The Question of Red

I know something about responsibility. Just don’t ask me about politics.

But all stories are made up,” I offered. “All telling is retelling, and therefore it is fiction. Everybody knows that.

His intellect might be a weapon, his worldliness his shield.

Does Bhisma care about women and their fate? Do all women have to be fierce warriors and die like men, as Rosa Luxemburg did, to earn his respect? Does he care about the mountains, behind which every day the sun rises and sets, about life on the side of the road, about the color of twilight in certain clear afternoons, so beautiful it is almost unendurable?

She felt like that worst thing—a victim.

She would stay like that, quiet and smiling, while her husband patiently, bigheartedly, closed the discussion, as men of wisdom often did with their wives.

Nuniek knew only too well when to stop, when to heed her husband’s change of voice. She knew that you had to feel your way through a marriage, not unlike politics. Just when you thought your relationship with your husband was firmly in place, the tables began, ever so slightly and unfathomably, to turn.

Families and neighbors started to avoid, rebuke, or repel each other, just because they didn’t share the same political beliefs or choose the same party.