The Red Issue is devoted entirely to "Little Red Riding Hood." and includes new work by...Sarah Blackman, Greg Bills, Nick Bredie and Nora Lange, Jennifer Calkins, Lindsay Coleman, Nik De Dominic, Molly Dowd, Rikki Ducornet, Eve Gil, Ryan Habermeyer, Tina May Hall, Christopher Hellwig, Noy Holland, Toshiya Kamei, W. Todd Kaneko, Michael J. Lee, Laura Mullen, Christopher Nelson, Danielle Pafunda, Marthe Reed, Rebecca Sharbaugh, Maria Tatar, Lee Upton, Emily Vieyra, Kellie Wells, & Matthew Zapruder.
KELLIE WELLS
from The Girl, The Wolf, and The Elderly WomanMore than once there was a soon-to-be-old woman who had a loaf of bread, held it in her hands she did, and it was inconvenient to have a loaf of bread always sitting in her hands as she tried to sweep or sew or sneeze, so she said to her daughter, the one with cheeks the appalling color of let blood: “With a face like that, you haven’t anything better to do, so here, take this bread off my hands!” The woman said she knew a sickly wolf who would like nothing better than to receive stale bread from a girl like her, “but be careful,” said the girl’s mother, “as the woods are full of primordial women with faces like the bottom of a river and who long to feel the weight of bread in their twisted mitts once more.” The minute the woman handed the bread to the girl, her face grew dark as thunder, and she barked, “Git!”
The girl fled with the loaf under her arm and at the fork where everyone chooses wrongly, she saw a waxen old woman with a face like a fallen cake, and the woman yowled, “You’re headed the wrong way, dear heart!”
“But I haven’t chosen yet!” said the girl with the objectionable cheeks.
“As if that mattered,” said the woman and for a moment her face looked like a weathered map leading nowhere good.
Note: This story appears in My Mother She Kills Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010, ed. Kate Bernheimer).
Kellie Wells’ story “Rabbit Catcher of Kingdom Come” appeared in The White Issue of Fairy Tale Review and was reprinted in Best American Fantasy 2008.
Like all fairy tales, the story of Little Red gets strength from its multitudes. It is a moving hive, a traveling pack of translations and interpretations too numerous to catalogue. It manages to examine our most salient tropes in binaries, and the equators formed in this contrast are tangential contradictions: The tale is at once innocent and sexual. It mingles the vulnerable with the predatory, and overlaps captivity with freedom. It is both fable and fairy tale, and a horror story to boot: a naïve individual walking into a den of trickery. Then comes that eerie, parsed-out realization when our girl comes to terms with what the readers have known all along: things are not as they seem. What a fright, when something categorized as safe becomes compromised and inverted, when the familiar is replaced with the unknown. Capgras delusion is a rare disorder where people feel their loved ones have been replaced by imposters. But here we have a fable where such a swap has truly occurred. It is in this way that the story serves as a shield, helping us to grapple with one of life’s most unsettling truths: danger can be anywhere, even (or especially) where we least expect it. It’s very hard to accept that we can never have absolute security. Luckily there is Little Red, a tale that provides a stress-saver act of metonymy: instead of having to think about how harm might find us anywhere, we can simply know that grandmothers are occasionally replaced by wolves and leave it at that. In this issue, we add new footprints to the path through the woods. Some of these pieces retell the tale; others explore its place in our minds and our culture. Go my dears, and see how your grandmother is doing. I hear she has been very ill.
Alissa Nutting
Managing Editor