving lights. She begins to walk.
*
Somewhere down the road there is a brunette woman in a red car that slows for her. The brunette asks if she needs a ride. She opens the door and gets inside. Bucket seats. The brunette asks where she wants to go. She shrugs. Anywhere. Nowhere. Just get me there fast.
Out of the window, signs pass, tilted and blurred. The first sign outside says JUDGMENT DAY IS COMING ARE YOU READY? It is accompanied by a church, weathered and beaten in the distance, swallowed by the tall grasses. She swallows and tries to look away.
As they roll through the heady dark, her eyes begin to sag. The stiffness has left her shoulders. The signs are getting to her. OPEN, a lone water tower advertises, no specifics: a state of being. They aren’t really worth reading but she can’t seem to pull her eyes away. Memories from a past life, maybe. The flat terrain dips and rocks. A tall board proclaims HAS ANYONE ELSE DIED FOR YOU? Perspective composes it like a crossword; at the same L LOOKING FOR A SIGN? THIS IS IT meanders down the post. An intersection.
She feels herself beginning to grow weary but the brunette doesn’t seem to have noticed, instead fixated on a distant point in the dark. She follows the brunette’s gaze. She is focused on the windshield. She is focused at some point past the windshield. She is focused on something that she cannot see yet.
At some point she must have drifted off because she has her second coming when they jolt to a stop at a traffic light. If it wasn’t strung on a wire, she imagines, it would be floating. The light changes from red and the car’s engine hums. The brunette closes her eyes and in the mirrored reflection of the window she can see that the woman’s eyelids are crushed lapis blue.
At the base of the hill she sees the first streetlights. They look haloed.
*
The town is called Lorraine. This the brunette tells her. It does not seem redundant that there is a billboard proclaiming LORRAINE in faded lettering ahead of them. They are entering town, after all.
She turns to the passenger seat window once again and rolls it down. There is something in the air here. She does not know if it’s asphalt or wheat or the ozone after a thunderstorm. She thinks, for a moment, it could be sin. But that is a familiar scent. No – it smells like the clouds have come down in a shower of coffee grounds. Lorraine feels like a heartbeat.
The brunette woman asks her where she wants to stop. She does not know what to say so she asks to be dropped at the diner. Diners have always been familiar to her, liminal spaces between empty tracts of road.
When the neon lettering emerges in the red car’s headlights, the car rocks to a gentle stop. CROSS’S DINER, it proclaims. Through the glass she can see the checkered floor illuminated.
She stares through the windshield. The brunette woman leans across the leather seats and kisses her once, slow and deep. A spark. She opens the low-set door. The brunette is applying fire engine red lipstick. The brunette offers it to her and she smears it across her lips and it is on her fingers too. Something hungry has awakened inside her.
She gets out and walks to the diner door. When she looks back, the brunette is gone. The door is still open, unlocked. In fluorescent subtitles, a sign on the door advertises 24/7 service.
At the diner counter there is an old woman wearing a blue apron. Her hair is graying and there is a cigarette between her fingers and a smile on her face. The old woman’s name tag says something that she can’t read, something that once said something.
“You’re not from around here,” the old woman says, smiling, taking a drag from her cigarette.
“Coffee?”
Yes, she says. I would like that very much.
The old woman returns with a mug of black coffee. Apart from the old woman, she is the only one in the diner. She does not know what time it is. It must be late. It must be very early.
“How long are you planning on staying?” asks the old woman.
Yes, she says. I would like that very much.
The old woman nods. “I know a guy.” The old woman goes to the back.
The telephone is in the kitchen.
She takes a glance out the diner windows. On the low horizon of the huddled buildings outside, in dulled blue: EVERYBODY IS TOO FAR GONE.
*
This is how she gets the house. Turnover is slow in Lorraine, but there are houses that sit empty on the fringes of town, near the exit off the highway. They are only waiting for someone to make nest in them. She goes to work at the diner; it’s not hard to pay for the house.
The house is more than she expected. The floorboards are worn, but she can’t tell whether it’s from use or disuse. She doesn’t know if it’s never been used or if someone had lived there and moved or lived there and died but it doesn’t matter much. There is a warmth in its hollowness; in the chipped paint on the door she sees herself.
She has no furniture to keep inside other than what was already there. A rocking chair; a mattress; a bathroom with a rickety old shower. At first the taps produce nothing but a slow, sallow drip of water that tastes like iron. It takes time for the water to flow in the right direction.
She continues her exploration carefully. The floorboards creak. The lamp does not work. The radio does, and it quickly becomes her favorite part of the house. It is not perfect.
When she opens her closet door for the first time there is a long hallway that plunges abruptly into darkness. From inside there is the sound of distant music. This, at least, is normal. She closes the door and takes a fork from the kitchen from the untouched Formica countertop. This she bends accordingly and breaks the head off. She locks the closet door with the fork and then she goes to sleep on the mattress alone, counting the wooden panels of the ceiling.
