You are Red

by Melissa Cole

Art by Denita Benyshek

You only wanted to see what she said wasn’t there.

You saw fairies, but Grandmother scoffed at such a notion. The stories she told were of dark and danger, and wolves who would hunt a girl down. Take a bite if she wasn’t careful. 

For all those years, you listened to Grandmother’s stories. What else could you have done? The house the two of you shared was comfortable but small and surrounded on all sides by the Woods where the wolves of Grandmother’s stories lurked. 

During those years, you didn’t notice how small the space of your life was, or how vast the world you were forbidden to enter. The vegetable beds in the back were neat and abundant year-round, save for two months of bitter winter when the firewood was plentiful and the house warm and cheerful with the scent of baking bread and the sweetness of apples and cherries dried the previous summer. The front yard bloomed with flowers that visited as soon as the winter snow melted, snowdrops and crocuses and daffodils giving way to columbine and bleeding hearts as spring settled in, then a riot of Begonias, elephant’s ear, Canna lilies, poppies, and sunflowers in the gentle summer heat before autumn brought chrysanthemums and pansies.

The land on which you lived insisted that it could provide all a young girl would need. Flowers and sustenance, a place to play and a refuge. It worked, hand in hand, with Grandmother to convince you that the Woods were dark and dangerous, and a girl should never venture into them. Should, instead, live her life in the brightness of flowers and the comfort of baking bread.

But that, too, is a story.

#

The first glimmer came with the Woodcutter. He visited every month, or maybe twice a month. You couldn’t be sure, since you had only the flowers and the sun’s path through the sky to mark time. 

Grandmother was marking time in a different way, but you wouldn’t have known. Couldn’t see your own limbs lengthening, your chest finding its shape. 

The Woodcutter could.

You watched him leave that day. You’d never watched him do anything before, only chattered away over the lunch Grandmother served for his trouble—about the wonders the worms spoke of and the tales the spiders wove along with their webs. The Woodcutter was not a talkative sort of man. He’d merely crinkle his eyes as he chewed and nod his head when you’d finished, as if to tell you it was a job well done. Grandmother would smile indulgently. Her wood supply well laid in, her table bountiful, her granddaughter a charming and obedient thing. Her life enchanted.

But that day the Woodcutter’s eyes didn’t crinkle as you spoke. Instead, they slid toward you and then away in a hurry. 

Do you remember the sudden feel of the soup making its way down your throat and past the swelling of your breasts? Surely you noticed that you sat as tall as Grandmother now, your spine straight and supple where hers bent low. You felt the ends of your hair tickle the bare back of your neck, and instead of wiggling more firmly into the shrinking edges of your dress, you let it press against you, covering not quite enough.

After lunch, you stayed at the table while the Woodcutter mumbled his thanks and Grandmother placed the single gold coin in his hand. For the first time, you wondered—a revelation more startling than the way the Woodcutter’s eyes skittered about the floor without ever touching you—where the endless supply of single gold coins came from. Grandmother’s stories did not include a Grandfather who’d squirreled away a nest egg to keep her safe when he was gone. There were no hidden treasures in Grandmother’s tales. Only deep Woods holding dark danger.

You hurried to clear the table and brought the dishes round back to the pump that spouted clear, sweet water year-round, even, you surely now realized, in the winter months when it should have been frozen. Or maybe that thought didn’t come until later. Maybe right now you were too busy hurrying through the garden to crouch behind a tangle of sheltering tomato plants so you could watch the Woodcutter be swallowed by the deep, dark Woods.

It wasn’t violent, as Grandmother had promised. The branches of the trees didn’t reach out to claw at him the way you’d expected. The way you’d been raised, from before your memory began, to believe they would.

Was it possible, you may have asked yourself, that you’d never watched the Woodcutter leave before? 

This time, though, you did. His stiff shoulders, thick with muscles from swinging his axe. The scuffed belt around his waist. The boots tramping down the brown loam of Grandmother’s path, pausing as he pulled open the gate that seemed to hold all danger at bay, and then walking without hesitation into the darkness.

