Hope and Red Read Online Free Page A

caring for him, doing everything they could think of to keep him alive. They went without food so that they could afford the medicine her sister brought down from the uptown apothecary. It got so bad that Rixidenteron’s father offered to go back to work. But she refused and instead painted so much and so fiercely that her hands were perpetually stained with color. Years later, art critics would call this her finest period.
    And Rixidenteron did survive against all odds. When they celebrated his first birthday, they figured the worst was behind them.
    Except his mother’s paints contained a jellyfish toxin, harmless in small doses, but it had been seeping into her skin for years now and was beginning to attack her nerves. Between that and the coral addiction, it was increasingly difficult for her to paint. By the time Rixidenteron was two, she could no longer hold a brush steady. Again his father offered to go back to work. Again she refused. Instead, she taught Rixidenteron to paint for her. She had him wear a pair of leather gloves so he wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Then she put him to work. By the time he was four, he could create any image described to him with breathtaking precision. Rixidenteron flicked away at the canvas for hours a day while his mother lay on the battered blue couch in their apartment, trembling hands covering her eyes as she whispered the images in her head. And he would make them real.
    He cherished this time they spent together and was proud that he could help his mother, the great painter, with her art. But as time went on, it got harder. Rather than steering her away from the coral spice, Rixidenteron’s illness and her subsequent infirmity pushed her deeper into addiction. By the time he was six, her descriptions were nonsensical, and he was making up most of the images himself. But while he had her dexterity, he did not yet have her vision. And the paintings made that evident. People said she was through.
    This time, his father did not ask. He just went back to work. He was older, and life had taken its toll on him. But he was still reasonably handsome and able to make enough money to anonymously buy his love’s paintings. So she continued to think she was supporting her family. Rixidenteron knew the truth, but by the time he’d worked up the courage to tell her, she was too far gone to understand what he was saying. Or so it seemed. He always wondered. Because the night that he told her, she overdosed on coral spice and died.
    For a while, Rixidenteron and his father continued to live on in the same way. But by the end of another year, his father had become thin and pale. Rixidenteron didn’t know whether it was illness or the loss of his mother. Either way, his father did not seem interested in getting better.
    A week shy of his eighth birthday, Rixidenteron found his father had died in his sleep. He cleaned the shit and blood from his father’s body, burned the bedsheets, then left.
    *  *  *
    “But how did you live on the streets?” asked Sadie. “How in all hells did you survive when you clearly knew nothing about nothing?”
    He shrugged. “I met some other boys, and they let me join them. Because I’m good at taking stuff.”
    “What do you mean, good at taking stuff?”
    “My hands are quicker than other people’s. Maybe because of all the painting. I don’t know. But taking wallets, watches, and the like is easy for me. They never notice.”
    Sadie’s eyes sparkled. “That is a rare and useful gift.” She looked down at the complex knot that held her hands together. “I don’t suppose those hands of yours could work this out.”
    “Probably,” he said.
    “Even with your own hands tied?”
    “I can try,” he said.
    “Why don’t you,” she said.
    *  *  *
    When a sailor finally came down into the hold to check on them, the sun had gone down and only faint moonlight spilled in through the portal. They heard the sailor before they saw him, his boots