004. twice upon a time

[honkinbigteeth]

You don't know how long you've been walking, but it's a beautiful, sunlit day in the forest. There's dappled light coming through the leaves. You're walking on a really cozy little forest path. It's just a dirt path. It's hard packed. But it's the kind of path that there'll be a little wooden footbridge. There's a skip in your step, and you're carrying a basket.

Walking beside you, much too large to fit on the path, and so therefore off the path, not right by your side but just on the other side of the occasional tree or shrub or fern is the biggest wolf you've ever seen.

"Okay, stop being coy and make an introduction already," you tell the wolf. He regards you, curious. "Just felt like you were kind of, like, hiding behind the trees, and I'm kind of someone who's looking for friends outside of my grandma, so just say hello. You don't have to be a creep about it."

"Hello again, Little Red Riding Hood." He bows his head to you, solemn, polite. "I'm sorry you died."

"Oh." A memory comes to you suddenly. Lying on the floor of a canyon, surrounded on all sides by the fallen corpses and rotten wood of the army of enchanted soldiers you cut down one by one until you couldn't hold them off anymore. Your wolf body, broken, bleeding, fading away. "Aww fffff - freak! Really?"

You sigh, realizing you lost, you failed, but just as quickly you brighten again. "Wait! So then this must be the afterlife, and I'm going to be reunited with my grandma."

The wolf stoically continues to pad beside you. "We can find a story like that, you and I." His deep voice is unexpectedly gentle. "Truth be told, in most of your stories, you are reunited with your grandmother, and I am dead."

"I mean, that seems like the kind of story I'd like to read personally, no offense," you tell him, meaning a little offense.

"A fork in the road is coming up," the wolf tell you. You follow his gaze to the path ahead, which appears to divert, one continuing into the sunny and bright woods, and one winding into a deeper and darker part of the forest, one that looks sinister and cold. "It will be easy enough to go left, and we will find you a story where you and your grandmother are reunited. Perhaps one where the woodsman kicks down the door and cuts me down, carves your grandmother out of my stomach."

You turn your gaze to the sunny path to the left. "...Does it offend you that I would kind of like if that happened?"

The wolf doesn't seem offended. "You've already killed me once."

"Well, that's kind of unfair," you protest, remembering heaving the ax and bringing it down on the creature's head, the way its blood spilled. "Because you told me to. Anyway, I don't have any interest in doing that again."

"You were kind enough to comply," he says. "You regret those gifts?" You remember drinking the blood and eating the flesh of this wolf, and how it made your body strong and your fangs sharp and your anger all the more terrible.

"Well, I think you kind of gave me the gift of survival without giving me a reason to survive, and without any assurance that you won't just take everyone else from me, and those gifts also made me sort of a monster amongst princes and princesses. So I would say, mixed blessing." You say all of that, and then you start to regret it for reasons which are hard for you to put into words. "...I'm sorry for speaking back to you. I know that in some trippy way, you're kind of an authority figure, so that was rude, and I'm sorry I said freak at you. Oh, freak, I said it again."

"I wouldn't have even known to be offended by that." He seems almost amused, almost. "I come for everyone, in their time. It is without malice or cruelty that I intend to devour each and every being."

That doesn't sit quite right with you. "Every being? What about...Pinocchio?" The wolf nods. "Puss in Boots? He's just a cat."

"I think the true cruelty would be for me to spare some and not others," the wolf says.

"...What about Mother Goose?" you ask, with some trepidation. The wolf can't intend to devour him. Not the person who took you in and protected you after the wolf devoured your grandma and ruined your life for the first time.

"Him, too," confirms the wolf.

This makes you angry. "So you would give me the strength to protect Mother Goose just so that one day the same thing could happen to him that happened to my grandma."

The wolf turns his head and gazes at you. "The only time you will accept to make your life worthwhile is forever?"

You swallow, uncertain suddenly. You're only twelve, and you've never thought of anything approaching forever. "I don't think it's that. I guess you just make me do really crazy stuff, so I feel like I need a reason that's really noble to justify it."

"You wish to do something noble with your strength?" the wolf asks, still watching you.

"Yeah," you agree. That finally feels right. "Because if I'm going to be a monster, at least I could be a monster for the right side, or a good side, or..." You swallow. "Your gifts are monstrous. I don't think I can look at myself in the mirror."

The wolf sits on his haunches. You've come to the fork, the place where the two paths diverge.