At this moment, it looked more dusty than deep. Like the soft fur of a harmless animal. Taller than the rabbits that tiptoed through your garden, front feet, then back. Less skittish than the deer that emerged from between gray tree trunks. There was a shagginess to the dark that you may have embraced as you would a big, serious dog. 

Or a wolf.

The thought of a wolf brought Grandmother’s stories tumbling out of the tree branches, unfurling their long legs. You heard the snapping of sharp teeth. The snarling of danger. The Woodcutter disappeared as if eaten by the darkness.

#

You saw the fairies that night. 

Grandmother was busy readying herself for bed, a process that involved a great deal of unwinding and then rewinding of hair and clothes, punctuated, at the end, with the triumphant lowering of her sleeping cap over her gray braids. While she was busy, you pressed your nose so closely against the glass that you smelled the cool nothing of its surface. How you were lucky enough to have real glass in your windows, four panes in each of four, was a question that had never troubled you before. 

Maybe now it did. Maybe it tickled at you as you watched the fairy lights wink on and off again. They lit the path the woodcutter had taken. Promised light in the darkness. A dance of wishes granted and then squandered, and of clever girls like you who could do better than the ones who’d gone before.

Did you doubt yourself as you read the promises they winked at you? Or had Grandmother raised you so well that doubt wasn’t an ingredient you could taste? Did you see in those lights a straight line from the Woodcutter to something beyond Grandmother’s stories? A slim and sharp knife blade of certainty? Or did you know enough to be very doubtful indeed?

It’s hard to say whether you heard exactly what Grandmother said at that moment, and it doesn’t matter whether you did. She could have uttered the same words every night. An invocation to sleep, undisturbed, in the safe home she provided for you. Such invocations play an important role in these sorts of stories.

On this particular night, though, you didn’t listen. 

Or if you did, the words were swept away by your dream. 

You dreamt of the Woodcutter. Younger. His muscles supple instead of knotted with hard work and long years lived. His skin as brown as the soil that yielded your beautiful flower friends. His lips tasted of salt and soot and far-away places. His fingers were rough against your skin, especially where before you’d felt nothing but the whisper of your underclothes brushing absentmindedly against you.

There was nothing absentminded about this dream.

#

You awoke a different person. As different from yourself as the blooming lily is from its green bud. As the purple crocus is from the snow that blankets it until it awakens. As different as a young woman is from her aging Grandmother.

You ate breakfast with the blush of the dream Woodcutter’s mouth on yours. His desire pooled in the hollows of your collarbones. It slipped into your oatmeal, and when you swallowed, your own desire grew in the awakening spring of your belly. 

Not desire for the Woodcutter of course. He’d been there for as long as you could remember, a constant, providing presence. Steady and reliable and safe. Isn’t that all a father figure is in these kinds of stories?

Your desire was not for old relations, of which you’d had plenty. Or of spiders who spin stories or deer who pretend to be princesses. You may have found, as warm tea played over your tongue, that you couldn’t quite believe in such stories any longer. They may have slipped away as you swallowed, leaving you with nothing but a desire to know what was really there.

You took the dishes out to the pump after breakfast every day—nothing Grandmother would remark on. Even baking an apple cake when the sun was barely risen wasn’t so unusual that she’d say anything about it. 

But when you brought the cake outside to cool, Grandmother asked why you didn’t just leave it on the windowsill.

You replied, airy as the outdoors, that you thought the open blooms of the flowers would lend it a different kind of sweetness. 

She didn’t agree, but she didn’t argue either. To Grandmother, this was just more little-girl play. 

But you played at something different as you slid a bottle of wine out of the root cellar. You told Grandmother that you had a special treat planned. You didn’t say it was for her, but who else would she think it was for? 

Her smile was a tad smug as she watched you line a basket with a tea towel and lay the wine bottle next to it. You didn’t see it. You were too busy pretending to be caught up in your pretending. But you felt her watching you through the glass-paned window as you lay the air-cooled apple cake in the basket and swaddled it with the tea towel.

