RED

She’s not just red-haired She’s on fire and doesn’t know it. That hair catches the light like copper pulled fresh from a forge, a wild, living thing that doesn’t lie flat and doesn’t apologize. It curls where it wants, frames her face like a painting no museum could afford, and in the afternoon sun it turns the color of turf fire in a cottage, amber and rust and something older than either word.

And the freckles. God, the freckles. Not scattered randomly, placed. Like the sky itself got distracted painting stars and spilled a few across the bridge of her nose, across the soft round of each cheekbone, like a constellation you’d spend your whole life trying to name. An Irish man doesn’t just notice freckles, he reads them, like a map back to something true.

Her eyes are the color of a sea squall rolling in off the Atlantic and there’s something in them that says she’s been cold before and she’s been warm before and she knows the difference between the two better than most ever will.

She stands easy in herself, no performance about her, and that’s what does it. She’s not trying to be beautiful the way you try to be anything. She just is, the way the hex stand at Giants Causeway. Enormous and ancient and completely indifferent to whether you’re ready for them.

An Irish man wouldn’t call her pretty. Pretty is for china cups and spring days. He’d say, after a long pause, staring somewhere past her shoulder because looking directly at her is like looking at the sun. I’m sure you already know how you look.

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