Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  You know the wolf is about to spring when he shifts his weight farther back on his haunches, when his front paws spread and claw into the earth. You shift your left foot behind your right, your dominant hand forward, elbow tight and close to your body. Your knees are soft; your grip is hard.

  The wolf growls, snarls, and then moves.

  You are aware of Keisha, still backed up against the tree, and you see her in your peripheral vision, face twisted in pain and fear. You hope she stays where she is, out of the way, and doesn’t try to help. But hope is all you have time for as the wolf bounds once, twice, and then he is in the air and almost upon you, claws and teeth and fur, and if the wolf lands on you, he will flatten you, you will be pinned beneath him on the forest floor, and he will tear your throat with his fangs.

  Your heart beats steady and strong, your limbs vibrate with anticipation. As the wolf flies toward you, all teeth and claws, you see your target—the pulse of his throat—and you know you have one chance to land the first strike. You lunge forward, springing off your back foot, and you meet the wolf in the air. He has ten claws, but you have one, your sickle-shaped gift from Mémé.

  You meet the wolf’s flesh just above the collarbones, and you are fast and sure as you stick the wolf, plunging your claw into his body until your fingers meet bloody fur, and then you yank up, hard, a quick solid slit, and then the wolf is upon you, his weight throwing you back onto the forest floor, and you cross your left arm over your face, and the hot jet of blood pulses from within.

  Now Keisha cries out. She rushes to you, and she grabs the wolf by its pelt and grunts as she tries to pull him off you, but he is deadweight, and not until you push up against him are the two of you able to roll it away from your body.

  You are red with blood; in your hand, your claw is thick with gore; your eyes see through a haze of wolf blood that coats your face; but you are alive, and so is Keisha.

  She sobs, stifles it, and gives you her hand. You grab it, and then you are standing together over the wolf’s body. Minutes pass as you stand there, holding each other. You should move. You should run. But instead you stay. You wait. And together, you watch as the wolf’s eyes glaze dead, as the bloody wound stops weeping, and then as the creature transforms from dead wolf to dead boy—Phillip, naked, cut from sternum to chin.

  “Oh God oh God oh God,” Keisha says.

  You pant from adrenaline and exertion, but now is not the time to rest. When Keisha moves toward Phillip’s body to touch him, to see if he is real, if this is real, you reach out and grab her arm.

  “Don’t,” you say. “Don’t touch anything.”

  She stops. Nods. You release her arm, leaving a bloody print on her sweater.

  “Did you drop anything?” you ask. “Is there anything here that we need to find?”

  Keisha draws a deep, shaking breath. She pats her pockets, pulls out her car keys. Then, “My phone.”

  “It’s in your car.”

  She nods. “Nothing.”

  “Okay,” you say. “Let’s go.”

  Together you turn back toward the road, where your cars are parked, conspicuously, you realize now, and—shit—you’ve left James’s headlights on. If anyone has come down that road, they’ve seen the cars, the headlights, and they’ll remember that, for sure.

  “Hurry,” you tell Keisha, and she tries, but she’s limping, and the faster she goes, the more her thigh wound bleeds. You stop for her, sheathe the bloody claw and shove it into the pocket of your jeans, wrap Keisha’s arm over your shoulders and grab her around the waist. “Lean on me,” you tell her, and she does. She slows you down, but there’s nothing to be done about that. Her face is ashen from exertion and pain, and with each step her expression tightens more and more.

  At last you come to the woods’ edge. James’s headlights are still glowing, and it’s a relief now, at least, because it means you haven’t killed his battery. You open the passenger side door of Keisha’s car and sit her down in it; she cry-moans when she’s able to take her weight off her injured leg.

  “Stay here,” you tell her. “I’m going to turn on the wagon’s engine to keep it alive.”

  Keisha nods, closes her eyes. She does not ask questions, which is a first.

  You jog over to James’s car, fit the key into the ignition, turn. For a second it sounds like it’s too dead to catch; the lights flicker like maybe the battery is too drained to get the job done, but then the engine roars and you nearly cry with relief.

