My Grandma Madeline once told me a log family found security along a riverbank while a wolf disemboweled a man around the bent neck of an ephemeral flow. The man screamed horror, his organs splayed out under a wraparound-hug moon,
but the family didn’t hear his pain. Sprung from the expanse of his wet bark tongue, the Pa recited The Little Red Riding Hood to his daughter. Over a winter’s waxing and waning bedtimes, the tale wiggled itself like a hookworm into her consciousness. With her brain heavy with parasitic words of forested danger, she rolled herself to lay within the thumbprint of waning winter moonlight.
Heart tendrils on his lips, the wolf growled towards the family. The Ma and Pa whispered as one to their only kin he will not eat you, he will not eat you. Over the daughter, he stopped
where blood dripped onto her girlhood. As water shoved the stain away, the wolf hunted on into a night’s open mouth.