Matt Bell - How They Were Found

Every winter, the villagers sent one of their own girls into the forest as tribute. Although the wolf promised to return each girl by spring, it had been years since any had made their way home, as they once had. Even back then, they returned damaged, scarred, bereft, hardly the girls they had been before their time with the wolf. With few options remaining, the villagers had no choice but to send Red in place of the too-lovely girl they had previously chosen. At twelve, Red was almost too old for the wolf’s tastes, but the villagers were sure that her radiant innocence would win him over, would please the ravener they all feared so much.

Before sending her down the path, they gave her a red riding hood, the better to see her when she emerged from the forest, and they gave her a knife, sharp as the wolf’s own teeth, the better to saw her way from his belly when the time came.

For months the villagers fretted and worried. Then, when the sun was highest on the first day of spring, they saw Red appear at the tree line, her face grim and her forearm—still clutching the knife—covered in slick gore. In her other hand she held the hand of a child, and that child held another and then another and then another.

The villagers rejoiced, and praised Red above all others, but she did not join them in celebration. No matter how they pleaded for her company, she remained apart, her face a slab of pale skin and blank teeth. By the time she departed the following winter, the villagers were glad to see her go. Although they made great shows of protestation in front of each other, they knew she was changed by what she had done, and while they would not say so aloud, each secretly feared the sight of her hood, of the knife she still carried whole seasons after she had last needed it.

In another telling, Red never returned, and in the following years there appeared more and more wolves in the woods around the forest, until the villagers felt afraid to walk the path leading to the city. Each of these new pups had thick red fur, and when they howled in unison at the moon, it was in one voice, less like that of a wolf and more like a woman screaming, like a girl who, if the rumors in the city were true, the villagers had knowingly sent to be raped and tortured and, after she gave birth, torn limb from pale-fleshed limb.

Or maybe Red returned not with a line of small girls, but with the wolf himself in tow, a rope turned cruel around his neck and her knife wet with his protests. In this version, it wasn’t until she reached the village center that she slit the wolf from throat to tail. Too late, she retrieved each and every child from the wolf’s stomach, each of them bruised and bloodied and without breath. In anger, the villagers filled the wolf’s belly with stones while Red held close his howling head, counting for him the many names of these dead children, the many pounds of shale and limestone it would take to buy their penance.

If the wolf had always been the wolf, and the grandmother always the grandmother, why did Red so often struggle to tell them apart? Perhaps it was because, after pulling her knife from the wolf’s flesh, she frequently found wet scraps of bloodied nightgown stuck to the blade, or else how, while kissing her grandmother’s pursed lips, she so often tasted raw meat rotting from between the older woman’s teeth.

The wolf had expected the girl to protest, but she continued eating the flesh and drinking the blood that he served her, until her clothes were wet and matted, until her mouth was stained the color of her cape. Their goblets overflowed, then tipped and dripped onto the cottage floor. The grandmother was a bigger woman out of her skin than she had seemed in it, so the wolf, tired from his gluttony, yawned once, twice, a third time. He could not stop yawning. With his head thrown back and his engorged throat exposed, he realized too late that the girl was crawling across the table, her face filthy with the wet horror of their meal. Clenching her fork and knife in her tiny fists, she searched the empty platters, and when she found nothing else to eat, she clambered quickly toward the yawning wolf, hungry for more.

The girl was surprised when she slid her hand between the wolf’s muscular, furred legs, to find that he was a she , something she had never considered, not even when she saw her dressed in her grandmother’s clothes, so calm and perfect, reclining gorgeous against those many plush pillows.

He was a pup, a boy, a wolf, a man, a wolfman, a woodsman. He was all of these, but never more than one at a time. He changed with the moon, and then, later, according to his own whim. When he came to her at night, it was always as a wolf, a shape she grew to love, even though it had cost her everything she had once known. Even after the deaths of her mother and grandmother, she preferred the wolf to the man, to that shape that had failed to protect her time and time again, without ever understanding that her choice was no choice at all.

The wolf was trapped as soon as he dressed himself in the grandmother’s clothes. The bonnet grew tighter and tighter, its taut ribbons cutting into his throat and choking his jaw, while the nightgown’s sleeves immobilized his forepaws, made useless his claws. When he tried to take a deep breath to give air to a howl, he found only whimpers left within his lungs, all the air crushed out of him by the constricting nightclothes.

Several tortured hours passed before the women came for him, and by the time they arrived, the wolf was past pitiful. Weaker women might have felt mercy temper their vengeance, but not the grandmother, and certainly not her daughter’s daughter, whose flat smile betrayed a heart as hard and heavy as an unskippable stone. With their saws and their hatchets and their sharp knowledge of knives, they fed the wolf piece by screaming piece to their fire, and when they were finished with him, they buried the slim remains—teeth and eyes and spleen and genitals—beneath a pile of rocks so unremarkable that even they could never quite remember where in the wide woods it was.

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.