The Child of Wolves by Sabeen Sadiq
The Child of Wolves
Flames leapt from the small fire to frolic silently in the swirls and eddies of the night breeze, catching against the bare winter-stripped twigs of an elm to flutter brief passionate lives as fiery leaves. Turning their colors in mere seconds, they left only a faint settling of ash against windswept snow and a single unburned page on the grill. She sat the gaze of her eyes on the picture it bore—a red-cheeked curly-haired girl in hood and cape, toting a basket, confronting a handsome young man with the legs and the tail of a wolf. Cupping her hands, she made a small shelter for the match that she brought to life between her sloped palms and took to meet the untouched scene. The girl’s cloak went up in flames that quickly devoured both her head and the wolf’s, and then went on to deal with both of their bodies. She watched the fire treat its palate and cleanse her of her past once again. The story had come too close to the truth.
It had been luck that led her to stumble upon it, a slim book brought home in the hand of a child, the letters and numbers of a library’s white sticker assembled in code on its binding. She brushed a loop of her hair behind her ear, where it hung long, straight, and red down her back, and aimed her chin at the moon, which dangled pregnant and ponderous, a beacon of light in the night. She had witnessed too many atrocities committed against her brethren to dismiss the story as just another adaptation. It had been written by someone who knew her tale, who had seen and could expose her for who she was.
Images banished behind the unconscious veil of her mind began to drift their way back through, wandering without direction, caught up together in an explosion of loss and pain. Her husband, roasted upon a spit, protesting his innocence until his dying breath proved him liar, reverting his shape to that of beast. Her children’s mewling cries as their throats were mercilessly slit before her, their pelts stolen by the village’s knives just as surely as were their lives. She alone had been spared, always spared, instead made helpless prey to the wolves of the village, men whose natures resembled those of beasts far more than did those of her family. Within a month she had escaped, as grotesquely engorged in her vulpine form as the moon was in the sky the night of her flight.
Soft flurries of falling snow settled upon her face and she thrust her tongue out at the heavens, fishing for gentle brushes of wetness, recalling the time that she made her fateful decision and chose passion, chose bestiality. She met the wolf on the way to her grandmother’s house (they all got that much right), but she wasn’t frightened, wasn’t as naïve and innocent as they liked to make her out to be. He had appeared as a man, naked as the snow they stood on. She offered him her shawl, and he touched her crimson hair. He offered to carry her basket, and she touched his pale bare skin. They never made it to her grandmother’s house, never mind the path of needles or path of pins, and they dined on the basket’s contents as they lay on her shawl in the snow, bundled in her long, thick hair, munching biscuits and jam. It was thought of hot tea and a warm fireplace that had roused her, sent her from the wolf’s side without a qualm about her encounter and on to her grandmother’s empty-handed. Pleasuring in the tender touch of the drifting snowfall as she walked among great pines and evergreens, she forgot her shawl and her neck was exposed to the old lady’s horrified eyes, the twin punctures of wolves’ fangs unmistakable. And so the friendly flickering of the fireplace was transferred onto a brand and made to forbid her re-entry into her old life. The wolf was waiting for her with shawl in hand as she came fleeing back down the path, her hair streaming red as a river of a bloody tears behind her.
He had waited. He had marked her, but he had waited. Her husband, the big bad wolf, had only taken what she had given freely, and then he had waited, had shown more humanity than the beasts that would burn him alive. And because the story got it right, because the wolf was shown as the man he truly had been, because she was shown as the little seductress she had been, the story had to go, had to burn before her child read it. Because he would recognize the tale as hers, would ask about the other children that had never been mentioned in the other stories, would have to be told that he was the child of village wolves, and not of the man that waited.