  “Okay,” you say out loud. You take your hand off the keys and leave them red with blood. You survey yourself. Blood everywhere: dark on your jeans, sticky on your arms in places where it’s thick, drying and cracking other places where it’s splattered more thinly. Your whole shirt is wet with blood, soaked through.

  You’ve seen enough crime dramas to know that if anyone ever investigates James’s car, they’ll find this blood in it somewhere. You will never get it clean enough.

  You have to be fast, and you have to be thorough. You need to get your story straight with Keisha, and you need to get off the road.

  You are careful to touch as little as possible as you get out of James’s car, leaving the engine running. You go back over to Keisha, who has her head in her hands. She’s vomited, you see, onto the gravel. You kick dirt over the acrid sick, and then you kneel down in front of her. “Keisha,” you say. “There’s no time.”

  She tightens her fingers in her hair, and for a moment you’re shot through with fear, that she won’t be able to pull it together, that’s she won’t be able to help. But then her fingers relax, her head lifts slowly, and she looks you right in the eyes.

  “Okay,” she says. “What do we do?”

  “Text your mom and tell her you’re sleeping over at my house because you have a flat. I don’t live far from here.”

  Keisha fishes her phone out from beneath her legs—she’s sat on it—and she sends the message. Her fingers are steady. A moment later a text pings back: OK.

  “Good,” you say. “We need to get out of here. There’s no time to change your tire. You’re just going to have to drive on the flat. It’ll wreck your rim, there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  Keisha nods. She gets to her feet, and you help her around to the driver’s side. “I’ll follow you,” you say. “Do you know where I live?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Over on Thirty-Seventh. Number Sixteen-Ten.”

  She nods. “Okay.”

  When she’s got her car started, you go back to the wagon. You wish you had a plastic sheet or something to lay down—you’re going to get blood everywhere, it seems like—and you check the back of the wagon for the blanket, but it’s gone, James has moved it.

  At least no one has gone by, and there’s no indication that anyone’s stopped while you were in the arboretum. Maybe you got really lucky and no one has been by this whole time. You are struck by the absurdity that anything about this entire night could be viewed as “lucky.”

  “People can get used to most anything,” Mémé sometimes says, and you guess she is right.

  Now you are grateful for the heavy fog; maybe it’s kept drivers off the road. Maybe no one saw the cars parked by the arboretum entrance, and maybe no one will see you now, following Keisha’s slow, off-kilter Bug home.

  A few minutes later, you pull up to your house; James would never park in your driveway because of his oil leak, but the car has bigger problems right now than a leaky engine. Keisha parks at the curb while you pull up the driveway, and you leave the car running while you open the garage door. Then you maneuver the wagon inside.

  When the engine and the headlights are off, you relax, just a little. You’ve been holding yourself so tense, every muscle tight, and now, at least, you are home.

  “Do you have any first-aid stuff?” Keisha asks. She’s limped up the driveway and stands in the open garage doorway.

  “Yeah, of course, come inside.”

  Keisha steps in
to the garage, and you close the door behind her.

  Safe. You are covered in Phillip’s blood, and there is a body in the arboretum, and Maggie’s rim is definitely ruined, and she’s got a deep gash in her thigh, but, for now, you are safe in the pitch-dark garage.

  Then the door that connects the garage to the kitchen squeaks open, bringing with it a stream of warm honey light and the shape of Mémé.

  “Bisou,” she says. “You’re home.”

  v

  who’s afraid of the big bad wolf

  i am afraid

  of everything

  The Better to See You

  There is a fraction of a second between Mémé opening the door to the house and Mémé flicking on the overhead light. In that moment, you reel through possible stories—you hit a deer on the road, and you tried to save it, and it bled all over you. There was an accident at the party, one of the kids got cut by a broken bottle, but you applied pressure, and everything is fine.

  Then the light is on and the lies stick in your throat.

  Mémé scans the scene—you, thick with blood; Keisha, leg slashed, looking now like she might pass out; James’s car, parked in her garage.

