Grandmother’s house lies silent as it awaits the arrival of Little Red Riding Hood. It is a squat redwood cottage with a grey stone chimney that spits smoke into the clear blue sky. Grandmother had lit a fire and put the kettle on to welcome Red Riding Hood, as she always does.
But Grandmother is gone. Her flesh and bones are dissolving in the pit of Big Bad Wolf’s belly. The taste of her blood is still fresh on the back of his tongue. He is lying in Grandmother’s bed and wearing her clothes, as if everything that was hers always belonged to him. The noontime sun burns bright through the window, bathing the room in a golden heat that wards off the late autumn chill. Big Bad Wolf adjusts his bonnet, then lies back against the headboard and folds his paws over the bedspread. He waits.
Little Red Riding Hood is lost.
She has spent the past fifteen minutes picking flowers for Grandmother, at the wolf’s suggestion. “Such pretty gifts will make your poor, sickly grandma happy, don’t you think?” he had said, and she had agreed. She skipped through the undergrowth, collecting fistfuls of white aster and fiery butterfly weed, imagining the flash of delight in Grandmother’s eyes. But now Red Riding Hood has lost sight of the path that leads to the cottage.
She doubles back the way she came, or the way she thinks she came. She tramples on damp moss and dry leaves while tall blades of grass scratch her shins. She tucks the flowers she gathered under the cloth covering her basket, hoping they won’t get crushed.
The forest is oddly silent. It is as though a door suddenly closed, insulating her from the normal sounds of the woods such as birds chirping and wind rustling through leaves.
Then the sharp clip of an axe rips through the silence and life in the forest resumes. She stumbles through the foliage, following the noise as it repeats, until she spots the broad shoulders of the Woodsman. He is standing on a slight incline off the edge of the path, chopping at the base of a silver beech.
She lets out a long sigh of relief. The Woodsman turns, cheeks ruddy from exertion, and tips his cap at her.
“Watch out for wolves,” he says.
The wolf she met earlier, the one who told her to pick flowers for Grandmother, didn’t scare her, so she privately scoffs at the Woodsman’s concern. She has more important things to focus on: she has found the path again, and Grandmother’s cottage is only a few minutes away.
The scenery is familiar. The grey pebbles and clusters of weeds show her the way as clearly as signposts. Here is the tall blackberry bush, picked clean by birds. And there is the fallen log covered with moss and white mushrooms. She begins to whistle and skip, swinging her basket at her side. The path bends right behind an oak tree and—
The Woodsman’s shoulders appear through the trees.
Red Riding Hood blinks and turns around. The curve in the path is gone, and so is the oak. Instead, there is the gnarled elm that reminds her of a broken hand and the pit at the right-side edge of the path that is always filled with rainwater. She remembers passing them right before the wolf accosted her and sent her wandering through the undergrowth. She looks ahead: the Woodsman is in the same spot as before, hacking away at the same beech.
He doesn’t show any surprise at seeing her again. He simply nods, tips his cap, and says, “Watch out for wolves.”
Red Riding Hood gives him a tight smile.
She trudges down the path again, in the same direction as before, but she doesn’t whistle or skip. She scrutinizes her surroundings. Yes, the rocks and trees are familiar – she knows this forest just as well as the Woodsman does. She strides past the bare blackberry bush, the fallen log festering in its own decay, and rounds the corner past the oak tree. And before she knows it, she is facing the Woodsman’s broad back again. She notices for the first time that despite the relentless blows of his axe, the cleft in the beech’s side hasn’t changed in size.
He nods at her. Tips his cap. “Watch out for wolves.”
“I know,” she mutters.
She tries the path once more, heading in the same direction, but as soon as she rounds the curve past the oak, she finds herself facing not the Woodsman, but the forest’s entrance.
Red Riding Hood’s nape prickles. She’s known this forest for as long as she can remember, or she thought she did. Part of her wants to turn around and go home, but she can’t bring herself to face her mother’s displeasure. The longer she mulls over the situation the more a hot ball of anger forms in her throat. No, she won’t give up. She does know these woods. Her mother trusts her to trek through them on her own, and she will.
She forces herself to breathe calmly so she can think. She must have followed the wrong path. There is no other one she knows of, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. She charges deeper into the woods, annoyed at herself for having been fooled so easily. Almost immediately, a cool gust of air brushes her cheeks, and a sparrow flits above her head, as if to show her the way.
The trail is still all too familiar to her, and she wonders how she could have confused it for another. She passes the groundhog hole and steps over the fallen birch branch, then stops. The path in front of her now bifurcates when it didn’t before.