I'm going to tell you something, Ylfa," he says. Despite sitting, he still towers over you. "Down the left-hand path is a story quite common, though increasingly less common in these times of shadow, where you do not kill me, but instead the woodsman kills me, and you are reunited with your grandmother. But you must know that that story already exists, and your story ended in the dirt in front of those barrel soldiers and anvil-headed monstrosities. Whichever story you choose to go to will benefit from your strength and your knowledge, but it will carry the burden of the choices you have made and your memories. The left-hand path takes us to a kinder version of your story, and that story will receive you in all of the fullness of what has happened to you."

"So if I go down the left-hand path, then the woodsman will be there." You feel angry again, though you shouldn't. The woodsman was supposed to appear, you knew it somehow. He was supposed to protect you. "Where was he? He always came by my grandma's house, and he didn't come the day we met, in the capacity that we met."

"The woodsman's actions are varied across different stories. He is, after all, a character in your tale, and though that is a crown you may not wish to wear, it is the truth."

That feels too odd to you to think about, that the woodsman only exists because of you. "Well...my grandma taught me how to shop, so what's down the right lane?"

The right lane takes us to other stories," he tells you. "It takes us to some stories where you might receive answers to the question of the woodsman. And to your point of nobility and why it might be worthwhile to be a monster, there are stories down that path that will have your friends. Mother Goose."

"Is Mother Goose's son alive down the left-hand path?" you wonder. After all, wouldn't he be better off in that version of the story, where he hadn't lost everything. "Is Jack there?"

"In most of them, no. In many of these stories, you never meet Mother Goose," he tells you.

So that's something worth thinking about. After all, you haven't felt like there was much of a point to your survival, but you did make a promise to Mother, to help him find out what happened to Jack. So you can't really...break that promise, can you?

If only you had someone to offer you guidance. Someone other than this wolf, who seems rather wise, but who also ate your grandma and turned you into something pretty dark, so there's sort of a mixed bag there in terms of trust.

"...Is she still in your stomach? My grandma? Because you're offering me a very important choice, and I feel like I should consult my best friend. I'm assuming she's in the afterlife waiting for me, so we can be reunited, so I would like to tap into that and access her wisdom, please and thank you."

"You wish to speak to your grandmother?" You weren't really expecting that to work. Huh.

"Yes," you insist with a little more confidence. "I think that you're asking me to make a decision that I should really speak to an adult about."

To your shock, the wolf agrees, and wanders back into the forest, leaving you alone. But not for very long, as slowly but surely walking up the path behind you a few moments later, an old woman is trundling with a little shawl over her shoulders, carrying a parcel of wildflowers that she's wrapped up.

"Hello, Ylfa," she says.

"Grandma!" It hasn't actually been all that long since she died, but it feels like it's been ages since you've seen her. You're thrilled, relieved, scared. "Okay, this is really crazy, but you and I need to skedaddle, okay? I was just kind of sassing this wolf, but now you're real, so we're pulling a grandma heist, okay? Give me your hand, and we're just going to run. Anything but these two paths."

"You want to stray from the path?" She sounds disappointed in you, although she takes your hand. "Darling, you need to listen to your mother! We can't leave the path, it's dangerous. There's wolves in this forest."

You're a little stunned. "I thought - what? You're just going to parrot my mom back at me?" This is the wisdom your elders have for you? Just the same lesson, again, not to stray from the path? The lesson that never prepared you to face any of the things you've had to face, never helped you with any of it? This is all there is?

"Who do you think she got it from? I had to yell it at her all the time when she was little. I constantly had to send her out. I sent her out to bring things to my mother, who lived in the woods at that time and was very infirm and needed help with all manner of things."

This is such a disappointment to you, but you decide - it doesn't matter. She's here. You aren't alone anymore. You're going to go with her and you're going to make oatmeal raisin cookies in the afterlife. You can just stay with her. The only connection you have back home is Mother, and surely he'd understand. You take her hand and you skip alongside her back down the forest path. She starts to wander down the dark right-hand path, but you aren't so concerned with directions when you have an adult to guide you. You feel more like yourself than you have, and you've lost the hunched way you carry yourself, hide yourself in your cloak.

"Grandma, a lot happened while you were dead," you chatter as you walk beside her. "So, I did meet some friends. I turned into a werewolf. There was this time that we fought this really evil fairy, and I took out all this furniture. I fought furniture. Remember when we built furniture that one time? I basically did the opposite."

"Well, I hope whoever's furniture that was was consulted, and that you left a note, dear."

What is this? You're frustrated again. She doesn't have anything else to say to any of that? Your grandma, your best friend, she doesn't share that sense you have, that these things that have happened to you are in some way important, that the ways your life has changed and the way you have changed matter?

