Red marker

Red marker

Grandma asks if I want a glass of lemonade.

I quickly say yes, so she disappears back into the kitchen, leaving me alone.

She put the new markers in the tin box, but they are the kind that you buy in a plastic package at the Aldi supermarket and are already empty when you take off the cap for the first time.

Out of necessity, I make my drawing with a series of brackish colors.

Even the familiar trick – panting so hard on the tip of the marker, with the air coming from the depths of your lungs – doesn’t work.

That’s why I get frustrated, because my red marker only left a skid mark where a full line was actually supposed to be. A line that was going to serve as a dress under the princess head.

A thick, juicy, red streak had to be there.

Now it looks like you dabbed your finger in a bleeding wound and smeared it on the paper. The drawing is ruined, and all I can do is press the marker so hard on the paper that the last ink is squeezed out.

With a slow, powerful motion, I push on the princess’s body on my paper. Slowly but surely. As if I were committing murder: the red line appears like a jet of blood from the tip of the marker. “Here you go, ugly,” I whisper. The marker lets out a squeaky cry of distress.

Grandma comes in soon

And she sees how I went wild with my marker on my paper, on the body of the princess,

her eye falls on my creation,

the lemonade in her hands falls to the ground,

clatters the glass apart and splatters the candy around

And my grandmother takes off screaming.

To escape her bloodthirsty grandchild.

Then she runs to my parents and they will flee from me.

To another country.

Do they take on a different identity.

While I continue to sit here at the table, holding a murder weapon from the Aldi.

*I look alternately at the marker in my hand and at the door where Grandma will appear at any moment*

Fortunately, I know everything is here in the closets and will survive. I am quite mature for my age, I think.

Grandma comes in

And hands me the drink.

Lemonade nor grandma falls

I accept the glass with both hands,

As an apostle once accepted the chalice of Jesus, I think.

Amen in the name of Jesus Christ, I say to Grandma. She smiles and leaves.

She always has a pendant of Mary around her neck. Because her name is Mary herself.

Like the little doll on my Kipling book bag, also named Hanna

but with an H at the end, because by closing time we still had not found a doll named “Hanna” in the toy store.

I had to settle for an extra letter. Oh well.

Grandma has a tiny vein on her neck beating against the golden thread of her necklace. Gently, to the beat of her life. I try to push the throbbing again deeper with my toddler sausage finger, but it reappears shortly as I remove my finger, to continue undisturbed what it was doing.

Mommy says that vein is dangerous when it’s just under your skin like that. If you get hurt there, the blood squirts out and you have to rush to the fastest doctor at the nearest hospital.

I realize that I need to be careful, then, and perhaps best not put my finger on it anymore, even if I bite my nails off.

I put my red marker back in the tin box. Take the paper and tear it into pieces.

Time to do something else.

Something without a red marker.

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