Her house has no driveway. Her lawn is overgrown and behind the house the land stretches until it drops away. This is how she knows Lorraine is at the end of the world. But she doesn’t have a car, so it doesn’t matter much.
*
It is a Saturday when the angels arrive at her door. She knows they are angels because of the swath of eyes that land on her when she opens up and the doorway looks like it has been lit on fire. She asks them what they want. The angels say they want to stay here, if that’s okay with her. She shrugs and lets the angels in. So long as you’re no trouble when I go to work, she says. The angels nod profusely.
Later at the diner, people tell her there was a lightning strike at her house last night and is she alright?
She knew of no such lightning strike, but she smiles and nods and serves them coffee. It is nice that they were thinking of her.
When she gets back home from work, her house is still lit even though she turned the lights off and it is dark outside. She doesn’t know where the angels have gone, because the house is small and they’re not in the kitchen, so she assumes they have moved into the closet. The faraway music has stopped and there is a light under the door, anyway.
*
There is a boy in the cornfield, the one by the road. She cannot see his face. He is wearing a suit and in his hand is a fork. He is jumping. Dry husks crumple under his oxfords. In the field there is a door and the door is wide open and behind the open threshold there is more field and more field. The door is wood and the corn in the field is checkered. In the mirrored reflection of his shoes there is something that she cannot quite make out. It might be a universe, but it also might just be corn.
She runs across the field to him. She wants to see his face, but he is gone when she awakes.
*
Days are endless dreams that pass behind magazines and under withering diner lights. She serves coffee and people smile at her. She looks out the windows for red cars but finds none. There are no signs of signs in town, and no churches either. No more lightning.
When she is lonely she knocks on the closet door and the angels slip out from the inch-wide gap underneath. Then she and the angels walk to the end of the world, the one behind her house where the fields drop off. They stand there and she is reminded of the brunette woman’s eyeliner because the sky never gets darker than that shade of blue.
She wants to call her. She wants to feel her move against her and she wants the hum of that red car again. She asks the angels if the brunette was just driving through town because if she wasn’t she would have stopped at the diner, surely? The angels look at each other and then her with searching eyes.
The town is called Lorraine, right? they say.
That’s all well and good. She just can’t remember her face.
*
One day, at the end of the world, she finds a sign.
WE CAME FROM DIRT, it proclaims. WE HAVE TO SWALLOW IT.
She closes her eyes and exhales. The crushed lapis sky behind it swims dauntingly. There is a darkness in the blue setting low and fast on the horizon. She stumbles through the field. The sky opens. It begins to rain. It has not rained there in a long, long time.
In the house, the closet door is open. The narrow hall is dark and endless. That dreamy music is back. It never left. The bent-necked fork is listless on the floorboards and she is wearing velvet like she has always been.
Behind the music: something else. Thunder. It hangs low and rattles the rocking chair and the old bed frame. Rain beats tinny against the window panes in swaths. She wonders if it is raining in the cornfields or on the roads or if the streetlights have gone out.
She looks at her kitchen, the Formica countertop. There is nothing red in her house. There is nothing red in her house and there are no mirrors either. She has to go out.
It does not take her long to reach the diner even in the rain. The old woman blinks when she sees her. “You’re off today.”
She looks at the old woman. The music is playing again, she says.
The old woman empties the coffee percolator. “I don’t think my guy can help you with that.”
*
It is a Sunday when she knows the angels have left. There is no quiet in the house. At night it is harder to sleep because the music is in the ceiling panels and the only light she has is from the lamp that does not work. She doesn’t know where they’ve gone but it’s dark and she wishes they left a thank you note. Birds on the telephone wire cannot fill the space that angels once did.
There is a ravaged spot in her – burning barns – she is hungry for her angels and for that red lipstick. But she doesn’t have a mirror or a car so she supposes it doesn’t make much difference. The wood inside the walls and ceiling has eyes but those eyes don’t see. Typical. Her door frame is cold and is this how it looked before? she asks but this time there is no one to answer.
*
At the end of the world there are nothing but empty houses and diners and checkered cornfields.
It has not stopped raining. Somewhere beyond: little churches that hang from wires like stop lights. Above her is blue that has become black; arbitrary, sickening. Fields that stretch out to nowhere and signs that don’t mince words, dust to dust. The rain is stale and worn and there are no women in red cars anymore.
She thinks back –
Met with vacated lots.
She takes a step. Dry husks crumple under her feet. She could do with some coffee.
She begins to walk.
Aarushi Bahadur is a senior at St. Paul Academy in Minnesota. She’s a Scholastic writing award winner, a student journalist, a theater kid, and an ardent vinyl collector. Her work has previously been featured in Iris: Art + Lit Magazine.
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