Matt Bell - How They Were Found

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.

After the incident, Red became a great enemy of the wolves, vowing that never again would she wait for one of their kind to molest her upon the path. She took to the woods in her hooded cape, knowing the wolves would see her coming, but also that this warning would not be enough to save them. She tanned and sewed and dyed each of their hides, then gave away the fur-trimmed cloaks to the women of her village until the whole of the woods was filled with red hoods and red capes, each of them concealing a girl or a woman, a knife or an axe.

Given the opportunity, he chose once more to be a man instead of a wolf, and by doing so he gained certain abilities, lost others entirely. His man’s face and courtier’s clothes made it easier for him to lure his prey—not the deer and elk he had recently hunted, but the other, comelier prey he had long desired—and certainly he believed he had made the right choice, even if he no longer smelled as acutely, could no longer hear a doe approaching from miles away. This is how he failed to sense the women following him out of the village and into the woods, how he didn’t notice until it was too late that each of them carried her own small knife, her own sharp stone. When they pinned him down in the thistles beside the path, he howled as each of them made a cut in a place of their choosing, then again, as their tiny fingers shoved their stones through the openings they had made.

As commanded, she climbed into the bed naked, speaking in soft, mock-innocent syllables, pretending not to notice that the figure in the nightgown was not her grandmother, so that the great, hairy wolf would feel safe to reveal his true intentions. She waited, polite and acquiescent, and as soon as the wolf forced himself inside her, she sprung her trap, showing him that she too knew what it meant to consume someone whole.

An axe is a knife is a pair of sewing scissors: Tools as weapons, weapons as tools. Ways to cut yourself out from inside a wolf or, in other circumstances, to cut your way back in.

Red and her grandmother had seen this trick before, and so could not be taken by surprise. Red refused to leave the path, the grandmother declined to open the door, and when they each questioned the wolf through the bolted wood, they already knew the cheap answers he would offer. The only one surprised was the wolf, who knew not where these women had gotten their knives, nor where they had learned the sharp skill with which they wielded them.