RED

( I posted this as a status update after one of my friends gave me the word 'RED' as a writing prompt. I have modified it a bit and added a few paragraphs too. )

How does red taste? I have often wondered. Not the things that the colour represents like blood, the powder on mother’s parting or the liquid in my poster-colour box. But the colour itself. The colour I sometimes see in splashes in a too long stretched nightmare or that oozes from the jelly and trickles down my wrist in a tantalisingly long streak. 

White is just white. And black, well, just emptiness. But red? Red is an enigma. It can wrap itself all over a toy football and curl snugly inside an infant’s innocent hands, only to return in a sinister manner, in the pool beside that young boy’s head.  Red is everywhere. It chases you, teases you, sits beside you in a crowded metro as you nervously try to place it from the corner of your eye.

The jungle red lipstick on that girl's lips sits like an invitation misread. You would be attracted just like a helpless little moth gets drawn to a bonfire. As your own dry lips are smeared with that alluring shade of reckless lust, you struggle to breathe. By that time, the red has seeped into your veins, your blood. What happens when the red of a stranger's mouth mixes with the red in your system? Mayhem.

 But how you seek red! In and around deserted corners of a midnight street, on hapless nights when the linen white of your bed transforms into pricking thorns and at mind numbing pubs and motels, where you ask for red and you get a bland yellow or an icy blue.

Someday, it will come to you. All exposed. And you will take it inside your mouth. Savour the taste slowly and then when your insides will start boiling, you will hastily gulp it all down, never knowing as you lie limp, that it would find a way to creep out again and travel back to haunt.