Do you remember the words you called to her as you donned your red cape, tight at the neck now and too short by half? 

“I’m off to bring my Grandmother cake and wine!” 

The words tripped playfully from your lips, the last child’s play this little house and its garden would ever know.

#

You didn’t know what a real wolf looked like.

Grandmother’s stories were full of wolves. Sharp teeth. Long tongues that lolled from pointed snouts. Shaggy gray-brown fur. Hot breath that smelled of danger and the blood of weaker animals. 

But those, you’d suddenly come to understand, were just stories.

You made your way past the rows of rhubarb planted at the far end of the vegetable garden and climbed over the small fence that marked the edge of your world. If it was so easy for you to climb out, you surely must have thought, your confidence growing, how was it that the predators had never climbed in?

And then you stepped into a world that existed for you only in dreams, a land whose sole function was to mark the outer edges of your own. The grass was springier than the tame patch of Grandmother’s yard. The spot where darkness began closer than you’d believed. You stopped a breath shy of the place where the Woodcutter had been swallowed.

The Woods.

Yesterday, their razor-closeness would have sent you scurrying back over the fence. But today the darkness hinted at the darker corners of your dream. Of a woodcutter who wasn’t the Woodcutter and of your own choices that weren’t Grandmother’s.

Your next step was powerful and frightening, exhilarating and terrifying. 

Truth be told, the dimness you stepped into wasn’t really any different from the dimness of bedtime in the cozy bed you shared with Grandmother. If you shut your eyes, you might even imagine you were there with her, safe and sound.

Only, of course, you weren’t.

A dry murmur of shapes moved in the low tree branches. Twigs snapped under padded feet. Chittering winged creatures flew overhead, and the tang of pine caught in your nostrils, sharp and strange, a living thing.

When you opened your eyes, you’d lost your way.

You spun around, sure the sunlight you’d stepped out of was just behind you. You’d taken no more than a few careful steps into the Woods, hadn’t you? 

But there was no sunlight to be found. No going back so easily.

Maybe you steadied yourself with a breath, calmly assessing the situation. Or maybe not. You’d never been taught how to deal with real danger. Never had the concept of being lost explained to you. Never had an inkling of such a thing happening to you instead of to the paper-thin girls in Grandmother’s stories, pliant word-paintings who waited to see what dangers Grandmother would bring to them.

You knew not to wait. Though what your other options were was less clear.

#

The trees pressed around you like a caress. 

When you shrank from them, they reached further. Touching, exploring, pulling back only when you batted at them hard, then harder until a branch broke violently.

It lay on the ground where it fell, and you stomped on it, then lifted one end so it stood at an angle to the dark dirt beneath, and stomped again, the way Grandmother would to break a piece of firewood into smaller bits.

“Show me the way home,” you commanded. 

It was the sort of thing girls said in Grandmother’s stories. The way Grandmother told them, the girls’ voices trembled and then steadied. 

Your own words sounded small and furry. Field mice poking out of their burrows before popping back down again as if they’d never been there.

“I command you,” you said, louder this time. Braver. “Show me the way home.”

The Woods waited to see what would happen.

You weren’t the type of young woman to stand around waiting with them. Better to move, even without a clear sense of direction.

#

You could easily have expected fear and panic. These were the emotions Grandmother spun out of her story-girls so that they’d realize how wrong it was of them to step off the path. So they’d convince you never to do the same thing.

But you weren’t frightened or panicked or anything else Grandmother would want from you. 

You were thrilled.

Now, when branches brushed against the back of your neck or glanced your breast, you swatted and snapped. You bent them back and cleared your own path. 

“That’s more like it,” you said because you liked the sound of your own voice.

A creature overhead seemed to like it too. “Coo-hoo,” it called. “Coo-hoo beautiful girl, follow my voice and I’ll show you something.”

