Red

Red. The stones flowed with it. The sky looked as if it bled. The setting sun and the rising moon glowed with the color of shedding blood. It poured onto the streets, seeping in shoes, still warm as when it left the veins. Sticky, it smelled like copper and metal, attracting great swarms of black flies and birds and animals of prey. And yet, the greatest predators still fought in the streets of the once great, green, whole town.

And across the world, they watched as the streets filled with blood.

The crying, the shrieking, the moaning filled the air, shattering souls. Bodies added to the count; innocent life liquid painting the earth red, soaking into the grass and calling out to God as Abel’s did when his brother slew him. A living nightmare, a living Hell, where every demon of every dream came awake to torment. Fire burned the skin; darkness warped the unprotected minds as children huddled in corners behind their protectors. But how does one protect against that which one cannot see?

And the world watches as the streets are bathed in blood.

Red is the color of war. And in a dying world, fighting against physical manifestations of principalities and powers of an unseen world, the very air is red. In the fading light of a person’s world, about to die, about to be cut down where she stands, the last color she sees is the red dripping from a glistening blade coming toward her neck. The saint prays, hears the cries of ten thousand souls before her as if the very fabric between the worlds has been severed, and she can see the altar before her. She watches as the blood comes to kill her.  She wonders briefly about the name of the one who had gone before her, the one whose blood is about to mingle with her own.  She commends her spirit to God, and without closing her eyes, watches for her death to arrive.

The streets are flooded with blood.
With taken life.
With red.


*~*~*~*~*~*

When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" And there was given to each of them a white robe; and they were told that they should rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren who were to be killed even as they had been, would be completed also.   Revelation 6:9-11