  “Did anyone see you?”

  Her voice is sharp, but not scared. Not surprised, even.

  “I—I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  You nod.

  “All right,” she says. “Both of you. Take off all your clothes.”

  Keisha obeys without question, pulling her sweater and T-shirt off together. Mémé steps forward and takes them. Keisha’s unbuttoned her jeans but she can’t get them off over her boots, and her leg is too hurt for her to bend down and untie them, so Mémé tosses the sweater and shirt into the sink beside the workbench in the garage, kneels down, and undoes Keisha’s shoes for her. Then, as gentle as she once was with you when she helped you change at night, she helps Keisha shimmy out of her jeans, doing her best to keep the rough fabric from rubbing against her injured thigh.

  Keisha whimpers a little but doesn’t cry out, and then she’s standing in her underwear and bra. You are still fully dressed, blood-soaked, watching.

  “You too, Bisou,” Mémé says, and you kneel down to unknot your laces and strip out of your clothes. Even your bra is stained red; the wolf—the boy—has bled so much that you’re soaked all the way to the skin, so you unhook your bra and toss it along with the rest of your clothes into the washbasin. You grab a T-shirt from the clean-laundry basket near the machine and pull it on.

  Mémé disappears back into the house. You have no idea what the hell is going on. Keisha is beside you, and she is trembling.

  Mémé returns with lighter fluid, a pack of long kitchen matches, a bunch of rags, and a gallon of bleach. “Bisou,” she says, “help your friend into the shower and stay with her in case she passes out. You wash off, too. I’ll take care of this.”

  She indicates the car, the clothes, maybe the whole garage.

  “Okay.” Your voice sounds normal, like this is a normal conversation about normal things. “Come on,” you say to Keisha, but she just stands there, arms folded across her stomach, in a gray sports bra and white underwear, staring at Mémé. And her expression—it’s her investigative reporter expression.

  “Later.” You reach out and take her by the arm, pull her toward the door to the kitchen.

  She follows, but she looks back over her shoulder at Mémé, who is pouring lighter fluid over your clothes in the laundry sink.

  Keisha almost slips as she steps over the bathtub rim. She’s shaking again, all over, and she looks like she could pass out at any moment.

  There’s a little metal stool in the corner of the bathroom that you sometimes sit on when you blow-dry your hair, and you put it into the bathtub. You help Keisha step out of her underwear and pull off her bra, and then you put them into the sink.

  Keisha sits naked, shivering, on the stool. Gently, you take her glasses from her face and set them on the counter.

  Now, without her glasses, Keisha looks truly naked. Her eyes seem smaller without them, a bit unfocused, and she blinks several times. It’s her eyes you avoid as you get the water going. You wait until it’s the right temperature coming out of the bath nozzle and then take down the shower head and flip the bypass knob. Keisha sits, grasping the stool with both hands, while you run the water up her legs, trying not to spray directly into the wound on her left thigh.

  It’s two wounds, actually, you see now. One is bigger and deeper, and then, just below, where a second claw must have caught her, is a shallower wound, this one crusted over with clotted blood.

  You pick up the bottle of body wash and flip open the lid. “Sorry,” you say, and then you squirt it right at her wound.

  Keisha hisses with the sting of it. You’ve got a clean washcloth that was hanging on the towel bar, and you use it to lather the soap into and around the wound. Keisha’s grip on the stool tightens but she doesn’t try to pull away.

  You scrub for a full minute and then spray her down—her leg, which is bleeding harder, and the rest of her, too. Then you crank off the water and drape a towel over her shoulders.

  There’s some first-aid stuff—gauze and some useless Band-Aids—under the sink. None of it really looks big enough to deal with Keisha’s injury. Then you see the maxi pads, and think, why not, they’re supposed to soak up blood, and you unwrap one and place it facedown on Keisha’s wound. She snorts a laugh at the absurdity of it.

  There’s some medical tape, and you wind that a few times over the pad and Keisha’s thigh.

