and I found you, sniffed you out on the path with your basket, your cape, your soft hair, your pink-orange freckles lit by the sun piercing the canopy, and if I jumped out, held up my thick paws and clipped nails, opened my mouth wide, to show not teeth but hunger, not teeth but patience, as you walked this forest over and over, as I smelled the wishes rising from your skin, smelled the jail smell of your life, of this routine of caregiving, of caring, of giving, and if I searched and found the red haloing your head, the fire of everything you wanted to be, everything your mother and grandmother and great-grandmother wanted you to be, if you cried out, but it wasn’t fear, and then touched me, traced the pads of my palms, and said what big hands you have, said you’re so hungry, said I used to fear this path, then I could finally tell you I’m not really a wolf, and you’d run your fingers up my arms, dig the tips down through the fur to my skin, and say girls can be wolves too, if you reached up to my lips, pushing your hands into my mouth, if you said take me someplace new as I tried to whisper around you, my mouth full, as I tried to tell you let the ax man come, I’ll slice myself open, you’d hush me, widen my mouth, push in up to your elbows, crawl all the way inside, and I’d turn and run the both of us from these woods.
From The Rainbow Issue of Fairy Tale Review, published by Wayne State University Press, 2023.