She wavers, shifting from one foot to the other, before choosing the trail to her right. She immediately knows it’s the right one: the twisted elm is soon looming over her, and never has she been so happy to see it. She smiles up at the sunlight glinting through its ragged branches, as though greeting an old friend. When she lowers her eyes, she finds herself back at the fork in the path.
Gritting her teeth, she chooses the trail on her left. She passes the gnarled elm and pauses. Ahead of her is the bend around the oak, which she shouldn’t have come to yet. She continues anyway, and as soon as she rounds the tree, she finds herself again at her starting point, only now the path is branching off into three directions instead of two.
Red Riding Hood chooses the middle path and is immediately confronted with the racket of the Woodsman’s axe. He and his unyielding beech have appeared next to the elm, seemingly out of nowhere. The scent of freshly cut wood wafts in the air.
“Watch out for wolves,” he says. Red Riding Hood sticks her tongue out at him when his back is turned.
She stalks past, heading towards the gnarled elm branches peeking through the foliage. She reaches the base of the tree and does a double-take. It’s the same elm, the one that looks as though a giant’s hands tried to twist its limbs into knots but gave up partway, but now it’s covered in mushrooms and reeking of rot.
The rest of the path makes little sense. She finds the blackberry bush sitting in the middle of a puddle and the oak tree with half its branches missing – not chopped off, but simply gone, as though they had never existed in the first place. Red Riding Hood hurries around the bend and finds herself facing the three diverging trails again.
The forest has become a maze Red Riding Hood cannot hope to solve. But she tries anyway. She chooses one fork in the path, then another. The forest pushes her back to her starting point nonetheless. As she trudges on, her usual markers are no longer where or what they should be. She passes an elm that is no longer rough and distorted but perfectly straight. The blackberry bush is blossoming, full of fruit as if it were the beginning of spring. A coterie of groundhogs sits in the oak’s high branches, staring down at her with unfathomable dark eyes. Sparrows emerge from a hole in the ground and flutter into the air. Red Riding Hood scurries on.
At the thud of the Woodsman’s axe, she sighs and braces herself. But the sight of him stops her dead. His neck and wide shoulders are covered with grey mushrooms. He turns, and his skin is browned, lined and cracked, like bark. His mouth appears in the middle of his face like a gash.
“Watch out for wolves,” he says. Green moss shows between the gaps in his teeth.
Red Riding Hood slowly backs away before breaking into a run. Enormous crows darken the sky, and without thinking, she covers her head. Trees extend their branches to grab her arms and ankles, tearing her clothes, and she loses her footing. The wind is stronger now, and its freezing gusts howl in her ears and make her eyes water, blinding her. She stumbles along the path and treads into puddles. Her shoes are soaked, and along the way, she drops the basket of food for Grandmother. Eventually, the wind dies down, the trees cease their grasping, and she stops to catch her breath. She opens her eyes.
She has returned to the spot where she first saw the Woodsman. But he and the beech are nowhere to be seen, and the path in front of her has disappeared. She faces rows upon rows of thick oaks crowded so close together that she can’t see the rest of the forest behind them. The sun is setting now, blurring the trees in the grey light and turning them into a formless mass. She turns around. The trail behind her is no longer a single line; it splits into five separate directions, none of them familiar.
In the distance, a wolf howls.
In Grandmother’s cottage, Big Bad Wolf continues to wait. The sky outside the window darkens, throwing shadows across the flowery bedspread. The fire Grandmother lit for Red Riding Hood is no more than a pile of ash.
Big Bad Wolf spent the first hours of his wait tapping his claws together in anticipation before slumping his shoulders and staring out the window. Did Red Riding Hood figure out his ruse and run away? Did she return home for an unknown reason? Even so, it’s unbelievably rude to keep him waiting like this.
He’s unsure what to do now. The moon’s outline is growing brighter by the second in the indigo sky. He should cut his losses and slink out of the cottage to return where he came from. But each time he makes a move to leave he stops, thinking that surely this will be the moment Red Riding Hood enters, and he doesn’t want to miss it. Maybe if he remains patient just a little longer, he’ll hear her timid knock on the door. And so, paralyzed by indecision, he continues to wait, until the sky turns black and the cottage is sapped of light.
Somehow, he knows this isn’t how things were supposed to go.
Sophie Gazarian has a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Concordia University and a master’s in library and information science from McGill. Her work has appeared in Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 3, Fusion Fragment, and other publications. She currently lives in Montreal and is a member of the Quebec Writers’ Federation.
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