The wolf’s breath smelled of chalk, and his paws were covered in flour. It wasn’t enough to trick the girl, but she allowed herself to pretend to be fooled. She opened her cloak and invited him in, so that he might do what he came to do.
From inside the wolf’s stomach, the grandmother could only hear every third or fourth word her granddaughter spoke, and only slightly more of the wolf’s responses. She heard teeth and eyes and grandmother. She heard better and my dear and come closer, come closer.
She heard to eat you with, and then, with so little time left, she acted, placing her hands against the walls of her wet prison. She pressed and she pushed, stretching the wolf’s stomach until it burst, and then she wrapped her hands around the bars of his ribs. When she could not pry her way out, she did not despair. Instead, she opened her mouth into a wide smile, one that—had it happened outside, in the light—would have revealed to the wolf her excellent teeth. She bit down hard, first on lung and heart, then indiscriminately, casting about in a great gnashing, devouring all that she could until the wolf she was inside was also inside her, until she was sure the granddaughter was safe.
The girl dreamed often of the wolf and the grandmother, of the two together, as they were when she found them: The grandmother, with her gasping mouth and her skirts bunched tight in the clenched centers of her fists, and then the wolf, on top of the grandmother with his back arched and his head down, his nose pressed between her legs. In the dream, what captivated her was not the sight of the beast and the woman together, but the sound: the scratch of the wolf’s tongue lapping at her grandmother’s cleft, at the little red hood atop it. The wolf’s tail wagged eagerly, distracting the girl for a second from seeing his engorged penis, the red weight of which she knew was destined for her grandmother’s body, if only she did nothing.
She had not done nothing.
With only his voice, the wolf stripped the girl nearly naked, commanding her to remove her shoes and throw them into the fire, then her skirt and bodice, until she wore only her red cape and hood, which she would not remove, no matter how urgently he pleaded.
After she knew the heat of the wolf would keep her warm, she allowed herself to be led outside, where, at his urging, she climbed onto his back. Her body shuddered as his muscles flexed between her legs, as the sharp knuckles of his spine pressed against her. The wolf howled, terrifying and thrilling her at the same time, and then they were off, the wolf bounding faster and faster, carrying her away from all the paths she had known, toward a part of the forest where the brambles were thickest, where without a guide it was possible to get lost forever.
When she would not love him as a boy, he went into the woods and became a wolf, the better to take from her what he wanted. If only he had waited until later, when he was a man and she a woman, their fates might have been different.
I say wolf, but of course there are various kinds of wolves.
Red cried out when she saw the grandmother dressed as a wolf, but calmed herself, breath by breath, until she was ready to listen and learn. After all, it was not the first time the grandmother had changed herself to show Red the shapes she herself might employ one day. When Red was a child, the grandmother had turned into a bird to show her flight, then into a turtle to show her safety. At the time of her first blood, the grandmother had become a boy her own age, and then a woman slightly older, to show her two kinds of physical love that she might one day choose between, and now, as the wolf, the grandmother wanted to show her something else, and if Red did not quite understand what the lesson was, she trusted her grandmother, even though it hurt worse than anything that had come before.
The girl blamed the wolf for leading her off the path, for slowing her while it rushed ahead to devour her grandmother, to paint the lonely cottage with gore. Of course she blamed the wolf. Who would have forgiven her for dooming her grandmother, if she blamed instead the singing birds, the babbling brook, the clustered glamour of a thousand bright forest flowers, ripe for the picking?
She was taken by surprise, despite knowing her sisters had always been jealous of her red chaperon, that dash of color against the dullness of their world. When she awoke, lashed to a tree deep within the forest, she cursed their names loudly and without pause, hoping her father would hear and come to her rescue. After the wolf came instead, her screams turned to stammering, then to pleading. She shut her tear-stung eyes against what she feared was coming, crying out anew as the wolf’s hungry breath filled her nostrils. She reopened her eyes only when, instead of the teeth she expected, she felt his tongue rough against her cheeks, licking away her tears. Her fear fell away, was replaced with something else, some other emotion she had not yet experienced, one that was like the affection she felt for her father but darker, more thickly warm and urgent.
Afterward, the wolf chewed through the ropes and freed her from the tree, while she told him about her sisters’ betrayal. The wolf howled, and bid her to climb upon his back. His gait was impressive, and his strength even more so when he splintered open the door of their cottage, when he rent and devoured her sisters, as they themselves had hoped he might do to her.
Her father made the wolf’s fur into a rug, and laid it in front of the hearth. He said that it would serve as a reminder that his daughter was not to be touched or harmed in any way, that this was the penalty for such a transgression.
Whenever the girl was left alone in the house, she took off the red cape, the clothes beneath it, then she sprawled naked upon the wolf’s skin, with her smooth back against his. She touched herself, feeling again the friction of fur, the proximity of some new life she sensed the wolf would have bestowed upon her had they not been caught. When she howled, it was with her mouth against his unhearing ear, her lips close to his stretched and taxidermied jaws, full of the teeth she had just once felt so lovingly against her skin.
On four legs he could easily devour her, could take her in his jaws as fast as he could any deer or rabbit. But on two? On two she was often the one who mastered him.
The wolf tied the girl with silken thread and stashed her in the closet, unsure what to do with her. He was too full from the grandmother to eat, but little girls were rare this deep in the forest. When he heard her thrashing against the closet door, he emitted a low growl meant to frighten her. When the thrashing only intensified, he opened the closet to scare her again, with a flash of teeth or a swipe of paw.
There was no girl inside the closet, only a puddle of thread, cut and discarded.
The wolf did not see the girl again, not for many years. When she returned, grown lovely and stubborn and brave, he himself had declined, aged and weak. He was not sorry for what he’d done—he was a wolf, after all—but still he cried out for mercy. The girl acted as if she couldn’t hear him, scowling as she twisted her own ropes around his body, binding him still before setting to work on him in the same fashion he’d once intended for her—with sharp objects meant to cut, meant to tear, meant to render meat separate from bone.
With blade and trap, with fire and water, with drowning and crushing and boiling and slashing and cutting and stabbing: These are just some of the ways she killed them, one after the other.