Chapter 8
Eight
In the morning, from the inn’s porch, you watch her go.
You don’t belong to anyone, do you? you once asked her.
She belonged to you. Who does she belong to now?
A rooster, a cat, and a donkey. The corner of your lip twitches.
The lump in your throat hasn’t gone away since she left.
Buy something to make your life bearable, an old friend reminds you from the grave.
Even though morning just broke, you go back inside, sit at the bar, and drink liquor you can’t taste until you can’t feel, either.
* * *
Day after day, you drink until you can’t feel.
* * *
Did someone abandon you? Someone abandoned me, too.
Over, and over, and over again: abandoned.
Your father first, and now Friend, with so many in between.
Gertrude included. Favorite—the Swan Prince—included.
Why didn’t they summon you from the claws of the Fair Queen?
It’s been years since their tragedies, their failures.
And your loss was one of their tragedies, wasn’t it?
So why wouldn’t they seek to undo it, to bring you back into the fold of their family?
Why didn’t anyone come for you when you needed them?
Because they knew you weren’t worth it, an inner voice supplies. Just like Friend.
* * *
Did they ever think about you? Wonder about you? Even once? You hope they did. (But if they did, why didn’t they try to find you?)
You hope they didn’t. (Imagine them worrying for your safety, when all along the beautiful maidens of the world weren’t safe from you.)
* * *
The problem is you have to see him, and you just can’t stop yourself.
No matter how much you drink, the need is still there.
It’s there when you wake, and it’s there in your dreams, and it’s there every hour in between.
There’s no running from this, now that it’s here.
If you don’t see him you will dissolve like sugar in water; you’ll burn forever, your heart an oven that eats and eats and eats.
You trim your beard, don fresh clothes, pull on your boots, and head out of the inn. Out of the inn, and into the woods.
* * *
A well-worn path leads out of town and into the woods.
Impressions from wagon-wheels line either side of it.
In the middle: the tracks of various-sized boots.
The criss-cross of finch feet; the imprint of a deer’s hoof.
For a moment you stand at the path’s inception, where cobblestone gives way to trodden soil, where brick buildings surrender to mighty branches.
Hesitation hums through you. How many years has it been?
Will he remember you? Will he care? Will he invite you inside?
Let you sit with him? Talk to you? Tell you about all you’ve missed?
If he doesn’t, you remind yourself, that’s a story, too.
You take your first step down the path.
Not a happy one, but a story all the same.
Then the next.
What would I do with a happy story, anyway? I’m too used to blood.
And the next, and the next, and the next.
* * *
In the woods, you meet a woman hanging linens on a clothesline outside her modest home. “The prince lives deeper yet,” she tells you, “in a cottage with a vegetable garden in front. His tomatoes are a mess. You won’t miss it.”
You nod your thanks and carry on. A vegetable garden.
Somehow, this piece of Favorite doesn’t fit into what you’d imagined.
You’d imagined a lake, and a strong, stone cottage built beside it, an upgrade from Gertrude’s hovel.
If not a lake, then a pond, at least. You’d imagined the grown-up version of the child-sized life. A common pitfall, you suppose.
Miles pass between each cottage, none yet with a tangle of tomatoes out front. You spare each home a glance as you come up to it, just to be certain.
That’s when you notice the blood-streaked porch.
Instantly your hand goes to the hunting knife on your belt, and you walk up the path to the front door.
Inside: the click of claw on wood. A low, satisfied chuckle, with all the gravel of a growl in it.
Like Friend’s voice, but more ancient, less tame.
Something in your belly quivers. Something young inside you.
Gripping the knife, you try the door, and the knob gives under the gentle turn of your hand.
The wolf lay by the hearth, belly distended, a woman’s apron and a child’s red cloak shredded beside it. Your heart throws itself against your ribs: I remember, I remember, cries your heart, I remember and I’m afraid.
Your heart may be afraid, but the rest of you is hard as stone. You’re not a boy anymore. You’re no longer at the mercy of the woods.
As you step further into the house, the floorboards don’t creak under the careful placement of your foot. The wolf doesn’t raise its head, doesn’t seem to smell you, either, too busy chuckling to itself.
“What a meal,” it mutters, “the grandmother and the child both! What a meal…”
Something in your spirit snaps.
“So I’ve found you at last,” you say. The wolf’s head jerks toward you, teeth bared. You remember what it was like to be small and alone, to face those bared teeth with no hope in the world. You remember it, and you bare your own teeth, wild and feral. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
* * *
The wolf, too full from its gluttony, could not fight you.
Kneeling beside its limp corpse, you slit it open down its front.
Throat to anus. Then you cut open the rind of the stomach—and a girl’s hand reaches out of the wolf’s body to catch your wrist. Discarding the knife, you take hold of her and pull, and she slides out, covered in globs of viscera and blood, her hair waxy against her face.
“It was so dark in there,” says the girl. A child still, though just on the cusp of becoming a woman. She wipes fluid from her forehead with a shaking hand. Her whole body trembles. She looks up at you, tears in her eyes, a sob twisting her face.
“Granny—he ate her first! My grandmother, she’s still—”
“We’ll find her,” you say. You reach inside the wolf, searching almost in vain, but then you discover the frail wrist, the crepey skin. “Help me get her out,” you say, and the girl grabs hold where you tell her, and together, you pull her grandmother back into the world.
The girl sobs. “Granny?”
“What happened?” The old woman’s voice is thin, her breath a wet rattle. “Where were we?”
“Help her sit up,” you tell the girl. “She was in there longer. See if she can cough up that fluid, all right?”
The girl throws her arms around her grandmother and does as you say. Standing, you go in search of blankets and linens and don’t return until your arms are overburdened with both.
“Let’s keep you both in front of the hearth,” you say. “Dry off and keep you warm.”
Granny becomes more lucid as time goes on. Only the girl, Red, was injured—a deep bite on her calf, where the wolf caught her when she tried to run away. As you bandage it, you tell her how clever she was to try to run, how brave she was to endure the darkness and terror of the wolf’s belly.
“I’m not clever or brave,” says Red. “I was so stupid. I talked to the wolf, I told him where I was going—”
“No,” you say at once.
“It was all my fault,” she insists. “None of this would have happened if—”
“If you hadn’t talked to the wolf?” You shake your head. “Wolves are everywhere. And sometimes you don’t know that a wolf is a wolf until it’s too late. That’s not your fault. That’s the nature of wolves.”
Red sniffles, looking at you with bright, glistening eyes.
“You may meet a hundred more wolves in your life,” you say. “You may be tricked again. You just have to do what you can to survive it, all right? Even if all you do is survive, like today. You did good, kid.”
Red’s lower lip wobbles. Then she nods.
Maybe she doesn’t quite believe you. You’re not sure you believe you, either.
But maybe, maybe, you’ve done some good.
“Thanks,” she says.