Prologue
Term: oxblood.

Main
This red is red, but also blue. Sum: rich red-brown.

Oxblood is the dried blood of the dead thing dad brings back on his tires. It’s the wet blood of the living thing at her keyboard, stilled hands over keys. She stacks punishment against desire to measure. Then it’s sumptuous, pizzicato-pulse blood that turns its way through circulatory system to fingers, ventricle to artery to vein to capillary to cut. She draws back.

ASDFJKL; — I don’t curse. Won’t for years.

I retreat. Don’t get online. Search for a bandaid and watch a friend IM instead. The responses come in, line by line by line. Glee, like noise beneath skin. Nacreous static. Glitter!

Oxblood is my vast organ, my outermost layer, my membrane, bruised. Oxblood is my eye color. It’s the background of my first blog. The hover state. The poultice. Color of a plum, under-ripe, picked from the tree by a cousin, tossed to me and eaten to pit. Good, stinging tartness. Color of an apple on the ground, over-ripe, cocooned in dry grass, stem to dirt. Nascent doily-lace rot. Mold flowers!

Punchline
403 Forbidden                            — fruit.

Epilogue
My first job, age nine, was cleaning keyboards in the library computer lab. Old soul, I type, years later, to explain. Method: q-tip.

Chloe Scheffe is a designer and writer from Seattle. She lives in Brooklyn and on Twitter as @chloescheffe. In high school she was the last of her friends to get Facebook. This was very uncool at the time.