The words formed in your head out of a chorus of animal sounds. Burping frogs and crying rabbits. Shuffling badgers. And, of course, the howling wolves. You heard what they wanted. It was more than just to show you something, and it was more than you were willing to give.

So you followed your own path, the basket of cake and wine still slung over one arm, the too-small red cape catching on branches. Walked through the chorus of animal voices and deeper into the Woods until the bubbling song of a stream gave you something to walk toward instead of away from.

Did you think of the water from the pump in Grandmother’s yard as you bent to drink from it? Or were you thinking of the magic that lurked in running water? In Grandmother’s stories.

You were already magical as you knelt on the wet bank, the smell of moss strong in your head. The magic came from stepping out of your tiny world and into this vast one. Magic was discovery and wonder, and the strength to slap away branches.

The water was cold and clear, nothing like the water that came from the pump. It was its own being. Full and delicious as you quenched your thirst.

“Beware.”

Your head rose sharply. Water dripped from your lips. 

And you laid eyes on a wolf.

#

He wasn’t what you’d have imagined, if you’d ever bothered to imagine a wolf fully. Still, Grandmother’s stories had done their job. You recognized him, even with the shadows of the woods hiding everything but a face, his shoulders.

No fur, it’s true, but his skin was the brown found deep in a wolf’s coat and his eyes  reflected its gray. He didn’t have a snout, just a straight and long nose that you’d have considered regal if he weren’t a wolf. His teeth weren’t fanged, but they flashed white as he smiled.

“You never know what magic flows through an unknown stream.” His grin embraced the idea that you might find out. “You should take more care.”

You stood, unwilling to let him tower over you while you crouched like you were the animal here. He had the higher ground, but you had cake and wine and your wits. “It tastes fine to me. I’d like to think you’d have stopped me sooner if I’d really been in danger.”

“So you trust me to rescue you.” His gray eyes held yours, trying to draw forth a yes.

“You haven’t given me any reason to.” 

According to Grandmother’s stories, you should have been frightened and trembling. Your cleverness should have been born of fear. 

But it wasn’t. It was born of you.

The wolf took a step closer. You could see his hesitation. “Shall I have the opportunity to make you trust me?”

You eyed each other, taking stock. He held his shoulders back, his chin high, as if he’d been taught to. But there was uncertainty sitting at the corners of his mouth. 

“Why not give me an opportunity to make you trust me?” In Grandmother’s stories, the girl follows along, even when she’s being clever. She hides and waits and keeps herself alive until someone comes to rescue her. She never takes charge. 

The wolf tensed, squinted, then let loose a smile. “Fair enough. And then I’ll get my chance.”

“By then it’ll be too late,” you pointed out. 

His laughter seemed to relax him. When he came closer, he looked even more human and less like a wolf. “There’s different degrees of trust, don’t you think? For example, you just trusted me to come closer. And I trusted you not to run away.”

You picked up the basket of cake and wine as if preparing to depart. “I just wanted to see what you’d do. That’s not trust.”

“Isn’t it?” He cocked his head to one side, like the big, shaggy dog the Woodcutter sometimes brought with him to Grandmother’s.

“There has to be a promise to have trust.” You probably weren’t sure of this. But it sounded good.

The wolf considered it. There should have been drool dripping from his jaws and hot breath that smelled of his last meal. You wanted him closer so you could see for yourself if this was true.

“So.” His face, brown and regal and beautiful, moved into the light. “To get you to trust me, I need to make you a promise. Is that how it goes?”

“Yes.” You didn’t even stop to think before answering. The prospect of a promise from a wolf was too exciting.

“What if.” He paused, drew the moment out. “What if I promise not to eat you?”

You dropped the basket of cake and wine to the ground to show him you weren’t afraid. “And what if I promised not to eat you?”

This time his laugh was a bark of pleasure. “Would you really do that?” His gray eyes turned blue, then brown, then gray again. “Eat a wolf? We’re not reputed to be all that tasty.”

