She had never spoken to her husband about that night.
She did not have to.
“How things change,” she whispered. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf centered herself in front of her computer. She was filled with fear, doubt, and a near-certainty that what she was about to do was somehow terribly wrong and terribly right all at the same moment. She could feel a little nervous sweat gathering beneath her arms as she adjusted the keyboard so that her hands rested comfortably above the letters. She glanced around quickly to make sure that no one was watching her. She clicked a few keys.
A new, blank document flashed onto the screen in front of her. She paused again and told herself that there would never be a better moment. She wrote:
Chapter One: The Three Reds
She indented a few lines, and then she typed:
I did not know on my wedding night that the man who crept beside me into bed was a vicious killer.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf looked at the sentence. It wasn’t bad, she insisted to herself. It might just work. She did not know much about nonfiction or memoir, but this didn’t seem to her to be a poor start.
She asked herself whether somewhere within her there was another sentence to follow, and where she might find the language to construct it. And in that most rare of moments, spectacular arrays of words suddenly burst from her imagination. Words rollicked and rumbled, shined and shouted, they bounced around within her, suddenly unchained, adventurous and yearning to be free, exploding in the heavens like fireworks, gathering together into a great pyrotechnic display of phrases. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf felt a wild hot rush of excitement and hunched over, eagerly bending to the task at hand.
Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844) Page 38