Fiction from Madeline Graham

Photo: Jr Korpa

The Better to Eat You With

She worries meat from the lupine skull with a long and pointed knife. Her red cloak slung over the back of her chair. Blond braids caked in blood. Daisy bouquet upended on the floor.

She tongues bristly fur, grinding gristle between her molars, tendons snap between her jaws. She swallows the eyeballs, first one and then the other.

He hadn’t asked for this ending.

He had brought flowers to her bedside, thinking she was his granny. She played him out, until that climactic moment. When she dropped the fur-cloak wolf disguise to the ground, finally revealing her true hunger.

She crunches the bones themselves with sharp teeth, sucks dry the marrow.

After a time she holds him inside her completely. Holding him where he belongs.

The woodsman is outside now, ready to cut her open.

She stands above a reflecting pool, on the other side, upside-down, stands a wolf who has just devoured a little girl. A mirror image world in which little girls are powerless.

The woodsman is on both sides of the reflecting pool. He approaches with his ax raised, here a bloated little girl, there a distended wolf. In the mirror world a wolf’s intestines are spilled, the skeleton of a small girl sliding slickly from the slit as though birthed, into the reflecting pool, water swirling like mist, and here in this one a wolf skull is coming forth from a gutted little girl. The bones and insides of big bad wolves and fearsome little girls are mixing in the vaporous in-between.

In both worlds the woodsman shakes his head at what was inside.
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Madeline Graham is a writer and Minnesotan. Her work is available or forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Redivider, HAD, and Forge Literary Magazine among others. Find her on Twitter @madelineRgraham.