"Grandma, why are you being... Why do you sound like my mom? This is not you. You're the one who helps me get a little wild. You're the one who says, 'Let's stay up to 7:30 instead of 7!' You're the one who says, 'We can have black tea after 2 PM!'"

"Am I?" she asks you. "Fascinating." You suddenly notice something a little bit strange about her that you hadn't noticed before. Maybe it's the way she's carrying herself, or the shawl, or - were her ears always so big and hairy.

"Oh." You sigh out, frustrated. "Got me again!"

"Whatever do you mean, dear?" she asks, watching you with big gleaming yellow eyes and smiling at you with her big sharp teeth.

Your eyes sting with angry, stubborn tears. "I mean that you made me think that my grandma was back to get me to go down a path in which I could just keep turning into a monster and scaring everyone around me, including myself. Do you know what I did to my family, Grandma?"

"You huffed and puffed and blew them all away," she says, softly.

You look away and your voice chokes. "Yeah."

A furry paw rests on your shoulder. "Just to be clear, darling, it's not that I'm in disguise." You turn and look at her and it's still your grandma standing there, but she's also part wolf, just like you. It doesn't feel like a disguise. It feels like maybe she and the Big Bad Wolf are just different aspects of the same entity. "To invite someone into the world is inviting them into a world of shadows. There is no way to have the joy of the oatmeal cookie without walking through the woods full of wolves. Your first breath signs the deed to one day have your last." And then, with tenderness, she adds, "I am sorry that I am gone. I miss you more than anything. I miss you with all my heart."

You stare at the ground, hot tears still welling in your eyes, rolling down your face. "When you're gone, I don't really know what I'm supposed to be fighting for."

She appears less wolf like, more old woman, and she tilts up your chin and looks you in your eyes. "You're my favorite little girl in the whole world, and whatever you choose to fight for, I know is right."

You sniffle. "It's only gotten harder and harder to make friends, because, you know." You make a soft little growling sound, hunch your shoulders and show your furry hands.

"If I can give a bit of grandmotherly advice?"

"As long as it's not the stay on the path kind," you say, a little stubborn still.

"No, I'll say something true." She smiles at you and then she changes again, her features becoming a wolf, but not a wolf in disguise as your grandmother, just her as a wolf. "The real friends, the ones that make miracles happen, the ones greater than any treasure you could find on any adventure, they see the wolf in you and love it too." And she squeezes you in her arms. "You're not a monster. You're not."

"Does that mean I'm a princess?" you whisper, teary.

"Well - you're my little princess," she says gently. "But we are broke. Can't all be princesses. Though there's a shocking amount of them running around."

"Yeah, okay," you say. "Wolf it is."

She sets her head against yours and holds you a little longer as a goodbye before letting you go. She stands there with you, gazing into the deep dark of the woods ahead of you. "You asked why one should be a monster, what purpose there is to it. Purpose, true purpose, is always down the scarier path, through the darker part of the forest."

You nod. And you step away from her, and you adjust your galoshes, and you begin to walk into the woods, along the dark and sinister path you'd walked once before unknowingly, but this time knowing what lies in store for you and choosing it all the same. You begin to see the forest open up, and as it opens up, you are looking over a cliff, but it's a cliff miles and miles, it's so vastly high above these realms. You're looking at another forest down below, and you begin to feel at the edge of your mind another set of memories. You begin to feel like a version of your story where you made the same choices in the cottage, where you gained those gifts from the wolf, but you start to have memories in addition to the ones where you went and found your family. In this version of the story, you were still hungry even after you drank the wolf's blood and ate his flesh, and you continued into the forest until you found the woodsman's cottage in the forest, found the woodsman asleep in his bed, and you ate him too.

In the dark of the woods outside his cottage, the wolf appears again, though now you see him hurt and sick, with a stream of blood from his eyes and nose and mouth. "I am sorry for all you have suffered. Your friends need you. Take this gift before it is too late." He breathes on your cloak, and it becomes warm around your shoulders. "This is a less kind story you now travel to. Take care, Little Red Riding Hood." And then he cries, as if in pain, and he vanishes.

"What's doing this to you?" you ask in alarm, but there's no answer. He's gone. And you're alone, in the woods outside the cottage, in a body that is stronger than it was before, but with blood wet on your face and hands.

"Oh god," you say. "How am I going to make this right?"

Somewhere out there, in this world, your friends must be waking up in new bodies, too.