The Boldness of Red
Author's note. This story was the first one I wrote for Vocal. It was a last-minute submission to a challenge, and I didn't think much about it except that I wanted to play around with heavy-handed metaphors and some ideas around the marks that our parents leave on us. With hindsight, I'm not very happy about how it turned out. I'd even consider elements of it to be quite problematic. Nevertheless, I leave it here as a testament to an ideal that I'm trying to work towards: when you're practicing writing, mediocre and published is better than brilliant and unwritten.
