After the mother and grandmother both passed away, the wolf took their places, so that the girl he secretly adored would not have to go without. The wolf raced back and forth between their two houses, switching between the mother’s apron and the grandmother’s gown, raising his voice as high as it would go. For her part, the girl pretended not to notice, but it was hard, and sooner or later she knew she would slip, or else he would, and then they would have to act like girls and wolves were supposed to act, with howling and screaming and the gnashing of teeth and knives, until they were each alone once again.
The woodsman and the wolf had been friends once, and what happened between them in the grandmother’s cottage a mere misunderstanding. Seeing the wolf there in his mother’s clothing, the woodsman mistook him for the woman he had come to kill. It wasn’t until after his axe blade slowed—when he was able to see past his blinding matricide to the fur that covered the floor—that he realized his mistake, and was ashamed.
The grandmother hungered, consumed with her sickness, and in her crazed state she tore the young girl’s limbs from her body with fever-strong twists, devouring each one over the course of several screaming days. When the wolf came to visit, he saw what she had done, and in his mercy he devoured the grandmother too, so that she would not have to live with the sin, so that others would not know what this once great woman had become.
The wolf grew skilled at counterfeiting the girl’s voice. He gained entry into many of her haunts in this way, murdering her family and friends as he went, until his belly dragged on the ground as an animal, hung over his belt as a man. Sometimes, when she joined him in their bed, she laid her cheek upon the fur of his belly and listened to the grumbling from within, to the voices of all her kith and kin he had devoured on his way to loving her. They cried out for her to save them, but she had her wolf, and he was all she needed.
Come get into bed with me, said the wolf, said the grandmother, said the woodsman, said the girl. Each of them made their voice exactly what another wanted to hear, using the perfect enunciation and tone designed to lure them as completely as possible, and to each other they were lost.
Satiated, the wolf slumbered. His belly rose and fell with each breath, each drunken snore. Inside his swollen stomach he’d trapped little girls and mothers and grandmothers, woodsmen by the dozens. All around them were trees and deer and rabbits and birds and flowers, even the remains of a river, drunk greedily a week or a month before. The wolf himself couldn’t remember, had been nearly mad with hunger and thirst, and in his madness had consumed all that he could. The wolf slept on, and when he awoke he was surrounded by the shattered ruins of a cottage, and beyond that a vast field of furrowed, rent dirt. He could no longer feel all those he’d swallowed kicking at his stomach, trying to force their way back out. Satisfied, the wolf grinned—a wolf’s grin, all teeth—and then he tried to rise, only to find that his feast had turned hard and heavy as stone. No matter how he struggled, he could not stand, nor crawl against the distended weight of his belly, and soon there was nothing left within the reach of his desperate jaws.
If I told you the wolf deserved this lonely end, that his slow, struggling starvation was justified, then that would be one kind of tale. But he was not a moral wolf, and this was never about to become a moral story, no matter how it ended.
So little yet endured! Just the girl, with her red hood, her red cape, her red-slicked knife, with which she was still slashing her own story to pieces, still discovering new and radiant shapes of pain and pleasure, until all that remained was the last dirge of the wolf, howling with hungered frustration, joined by the cries of her own failing voice, each matching the other’s song note for bloody note.
MANTODEA
FROM ACROSS THE BAR, I COULDN’T STOP STARING AT HER, at that breathtaking mouth of hers. Obviously as orally obsessed as I was, she filled that laughing cavity with whatever was close at hand: lime wedges, olives, tiny black straws she chewed between cigarettes. Gallons of vodka or gin, I couldn’t see which. She cracked ice cubes between strong white teeth, the sound audible even above the jukebox and the clatter and clack of pool balls coming together, spiraling apart. I wanted to stick my fist in there, to get her bright red lipstick all over my watchband.
Getting up from my table in the corner, I steadied myself on chair backs and unoffered shoulders. The floor was the sticky history of a thousand spilled nights, and other couples danced between the pool tables and the bathrooms, their shoes making flypaper two-steps to the country-western songs spilling from the jukebox. I weaved between them until I reached the bar, where I took the stool beside the woman.
I lit a cigarette, signaled the bartender for another whiskey with a raised pair of fingers. From up close, the woman was all mouth, the rest of her thin, too thin, hungry and lean like cancer. I wondered about the nutritional value of her life, of everything that passed through the furious red smear of her lips. I imagined both our mouths working furiously on each other, kissing with jaws unhinged as snakes.
I turned toward her, lifted my glass. Tried to remember how to smile without opening my mouth. Felt I probably wasn’t doing it exactly right.
Her own mouth said, Whatever it is you’re thinking of saying, it’s probably the wrong thing.
I waited before I responded. Waited until the urge passed to tell her about my old life, about all that I swallowed in the months before the hospital. I wanted to tell her though. Wanted to tell her about the coins and thumbtacks and staples. The handfuls of dirt and crushed light bulbs.
I wanted to tell her that like a lot of poisons you might eat, you have to swallow a lot more drain cleaner than you’d expect, if you’re trying to kill yourself. At least, the stuff hadn’t worked on me, not as I’d once hoped it would.
What it had done was clear me out, get rid of all kinds of things that had once been stuck inside of me. That had backed me up.
What it had done was take away my lower intestine, give me a short throw of a colon that couldn’t handle spicy food or even most solids. No citrus or tomatoes. No milk or milk products.
This new body, it wasn’t supposed to be exposed to alcohol, but giving up the booze was never really an option.
What I said to her instead was, I like watching you eat, drink.
I want to buy you a meal.
A meal with courses. Appetizer. Soup. Salad. Fish. Meat. Miniature loaves of bread with mounded pats of butter.
I said, I want to watch you eat desserts that you have to chew and chew. Taffy. Caramels. I want to give you hard candies to suck thin and crush between your molars.
I said, I’d lick all the sticky sugar off your teeth for hours, if you wanted me to.
Her mouth laughed, said, The only meals I eat I find at the bottom of cocktail glasses.
She fished her olive from under her ice cubes and popped it into her mouth, then licked clear liquor off her dripping fingers. I watched a single drop spill down the back of her hand, trace the blue ridge of a vein from knuckle to wrist. I laughed too, but with a hand over my mouth, hiding the teeth destroyed by chewing steel, the gums peeled black by the Drano. She reached over and pulled my hand down, saying, When I was a little girl, I thought mastication and masturbation were exactly the same word.