My hands worked quickly.  The knife I held in my right hand sliced down, red seeped from the cut.  The knife went deeper, still the red oozed and spread across the table, forming little pools, so red.

The colour soaked into the pores of my fingers. It would be the devil to scrub them clean afterwards but I continued nonetheless.  The knife, ever hungry, crying tears of red. I wiped the sweat from my forehead.  My work here was done.

Only a salad chef can appreciate the finer points of dicing a beetroot.

Christopher Farley was born in England but has been living in southern Switzerland since 2001.
After years in the financial services sector he studied his Cambridge CELTA teaching certificate and he now teaches English and work as a text translator.
He took part in the 2014 Poestate poetry festival in Lugano, with a piece named ‘Foreign man, foreign land’. It was his first ever public reading; the piece was well received and gave him confidence.
He’s had an article on wines of Piemonte published in a Canadian magazine which was followed by first prize in the October 2014 Writer’s Forum fiction competition. www.christopherfarley.net

The post Red by Christopher Farley first appeared on Prachya Review.