  “Okay.” You help Keisha stand and hold her hand as she steps out of the tub. Then you leave her to dry off and go to your room to get her some clothes—a pair of loose sweatpants and a T-shirt. You grab her a pair of your underwear, too.

  When she’s dressed, you walk her to your bed and help her get in. You pull up the covers and hope she’ll stop shivering soon. She’s left her glasses behind, on the bathroom counter, as if she has seen enough this night. It’s your turn for a shower, and you rifle through your drawers for another set of clothes.

  But before you leave: “Bisou.”

  You turn back.

  “Did that really happen?”

  “I think so,” you say. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Is that . . . what happened to Tucker?”

  This question was answered for you back in the woods, but you do not answer Keisha now. Is this Keisha the girl or Keisha the reporter asking? “Let me take a shower,” you say. “We’ll talk later.”

  Keisha rests her head against the pillow and closes her eyes.

  You pee and pull out your tampon before you climb into the shower. You let the water pour over your head, washing your hair forward, and you watch the blood rinse from you, inside and out, wolf blood and womb blood, both.

  It’s many minutes before the water runs clean, and then you scrub yourself with soap, and then you turn off the water, put in a fresh tampon, and dry your body.

  There are Keisha’s glasses. You pick them up; a smear of blood streaks across one lens. Gently, you wash them, then hold them up to the light to make sure they are clean. Through the lenses, the world blurs for you. Strange how a thing can strengthen one person and weaken another.

  Keisha is asleep. You switch off the bedside lamp.

  Mémé is still in the garage. The air stings with the smell of bleach. There’s an orange bucket next to the open driver’s side door of James’s car, and a plastic trash bag beside it; the bucket is half full of soapy water, and Mémé is leaning into the car, scrubbing.

  She is methodical. Already the dashboard has been wiped down, and the steering wheel, and the ignition. She’s wiped down the gear shift and the center console, and now she’s working on the driver’s seat.

  She’s started at the top, the headrest, and has wiped down the seat back; it’s damp and shiny clean.

  She’s working on the seat now, and she has her glasses on,
and she’s found a headlamp among the camping gear, which she shines down on her work.

  “It’s a good thing he has vinyl seats,” Mémé says, “or we’d have to arrange a car fire.”

  She looks up and smiles, and you wonder if maybe she’s joking, though you don’t know how she could joke right now about anything. You don’t smile back. You don’t do anything—you don’t offer to help, you just watch as she puts a damp, bloody rag into the plastic bag and then dips her hand into the bucket of soapy water, fishes out a new rag, squeezes it, and goes back to work.

  At last she is done. You have never seen James’s car look so clean. It gleams, and you can’t see any evidence of how it looked before.

  Mémé takes the bucket of soapy water and the bag of used rags over to the laundry sink, where she burned your clothes; the sink is empty, and there’s no sign of what she did with the remains, though the smell of smoke lingers. She pours the soapy water down the drain, and then she spreads another plastic bag on the floor near the washing machine; one by one she pulls out the used rags from the bag, rinses them as clean as she can, squeezes the excess water from them, and spreads them on the plastic bag.

  “We’ll burn them when they’re dry,” she says.

  Then she washes her hands and forearms, the water from the sink steaming hot, and scrubs with soap. She dries off with another rag and adds this one to the pile on the floor. You go back to your bathroom to retrieve the T-shirt and underwear, then drop them onto the pile as well.

  Mémé is still wearing the headlamp, and not until her hands are clean and dry does she pull it from her head, press the button to turn it off.

  She turns to you; her long gray hair is barely disordered from its braid. “Now,” she says. “Perhaps we should move James’s car to the street, and then how about a cup of tea?”

  You back the car out of the garage and park it next to the curb in front of your house. Mémé stands silhouetted against the light of the garage and watches. It’s raining now, which is good; it’ll wash away Keisha’s vomit and obscure any footprints you and she might have left behind. You shut off the engine, close the car door quietly, lock it, and walk back up the driveway to where Mémé waits.