Anitole's Red Riding Hood

~o~

The next morning when Persephone awoke, she was surprised to find that she was at home in her own bed. A morning breeze blew in through the open window, fluttering the curtains and lending a slight chill to the room.

Persephone stretched her arms up over head and threw off the heavy comforter. She swung her legs out and shuttered as she let her bare feet touch the cold wooden floor of her bedroom. She dashed across to the bureau and quickly pulled on a pair of socks.

She next ran over to shut the open window against the chill, taking a moment to look out through the glass to the edge of the forest far in the distance on the edge of town. Had he carried her here after she'd fallen asleep? How long had she slept? It felt to her like only seconds before she had been in his arms, listening to his heavy breathing, to the strong beating of his heart.

She looked out into the street of the village to see some of the shutters of the neighboring houses just being opened to let in the daylight. The baker, with his cart of fresh rolls and bread loaves was following the milk man as they traveled up the street. She quickly dressed and went down to buy a liter and two loaves for the day.

She'd paid the baker for the bread and was turning, putting her change back in her little coin purse to run smack into the broad chest of Philip, the woodsman's son. Who caught the purse when she dropped it and the liter of milk before it could hit the ground.

"You should be more careful, Persephone." He took the two loaves of bread which she had managed to save on her own and handed her back her change purse. "Can I help you inside with these?"

"Well, I could have managed on my own."

"I'm sure you could have." He stepped out of the way and let her open and pass through the gate before following. "It wasn't my intention to startle you. I was merely in the neighborhood."

"You live in the neighborhood, Philip." She opened the door to the house and held it for him.

"Yes," he smiled, passing through. "That would explain why I was in it at such an early hour. But I saw you and thought I'd just say hello. Where should I?"

"On the table."

"Right." He placed the groceries on the table and then, awkwardly, removed his hat. "You look very pretty this morning," he said. "Would you like to go with me for a walk in the square?"

"In the square? Why?"

"For the fun of it."

"What's fun about walking through the square?"

"I... I don't know. I, uh, I just wanted to know if you would like to go for a walk. We can walk down to the bridge over the river if you'd prefer that?"

"I'd prefer not to walk anywhere at the moment."

"Oh," he looked down at his feet. "Well, in that case can I stay and help you with anything?"

She shook her head. "Philip, stop acting like a boy."

He chuckled. "Sorry."

It was no secret in the village that Philip had always been rather sweet on Persephone, however, it had become more of a problem of late. It wasn't that Philip was unattractive, he was big and brawny and his face had a sort of soft simple freshness that had been there since they'd played together as children.

"You're sweet to ask," she said, brushing past him into the kitchen. "I'm sure there are plenty of other girls who would love to go for a walk with you anywhere."

"Yes," he smiled. "You suggested I ask Elsa for a walk the last time I asked you, and the time before that you suggested I ask Gretchen."

"Why don't you take Henrietta?"

"You suggested her before Gretchen and Elsa."

Persephone smiled. "I would have thought any one of those girls would be right up your alley, Philip."

He smiled and looked down at the floor. For being such a big and strong young man he was still very much a shy and bashful boy. "They're all very nice girls..."

She came over to the table and took one of the loaves of bread over to the cutting board to begin slicing it. "It's just the hold out that entices you, huh?"

He looked up a bit perplexed. "No," he said, defensively. "I... You're just... You've always been my friend and I like you. I don't really like the other girls. Elsa, she's a bit stuck up and Gretchen, well, she never seems to stop talking."

"And I bet she complains about how you never seem to have anything interesting to say?"

"Yes. I actually started writing down random thoughts in a book so I'd remember them, have something to chat with her about. But she asks so many questions, it's like being in a courtroom with a prosecutor grilling you, trying to trip you up."

"A very good analogy," Persephone said, taking the heel of the bread and putting it on a plate. She took a glass down from the cupboard and took the plate and glass over to the table. She poured a bit of milk into the glass and placed it all in front of Philip. "You can have the heel, I know you like that part."

Philip took the bread and ripped off a piece. "Anyway, if you don't want me to ask anymore I'll stop."

