“Red or green?” the waiter asked.
“Green,” I answered.
My companion commented, “I always like the red chile better. Gives it a better flavor.”
“I like the flavor of green chile better,” I said, unswayed by her attempts to convert me to red.
You can’t equivocate about chile. You can’t ask the waiter which is milder or hotter today. You can’t vacillate. Not if you want to call yourself a New Mexican.
Please leave a comment with your first 50 words on the topic “red or green.”
I had practiced for this one. I had spent almost a lifetime working on the subtle differences. Still, my heart pounded. I knew there were no guarantees. Context usually helped, but here there was very little of that. He held up the card on which my future depended. Red or Green?
The kids still love going to California Pizza Kitchen. No longer small, they remember the endless games of red light, green light that we use to play on the path in.
On our good days, not so common with teenagers, I can still murmur “red light” as we walk in and get a stutter step and smile out of some of them.
Tears. Green light.
Dad
As the little girl studied the picture of the two kittens in her coloring book, she dumped the color crayons out of the Crayola box onto the table. She immediately reached for the red and green crayons and then almost in a melodic rhythm began repeating over and over, “Red or green? Red or green? Red or green?” Then, after a moment…..
Tomatoes:
yellow, red, green, pink,
purple, pink, orange, striped,
tiny, huge, grape, cherry,
early, late, mid-season,
container, hanging, staked,
determinate, indeterminate,
sauced, sauteed, sliced, stewed,
fried, shishkabobbed (is that a word?)
fresh, pickled, frozen, canned, dried.
The staff of life may well be bread
but the stuff of life: tomatoes.
Major Alan “Shockwave” Anderson felt the telltale signs of blood loss after an anti-aircraft gun riddled his slow moving transport copter and one of its huge rounds smashed through his left femur. He tried desperately to keep the aircraft level and oriented toward his destination as the warning lights flashed red, green, red, green. As he lost consciousness he felt his co-pilot loosen his flight harness….
“Red or green?”
“Pardon me?” I said.
The bartender repeated, “Red or green?”
“But I asked you what wine you would recommend,” I said, “and wine is ‘red or white’, not ‘red or green’, isn’t it?”
“Not here,” said the bartender. “Here it’s red or green. You have red grapes and you have green grapes, right, so it makes sense that wine from these grapes turns out to be red or it turns out to be green. What’s your choice?”
“I have to think about this a bit,” I said. “This is all so new to me. Maybe I’ll just have a beer.”
“Fine,” said the bartender. “Purple or orange?”
The waiting room was decorated in someone’s idea of a comforting decor. Happy paintings of fields of bluebonnets. Too many copies of People magazine. Bowls of red and green M&M’s waiting to be eaten. Everyone knows chocolate cures everything. Which will cure the cancer, red or green? I say a quick prayer and gulp a handful of both. What have I got to lose?
The Conspiracy
I looked down at the dead body, her green dress mingled with the red of blood. Looking back I was too silent, the body as stiff as hers, both our eyes dry. I longed to scream, as once we did between silken sheets, or in the poppy field at dawn.