“I’d cook you up in a hearty stew.” You and Grandmother never ate stew, but in her stories people always did. You didn’t know exactly what went into a stew, besides potatoes, so you made it up as you went along. “With potatoes and some vegetables from the garden. And maybe some of the wine from my basket.”

He looked at the basket on the ground and then up to you again. “You’d waste good wine on wolf stew?”

“Why not? Unless, of course, we happened to drink it all now and there wasn’t any left to cook with.”

You must have known how reckless you were being. When Grandmother drank wine, her stories grew wilder. 

“Are you offering to share it with me?” The wolf seemed startled, and suddenly shy. 

“Yes,” you said.

#

Yes was the magic word, the key that unlocked the door between you. The wolf stepped out of the shadows to stand in the mud and moss a few yards away.

He was lean and muscled, and he stood upright like a human. His skin was smooth like a human’s, and the same brown all over, nothing shaggy about it. He wore pants, held at the waist with a thick, worn black belt. Instead of paws, he had feet, bare, like his chest. Strangest of all, he didn’t have a tail.

“The wine is tempting. But—” and here he hesitated, as if hearing a voice inside tell him otherwise— “not a good idea. Sharing wine with a stranger.”

“A wolf,” you corrected him, even though he wasn’t like any wolf in Grandmother’s stories. 

He seemed surprised, then ashamed. “I should leave now.” He shook his head. “No, I should see you safely home.”

“And why would I trust you to do that?” you teased.

But he didn’t laugh, and he didn’t tease back. His gray eyes were serious, his chin held low. “I promise,” he said. “It isn’t safe out here, and I’d never forgive myself if I left you to worse creatures than me.”

“Worse?” Grandmother’s stories whispered their way through you. Enormous beasts that locked innocent girls in their lairs. Witches who made girls dance until their bones broke and their bodies collapsed. Sleeping princesses who gave birth to unknown men’s babies.

You didn’t feel frightened by these stories, not anymore. Not in the way you had been when Grandmother told them to you in front of a blazing fire, the windowpanes frosted over, the wine on her breath as intoxicating as her words. 

What you felt now was hungry.

Your stomach gave a wolf-like growl to remind you that it had been a long time since breakfast. Your time in the Woods had passed like a dream, but there it was. No fooling your stomach, which didn’t care about stories and wolves and disobeying Grandmother.

“Want some of my cake?” You tilted the basket toward the wolf so he could see it wrapped in its swaddle of tea cloth. Recalled the gold of the yolks as you’d added eggs, the sweetness of the sugar you’d sucked from your fingertips. The richness of the batter as you’d poured it into the pan. 

Your stomach gave another mighty growl, and the wolf laughed. It broke his serious mood. “Sounds like it would be dangerous to say no.”

It was easy now to climb further away from the stream, where the ground was too damp for sitting, and to find a dry spot beneath a silver-trunked tree. Its branches hung over you without any grasping or grabbing.

The wolf sat across from you, too far away for an accidental touch. He inhaled deeply as you peeled back the edges of the tea towel. 

My, Grandmother, what a big nose you have.

You broke off a piece of cake as big as Grandmother’s lie and held it out to the wolf, who did not drool or gobble or pop the whole thing into his mouth. He said, “Thank you,” and held it in his hands, waiting politely while you broke off a piece for yourself. He said, “This is truly delicious, the best apple cake I’ve ever tasted,” as if wolves ate apple cake all the time and never one as good as yours.

“You’re a strange wolf,” you told him. 

He cocked his head, chewed, and swallowed. “What makes you say that?”

Now you were trapped, whether you knew it or not. You would either have to admit that he was the first wolf you’d ever met and you were relying only on the evidence of Grandmother’s stories or you’d have to lie. And you’d never lied until the moment you pretended this was all a game. There’d never been any reason to before. 

You took another bite of cake, and another and another, while the wolf waited for your answer. Maybe he thought you’d give it to him when you were done.

