Anthology of Short Stories - Vol. 1 (Literary Fiction)

Strawberries Bleed Red - @ac3rb1c Winston Liu

Strawberries Bleed Red by Winston Liu

Something changes in you when you live in a place where everyone hates your guts. Paranoia clenches around you like a vise.

That old lady crossing the street?

She despises you. You can see it in her glare. She's just waiting for a reason to turn you in. The cops will swagger up to you, every movement semaphores of their disgust. Where are your papers? They'll squint suspiciously. You know all too well what they do to illegals.

Even so, it's not the cops that you fear the most. They are still obliged to operate under the aegis of the law. The Crimson Rising thugs have no such obligation. Your ribs are still bruised from the last encounter you had with them, over a month ago now. You doubt you'd survive another.

The nights here are full of roving patrols of hard men wearing crimson armbands, it's best to get inside well before dark falls.

Home is a ramshackle apartment in the seedy part of town. A single room into which you've squeezed a threadbare mattress and a rickety table. You can't afford much better on the pittance that you earn.

The roof leaks when it rains, rivulets snaking their way down the mildewed walls. You suspect you won't be living here much longer. The landlord has been constantly upping the rent, hoping to drive you out. You are a risky tenant. Crimson Rising stakes out the homes of your lot. Before long, they'll find this place.

You've seen the movies where the cops are the good guys. They protect the innocent and find the bad guys. Usually, the criminals get one final badass line before departing from the story in a funeral pyre of flying lead and pyrotechnics.

They don't show the cops standing on the sidelines, shouting insults at you as the Crimson Rising thugs kick you with their steel-toed boots.

They don't show you curled up into a ball and begging them to stop, tears running down your face in pain and humiliation and anger.

They don't show them yelling at you to go back to your country, to stop leeching off theirs. Back? Back to where?

Back to that pile of rubble that was once a fine two-storey house. You remember the airy halls, the dining room with the cabinet full of exquisite china. Persian rugs covered the marble tiles. You used to play soldiers with your brother, waving around your toy guns and running up and down the halls until the nanny yelled at you to stop. Ambushes in the hallways, plastic darts finding their way into the dinner soup. Laughter, fond childhood memories. Your brother carries a real gun now.

The house you grew up in is a heap of broken concrete and twisted rebar. Collateral damage, the khakied men said. Their apologies. You almost spat in their face for their indifference, but the way they held their rifles made you pause.

Your brother had no such reservation. Their apologies didn't bring back your parents. Their apologies didn't erase the look on your brother's face as he dug their broken bodies out of the debris.

Your brother tried to convince you to join the resistance with him. To avenge the fallen; an eye for a bloody eye. But you were tired of war and bloodshed. Tired of waking up chilled to the bone by the sound of mortars every night.

You wanted to become a doctor and learn how to fix people. If you had been a doctor then maybe you wouldn't have had to watch helplessly as your parents lay bleeding out on the street. Your hands covered in crimson trying desperately to staunch their gaping wounds.

Your brother got angry. He called you a coward, a spineless dog, a disgrace to the broken remnants of what was once a proud family. He spat on the ground. Then, he picked up his Kalashnikov and left. You haven't spoken to him since.

You paid a fortune in bribes and fees to leave the country and ended up here. Days spent dodging thugs so you can work in the fields picking strawberries. The sun beats down relentlessly, as you trod from row to row plucking fruit you don't earn enough to buy.

You've been at it long enough to learn to tell the good ones from the bad. In your first week on the job you would often pick a bad one and feel it squish between your fingers. Watch as the red juice threaded its way down your fingers like the way your blood threaded down the black asphalt. A red thread trickling to the rhythmic pounding of steel-toed boots.

You weren't paid much, if your paycheck came at all. It's a job none of the thugs would touch with a long-handled broom. Some days, you think that maybe your brother was right, maybe you should have gone with him. You fantasize about going back and joining him, fighting alongside as you had done since childhood. Paying back blood with blood.

But then you catch a glimpse of crimson, and you duck into the alleys. The Crimson Rising are out, and they will beat you if they catch you. Most days, you just fantasize about staying alive.