Matt Bell - How They Were Found

Guilt is a loop of footage repeated ad infinitum: He’s here. In the hallway and the courtyard and at the end of the driveway, he’s here. The man’s face is close to your face, and although film captures only sight and sound you know how his breath smells like the aftertaste of white pills manufactured in white factories, distributed by doctors in white coats who promised they would help with the pain, the feeling that was once white but is now a million more complicated colors. The man wears a mask of mirrors. Reflection: a lit cigarette between coarse-stubbled lips, a tiny fire bobbing back and forth. The smoker rocks himself, consoles or controls himself. He has urges. He has needs. They are not necessarily all ones the audience already suspects, but some of them probably are.

Hiding your face from the mirror man will not stop reflection from turning into recognition. You know what you saw, what you did, what you continue to see and do in all too frequent flashbacks. The problem with this film isn’t what you see but what you don’t. Your flaws are the product of another’s too-small imagination, a city limits delineated by bias and slim experience. The director is your only hope, his edits your only chance for revision. He has set himself up to be your savior, if only you’ll ask him. If only you’ll beg. Beg, we beg of you, beg. For her sake and for your sake.

At last, the forgiveness of new film: A little girl in a sundress pirouettes on a coffee table, her curly red hair encircled in a costume tiara. Her expression is concentration, the grimly pressed lips of a trapeze artist. She spins around and around, and when she stops she is so dizzy she doesn’t notice the shadow moving closer, a human form with some sharp darkness clenched in its left hand. The light coming through the window suggests sunrise, sunset, the dusk or the dawn. It suggests choices and borders and the parting of veils between one world and another. The camera lingers long enough that when the girl looks up the shadow is gone. She sits down on the edge of the table, flushed and exhausted. Her legs dangle over the edge, her toes floating just above the floor. She smiles and waves, and when she is ready she stands to repeat her dance all over again. The only thing that captures her is the film, preserving her exactly as she is in that moment, as safe as mere cameras can keep her.

AFTER RED CUT HER WAY OUT OF THE WOLF’S BELLY—after she wiped the gore off her hood and cape, her dress, her tights—she again found herself standing on the path that wound through the forest toward her grandmother’s house. Along the way, she met with the wolf, with whom she had palavered the first time and every time since. Afterward, she went to her grandmother’s, where she again discovered the wolf devouring the old woman, and where he waited to devour her too, as he had before. Once again she was lost, and once again, she cut herself out of his belly and back onto the stony path. Over and over, she did these things until, desperate to break the cycle, she laid across the stones and, with the knife her mother had given her, gutted herself, quickly, left to right. She cried out in wonder at the bright worlds she found hidden within herself, and with shaky hands she scooped their hot wet flesh into the open air, where with a flick of her wrists she set them each free.

The first time she saw the wolf, she did not run, but let him circle closer and closer, even as his querying yips turned to growls. With one hand, she reached to stroke his fur—full of wretched possibilities, thick and gray and softer than she expected—and with the other she reached into her basket. She dug beneath the jam and pie and paper-wrapped pound of butter for her knife, the only protection her mother had sent with her, as if all it took to keep her safe from the wolf was this tiny silver blade.

At the wolf’s suggestion, she left the path to pick some flowers for her grandmother, who was sick and could not care for herself anymore. Tearing each blossom from its roots, she didn’t notice the hour growing late, didn’t understand the advantage she’d conceded by allowing the wolf to reach the cottage first.

In another version of this story, the flowers cried out warnings of the wolf’s trickery, never realizing she could no longer hear their voices. In a previous form, she had lain among their petals and stalks, conversing with them for hours. She had lost this ability when her mother—just days before sending her to her grandmother’s—said it was time for her to grow up, to stop acting like a child.

Only his head was that of a wolf. The rest of his body was that of a man, and resembled in all ways that of the only other man she had ever seen without clothes. He had the same hands and arms and legs, the same chest with the same triangle of downy hair that pointed to another thicker thatch of fur below. Even with his wolf’s head, the girl was able to recognize his expression, knew that the snarled lips and the exposed canines betrayed the same combination of hunger and apology that she had seen on her father’s face years before, when he too had pushed her to the ground and climbed atop her, when he had filled her belly with the same blank stones that the wolf now offered: First gently, then, after she refused, not.

The wolf and Red had always shared the twin paths through the forest, but it wasn’t until the girl started to bleed—not a wound, her mother said, but a secret blood nonetheless—that he began to follow her, began to sniff at the hem of her skirts and cape. She asked the wolf what he wanted from her, but he would not use his words, would not form the sounds that might have made clear what he expected her to offer. Instead he nudged her with his muzzle, away from the path of pine needles she had been instructed to walk, and toward the other, thornier path he more often walked alone.

For three days, the grandmother waited in her bed, glued twitching to her sweaty sheets by a fever that choked and burned her, by a hunger that left her furious for foodstuffs, for cakes and butter and tea and wine. For bread that might soak up her fever, if only she was strong enough to get out of the bed to eat.

And then on the third day, a knock, and on the third knock, a voice.

Raise the latch, she cried, before she even fully heard, and certainly before she realized how deep the voice was, and how terribly unlike a little girl’s.

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.