Your mouth grew dry, your swallows more effortful. Your stomach felt sore. But if you stopped eating, the wolf would expect you to speak, and you couldn’t tell him that what made him so strange was that he didn’t seem strange to you at all.

#

You reached for the wine when your mouth was so dry you couldn’t ignore it any longer.

The wolf still sat a respectful distance away. He’d finished his cake and was brushing the crumbs from his hands. “I think it’s time to take you home.”

You didn’t want to go back to Grandmother’s, and you didn’t want the wolf to feel so familiar, and there were dangerous things in the Woods, and here was the bottle of wine, solid and cool to the touch, so you threw it at him.

Actually, you threw it to the ground in front of him. You changed your mind in the instant before it left your hand. Regretted the momentary urge to throw it at his face so he would stop being so beautiful.

“Please open it,” you said.

He stared at the bottle as if trying to work out what it was, though he plainly knew. “Not such a great idea.” 

“But I’m thirsty.” You spoke as plainly as a child who doesn’t know better.

“Drink water from the stream.”

“You said it was enchanted.”

“I was lying.”

“Why?”

You both knew the answer.

“I’m sorry,” the wolf said instead. Had a wolf in one of Grandmother’s stories ever said he was sorry? You doubted it. Or if you didn’t doubt it, you should have. 

“Then open the wine,” you said.

The tangy heat of the first sip turned into many more, and the heat spread from your belly to your limbs to your lips, and you found yourself stretched on the ground with the wolf stretched opposite you, his head propped on a most un-wolf-like hand.

“Are you really a wolf?” It may have occurred to you that you should have asked this question a long time ago.

He let out a breath that tickled at your skin, and you sat up. “I try. But I don’t really enjoy it.”

“Were you raised on stories of wolves?”

He nodded. Sat up to face you as if hungry, not for cake and wine, but for the wolf stories you’d been raised on.

“Grandmother’s stories were all about how dangerous wolves are. Especially the ones who live in the Woods.” Your lips must have felt like someone else’s, betraying Grandmother like that.

“Then why did you come?” 

“I didn’t have any reason to trust them.” You looked at him hard. A promise in exchange for trust.

“The stories I was told were about the nobility of wolves. Their duty to protect helpless girls. And about how sometimes a wolf has to remind her of how helpless she is.” His voice wavered at this last part.

“You didn’t do such a good job of that.” You leaned forward to prove it.

“I couldn’t.” 

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe the stories.” He moved away, and you were disappointed. Don’t pretend you weren’t.

“I don’t believe the stories either.” Whether you said it because you were mad at him for moving away or mad at Grandmother for telling them, it’s hard to say.

“You don’t believe that I’m dangerous?” The wolf seemed sad to hear it.

“Do you believe that I’m helpless?”

He shook his head, slow and serious.

“Do you think you need to make me believe I am?”

Now he did move closer. You helped lessen the space, until it was nothing but his lips touching yours and he said, “I don’t think you’re helpless. That’s what makes me such a terrible wolf.”

“That,” you said, tasting him along with the wine, “is what makes you such a good one.”

#

Afterward, you walked hand in hand through the Woods. The basket and the tea towel and the wine bottle lay forgotten by a crushed bed of pine needles, some of which were still caught in your hair. The Woods were no longer dark, but twilit. The animal calls were music, and the caresses of the branches were soft and loving, like the wolf’s hand in yours.

You told each other your own stories, your names, where you came from. By the time you knocked on Grandmother’s door, he was more real than any story she’d ever told you.

When Grandmother screamed, you screamed back.

When she spit on the ground, you grew taller.

When she cursed all wolves, and especially this one, you refused to believe in it, and her curse shrank into nothing, withered and useless.

You gave up the safe home where you were never hungry and never in danger. You would have to learn to plant your own vegetable beds, and they wouldn’t always flourish. You and the wolf might spend the rest of your days together, or you might not. You might raise a family together, or you might end up with no family at all, even a wolf. 

It’s impossible to say what your choices will be. You are young, and fairy tales are only that, and writing your own story sometimes requires a wolf or two.