She smiled as he took the torn piece f bread and put it into his mouth to chew, thoughtfully. "So you don't think I'm stuck up or gabby, then?"

"No."

"What about cold and unfeeling. I have after all turned you down more times than is decent considering you're the best looking boy in the village."

He blushed a bit red. "I am not."

"Well, the sweetest at any rate."

"Careful, you'll get my hopes up."

It was at that moment that Persephone's father walked down the stairs, tucking in his wool shirt and yawning. "What's all this morning noise I'm hearing? Hello, Philip. I see she's feeding you."

"Good morning, sir."

"Haven't you got a father who makes you chop wood in the mornings?"

Philip smiled. "I do. I told him I was going to ask Persephone for a walk this morning and he let me have an hour."

"Why aren't you both out walking, then?" Her father took a glass from the cupboard and joined them at the table. "You two used to spend every day together when you were small, playing in the meadows or making mud pies by the river. More than a few ruined dresses were blamed on you being a bad influence, young man."

Philip looked down at his now empty plate. "Yes, well. I'd best be getting back."

He stood and walked to the door. Persephone followed him out and walked him to the gate. "You really are a nice boy, Philip."

"Thank you." He put his hat back on top of his head. "Maybe tomorrow or the next day, huh?"

She smiled. "Maybe."

~o~

It was late in the afternoon when she set out from the village for her grandmother's house. The sky had grown gray with the passing of the day and a rainstorm threatened as she walked slowly and thoughtfully into the wood, not knowing from behind which tree the wolf might leap. She crested the first hill, looking over her shoulder at the village. She took in the thatched roofs and stone chimney-tops and then turned and started down the hill.

She was nearly to the top of the next hill when she heard the snap of a twig. She turned to look in the direction from which the sound had come, a smile on her face, anticipating that her lover would step out from behind an elm and take her in his strong arms.

There was no movement though, no sound. And after a moment she heard the brush rustle behind her to her left. She wheeled around in time to see a glimmer of russet hair and then whatever it had been was gone.

It was at this moment she began to feel a sense of dread and she turned back on the path, preparing to run back over the hill toward the village. She had only taken one step before she felt the force of a body slamming into her and knocking her off the trail into the brush, pinning her to the ground.

"Who do I find tripping through my woods, but pesky little Red Riding Hood?" Persephone looked up into the big golden eyes of the unfamiliar girl. The stranger sat atop Persephone with her knees planted firmly against her quarry's shoulders. The girl's hair was a dark, dirty red color and her skin was pale and slightly luminous. She smelled slightly of compost, and her teeth were white and very sharp. "Three guesses as to why I'm about to rip your rotten little throat out, deary?"

"Wh—who are you? What do you want?"

A hard smack across the face seemed to explode out of nowhere. Persephone had barely had time to see the girl's hand move before the sting of the blow was already beginning to subside.

"He was mine! I'd chosen him. He was going to be mine, and then you had to go and take him away! Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you could cause for him if the others were to find out?"

"What? Who? What are you talking about?"

A sudden rustling of leaves and the weight of the girl atop her vanished. There was the tremendous sound of snarling and growling and in a second Persephone lifted her head to see the two of them, the gray wolf had come out of nowhere and tackled the girl, pinning her to a tree. The girl let out a loud scream of pain that seemed to morph into a gruesome whine as she lashed out, her arms lengthening as her hands foreshortened into tremendous paws. In a second the transformation was done and the russet-haired female timber wolf had sunk her teeth into the throat of the one who had charged into her.

It was all so quickly executed that even when it was all over it took Persephone a few moments to gather what all had happened. The she-wolf managed to get a firm grip on the throat of her attacker and using her powerful jaws, she choked him until his grip on her loosened. She freed herself, bounded from the tree and landed fleetly on the ground behind her attacker. Both wolves circled each other a moment, the gray wolf taking the trouble to put himself between the female aggressor and Persephone.

The she-wolf lunged, but he was ready for her, snatching her out of the air and pinning her. She struggled and in a moment the violent slashing stopped. She lay still, petrified with fear as she realized it would take one quick jerk of her opponent's jaws to snap her neck. A whimpering came from the she-wolf then, and after a moment, the gray wolf removed his teeth from her exposed throat. The timber wolf leapt up and quickly departed then, her tail between her legs as she bounded away from the trail.

