Glass

When I told the story afterward I always said we spoke the same language, the wolf and I. A slight falsification. Actually the word we spoke was silence—blue burning cloudless and the glade of bees, then the loom of darkness, leaves shining in the sun and the stars’ prickly light.

Until I was 12 we ran in sync, the snow’s myriad dazzle crunching beneath us as we loped toward the edge of unknown. The forest went on forever, its green light a promise that the future lay rolled out ahead of us like some infinite magic carpet.

On my thirteenth birthday my grandmother draped a cloak around my shoulders. It was white, the color of bones and January. When I walked home it dragged behind me, its ties a noose around my neck. The wolf hung back, waiting, but it was too much for him. He loped ahead of me and I fell further and further behind until he was only a grey dot against the snowy horizon.

Winter melted to become spring—time of flowers and scents, of secrets and fever. Every day he met me on the path, waiting still, and every day I hurried past on the way to grandmother's with my white cloak and my basket of cake and wine. I could hear him just beyond the bushes, following me.

“Leave the path,” he called. “Let us run as we did before.”

As I said, he spoke in the language of silence, of seduction. I acted as if I hadn’t heard him, only walked on in my cloak of bones. At last he left me and surged ahead into the forest. I walked on, ignoring the way dusk ran its fingertips through my hair, the way it touched its lips to mine. Then walking melted to become running, though I couldn’t tell you when.

The door was unlatched when I got there but I didn’t enter. I stood unmoving in the garden of herbs and baby’s breath, both hands shaking with anger and fear. Even so, the roses sang me strange lullabies--as if their pinks and perfumes could soften me to betrayal, to what the world was at its worst.

I crossed the yard and climbed the front stairs to the cottage. Inside all was quiet, save for the wolf's heavy breathing. I knew what he had done and what he planned to do. The time of green carpets and of bones was over. Or so he thought.

I took hold of the door handle and pulled myself inside, peering behind closed curtains. I could make out the pointed tips of ears, the eyes so oddly human, the snout, the fur that shone like fire. I could see grandmother's nightcap and gown.

Without a word I backed away and stepped outside, slipping a glass goblet into the pocket of my cloak. I crushed it with the heel of my boot and sprinkled myriad dazzling shards over the cake, which I set with the wine on the uppermost step of the porch.

It wasn’t a long wait.

He emerged sated, his belly unnaturally large, and swiped at the cake with his paw. When he lifted it to his mouth and swallowed, he knew my revenge. His eyes tried to read the forest but they were already too dim with pain. When he fell, I neither smiled nor cried. By the time I reached the top of the stairs, his eyes had clouded over.

I sliced him open and pulled grandmother out, touching the tip of my cloak to blood, the color of apples and stormlight. Swathing myself in red, I leapt into the forest toward the edge of unknown and beyond.

*

You might also like: