Red

Adam had always been a screw-up. He knew it, the Master knew it, and the whole damn universe knew it too. In every possible version of every possible world, there he was—blundering, fumbling, and tripping over his own humanity. Sometimes he was a drunk. Sometimes a preacher. Once, he’d been a king, but that had ended badly. The Master, cosmic and cruel, had suffered Adam’s idiocy across too many timelines, and patience wasn’t in his nature.

“For your sins,” the Master said, his voice rippling through creation like a rolling quake, “I will take from you the colour red.”

It didn’t happen all at once. No, the Master was deliberate. The red bled out of the world slowly, like a wound refusing to clot. Adam watched it go, helpless, horrified, as the color seeped from the flowers, the fruits, the sky. By the time it was gone, it was as though it had never existed. Time folded neatly over the wound, like a lie you tell yourself to stay sane.

People didn’t notice. Of course they didn’t. How could they? They couldn’t miss what they’d never had. But Adam knew. Adam saw it all. He walked the streets of this pale, washed-out world, feeling like he’d been gutted. Roses, once blazing with romance and longing, were now dull and sickly. Lovers still exchanged bouquets, their smiles empty of fire. He passed by a fruit stand and stared at the tomatoes, greenish-gray and shriveled-looking, the kind of thing you’d only buy if you were starving.

The city looked smaller somehow. Flags flapped limply in the wind, their colors muted, their messages subdued. Without red, they were just pieces of cloth, signifying nothing. Adam wandered past a café, peering through the window at the people inside. They sipped glasses of wine that looked like dirty water. He felt something twist in his chest. It wasn’t just red they’d lost. It was everything red meant. The rush of blood to the face. The heat of rage. The quick, sharp pulse of lust. Life.

Wars still happened, of course. People didn’t need red to kill each other. But they weren’t the same wars. There were no fiery speeches, no vivid banners snapping in the wind. Soldiers marched, they fought, they died—but it was cold, mechanical, like a machine grinding forward because it didn’t know how to stop.

Adam stumbled into a museum once, hoping to feel something, anything. The paintings were there, hung in their expensive frames, but they looked flat, dead. The Renaissance masterpieces were smudges of beige and brown. He stared at a portrait of some saint or another—probably Mary—but her robes were pale, her lips thin and colorless. He wanted to scream, to shake the other people wandering the gallery. “Don’t you see it?” he wanted to shout. “Don’t you see what’s missing?” But they wouldn’t, couldn’t. To them, everything was normal. Perfectly fine. He wanted to laugh. Perfectly fine. That was the problem. The whole world had become perfectly fine.

He spent nights in bars, hunched over glasses of whiskey that didn’t burn the way it should have. His mind drifted to the Master, the smug bastard, sitting somewhere in the great cosmic nothingness, watching him, waiting for him to break. Adam wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He wouldn’t. But God, he was close.

He thought about blue sometimes. What if the Master had taken that instead? Would the skies have turned to smoke, the oceans to sludge? Would people notice the absence of calm, of depth, of infinity? Maybe. But blue was too distant, too cool. Red was life. Without it, the world wasn’t a world anymore—it was a sketch. A bad first draft.

And so he kept walking, kept drinking, kept feeling the absence of red like a hollow space inside him. He tried to remember the way it used to feel, that hot, bright, unbearable fire. Sunsets that seared your eyes. The slick, dark gleam of blood on your knuckles after a fight. The way a woman’s mouth, painted crimson, could make you forget your own damn name. It was all gone now, a dream he couldn’t wake from.

He met a woman once, on one of his aimless walks. She was pretty, he thought, in a quiet, pale way. They talked for a while, and she smiled at him. There was something kind in her eyes, something steady. She asked if he wanted to come back to her place. He almost said yes. Almost. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t look at her pale lips and pretend they were red.

He walked away, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his head full of ghosts. The world had adapted, but Adam couldn’t. He carried red with him, like a curse, like a memory that wouldn’t fade. It wasn’t just a color, damn it. It was the thing that made life worth living. Without it, people didn’t feel—they endured.

And Adam endured too, because what else could he do? He carried the weight of the Master’s punishment, alone in a world that had forgotten how to burn.