The gray wolf turned then to look at Persephone. She took a step back, he appeared much bigger up close. She had, up until that moment, only ever seen him in this form from a distance. "Th-thank you," she said, her voice very small.

The wolf snorted, a bit of steam coming out of his nostrils. The rain started then, little droplets hitting the ground and the leaves of the low bushes along the edge of the path. As the droplets fell onto the wolf's nose and throat, the features seemed to melt away. It was only a few instants before he stood before her, naked on the path, a rather nasty looking gash along one side of his neck.

"You're hurt." She took the cloth from the top of her basket and pressed it against the wound. He was silent, looking at her, his eyes still not entirely human.

"You carried me home last night?"

"Yes."

"Where did you put my cloak?"

"I didn't move it. It's up the trail, by the oak."

She took the bloodied cloth away, the wound was already beginning to clot and heal rapidly. She looked about for some place to put the bloody cloth and after a moment she settled on putting in the pocket of her skirt. He picked up her basket and together they began walking along the path, quietly, over the hill.

"Is she..." Persephone began, but then stopped. She cleared her throat. "How did she know about me?"

"She knows things."

"She wants to kill me?"

"No. She wanted to scare you. She wanted to, I think, scare me a little, too. It's what any of the others would do if they found out. Hunt you, kill you, then the village would be next."

"They'd attack the village?"

"One by one, people would start to go missing. First you, then your grandmother, then anybody caught too far out too close to nightfall. The net would close a little more each day, more and more people would be caught in it..."

"Why?"

"Because it's the way of things."

"Why is it the way of things?"

They had come to the big oak. He waited while she went around behind the tree and picked up the slightly soggy red cloak.

"Once upon a time," he said, "before the world grew civilized, men worshipped our kind. We were protectors, you see. We guarded men against the darkness. Men revered and respected our race, but then, over time the reverence was replaced with fear. Men grew distant, they began to distrust us and then one day they discovered our weakness..."

Persephone ran her hand over the silver thread.

"Yes," he said. "They began to call us monsters then. We were hunted. First with arrows with tips forged from silver and then with guns and powder and silver shot. A few survived those times and hid here in these woods. Eventually man began to forget we had even existed, as monsters as well as deities. We became creatures of myth and folklore. We hide from mankind as best we can, doing our best not to cause trouble for them and keep them from causing trouble for us. But if, some day, we should be found again, well, many of our pack would rather kill than be killed."

"But my grandmother knows about you."

"She knows and yet she has proven herself to our elders as being trustworthy. She keeps her silence so long as we keep our distance from her and from her loved ones."

Persephone nodded, moving in close to put her head against his bare shoulder.

"So, this is a problem, then."

She felt his hand move up, his fingers curled through her wet hair. The rain was falling all around them; neither of them seemed to notice or care. She listened to him breathing.

"Aren't you afraid?"

She looked up into his eyes. The grayness of the wet world around them made the violet of them more pronounced.

"Yes," she said. She lingered a second before tearing her gaze away from him. She walked on, willing herself not to look back at him. By the time she arrived at her grandmother's gate she was drenched. She threw the cloak over her shoulders, though it did little good, and opened the latch. She finally looked back up the trail as she shut the gate. He was gone. There was nothing but the woods and the rain.

~o~

"Tell me a story, Grandmother."

Persephone was seated on the warm rug by the hearth in her grandmother's house. Her clothes were draped over the fender and she was wrapped in a large blanket.

"You're a bit old for stories, aren't you, my dear?" Grandmother took the kettle from over the fire and poured some of the hot water into two cups for tea. "Anyway, I think I've told you all the stories I know."

"No you haven't," Persephone said, taking the cup her grandmother held out to her.

Her grandmother nodded, doing her best to avoid her granddaughter's eyes. "I feared one day you'd begin to ask questions I would not want to answer." With that the old woman went to her chair and sat, blowing on her steaming cup of tea. "There is very little to tell."

"Start with his father." Persephone sipped her tea, expectantly, doing her best to look resolute. Her grandmother was a master of evasion and this was one topic Persephone was not going to let her equivocate.

The old woman set her cup of tea aside and looked over her shoulder out the window into the growing darkness of late evening. Her thoughts seemed to wander off into the woods almost, her eyes half closing in memory. Her face softened a bit and when she turned back to face her granddaughter, her eyes moist and tearful.

"I named him Alexander," she said. "They don't have names in their culture. They can all speak and pass themselves off as human if they want to but they don't. They're very proud. It's one of the more stupid things about them if you ask me—their pride. To be that prideful is to think themselves superior and they aren't."

"He must have hurt you very badly."

"I was young. Not quite your age. I lived with my parents in the village in those days. I used to love to go for long walks by myself, out along the outskirts of the meadow right at the edge of the woods. I would take books and sit by the river just out of sight of the village and I would lie in the sunshine, reading, listening to the sound of the water rushing over the big rocks. One day, lying by the river bank, I was aware of a feeling like I was being watched. I looked up, and standing atop one of the rocks, only a few meters from me, was the wolf." The grandmother wet her lips and leaned forward. "He was very large and gray with large paws that gripped the stone with sharp claws, I swear I felt sure could cut through the solid granite like knives through cheese.

"I sat, petrified, thinking that I'd caught him preparing to pounce on me. But he just stood, looking at me, and I looking at him. His eyes were unlike any eyes I had ever seen in an animal. Behind them there was a sort of intelligence. He not only saw, he perceived and he understood. After a few moments, moments that for me seemed to last hours, he leapt from the rock to land on the ground just beside me and bounded away into the thick of the woods. I had never been more frightened of anything before in my life, and yet, when he had gone, I felt an odd sort of sensation, like I had experienced something very profound and significant in that first encounter with the wolf. I rushed home and told my mother and father about what had happened and they forbade me to ever go near the river or beyond the edge of the meadow ever again."

Persephone straightened up her posture as her grandmother paused in her story telling to have another sip of her tea. "Did they know about them in the village back then?"

"I don't know for sure. My parents and all the other parents in the village told children stories of monsters who roamed the woods, feeding on anyone who ventured out too far alone. Like you I had, at a certain age, begun to suspect these stories to be nothing more than just stories. It is natural as one grows up for curiosity to lead one out further than one has gone before."

"So your parents said you couldn't go into the woods again."

"Naturally, I obeyed them... for a few weeks. But then, I exercised the same adolescent tool that I fear you exercised the other morning. I selected the memory of what my parents had told me to do and I then simply ignored it. I was back at the side of the river before even a week had passed, this time I removed my cape and spread it out on the ground. I had brought with me some dried meat. Don't ask me now if I knew then what he was, or what I had planned. Sometimes I think perhaps I had some inkling of an idea that he was no normal wolf. But other times, I recall my youth and my innocence and I think, perhaps, like a silly girl, I imagined capturing him and taming him, making him some sort of... pet."

"And did he come?"

"Yes. I had spent quite a few hours by the river, waiting, reading from my book. I must have drifted off to sleep because when I awoke he was there, but not perched high above me on the rock once more. No. I awoke to the sensation of his nose pressing against my cheek. I started and tried to back away on my hands and feet, but he followed pressing his nose closer, sniffing me. Over one of his shoulders I saw the remains of the parcel that had held the dried meat. While I had slept he had crept up and devoured the meat and now, that being gone..."

"Were you afraid he was going to eat you all up in one big gulp?"

The grandmother chuckled. "Well, something like that, yes. But he didn't. He sat right before me and cocked his head, curious about me."

"What happened then?"

"I spoke to him. I said, 'You're not going to hurt me are you?' "

"And did he speak to you?"

"No. He just lay down, idly with his paws crossed before him, his eyes studying me. After a few moments I decided I would get closer to him. I moved slowly at first and when he didn't seem to mind, I ran my hand over his head, letting my fingers massage the spot between his ears. He began sniffing and then licking my face. It was at that moment that I feel we first became friends."