Authors Adrienne J. Odasso, Jennifer Moore, Batya Deene, Fraser Sherman, Angela Rega, Imogen Howson, Jo Thomas, Joselle Vanderhooft, Jessica Tudor, Greg O. Weatherford, Hilary J. Nowack, Genevieve Valentine, Skadi meic Beorh, H. Anne Stoj, David Sklar, Lee Pletzers, and Teresa Wymore re-tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood in poetry and prose, illustrated by the art of Anna Repp. In these stories, Red is sometimes innocent, sometimes less so; and the wolf is sometimes a monster, and most often human, monstrous or not. This is an excerpt from Greg Weatherford’s story.

Under the Skin

Greg O. Weatherford

1.

My father the wolf is working late. Typically, he’s home before dawn, but this time the sun is staining the roofs of the ranch houses on our street and he’s still out.

This worries me–what if someone has trapped him somehow, or, worse, hurt him? He’s strong, but his weaknesses are well documented: a stake through the heart, a silver bullet, decapitation. His nature leaves him vulnerable to certain things. He’s like most people that way.

I worry every night he is gone, but this time is worse than usual. I can’t wait forever–if he doesn’t come soon I will be late for school. So I listen to the television talk about nothing.

Finally a thud and a scratch send me rushing to open the back door. My father stumbles in. He’s exhausted. His black, heavy fur is smeared with blood, firetruck red and clotted black. He smells of animal and fresh meat. He shuffles on his fours to the fireplace and collapses. As usual after a night’s work, he’s exhausted–his yellow, slitted eyes are rolling in their sockets. His heavy breath fills the room, his eyes close and he snores.

I lay an old blue blanket over his wolf body. When he awakes, he’ll pull his human skin back on; until then I don’t want him to be cold. Then I shrug my backpack over my shoulders and rush to school, just as the bell rings for first period.

2.

My mother taught me what to do when it happens, when he goes out. Stay quiet, stay alert.

Stay inside. Do not walk into the dark where he can find you. Say nothing to anyone. We are alone in this.

3.

We live a twenty-two-minute walk from school, in a little house surrounded by trees. The walk is fine except when it’s raining hard. When that happens I wish my father would come pick me up as I walk but he never can. He works hard; he can’t just drop everything for me.

This day the sky is clear. When I come through our front door my father is up, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, showered and cheerful. He’s making pancakes to the soundtrack of the television–it’s always on, all day, all night, the chatter of newscasters and local car ads filling the empty air even when we’re out.

“How was your day, kiddo?” The day afterward, he’s always nicer to me than usual. He snaps the frying pan upward, flipping a pancake onto a plate he holds in his other hand. He exults: “Ha!”

“It was fine,” I say, sitting at the kitchen island. “I had a spelling quiz. Got an A.”

“That’s my girl,” he says. He slides the plate over to me. “Hungry?”

“Thanks.” Syrup and melted butter pool on the pancakes.

He sits with his arms on the island and watches me eat. Now and then he sips coffee. My father looks younger than 42. Women watch him walk and raise their eyebrows to each other. His hair is thick and dark and he has bright green eyes and a quick smile.

He doesn’t smile now. “Kiddo.”

“What?” I know that tone–we’re moving again.

“I need to talk to you about something.”

“I don’t want to leave. I like it here.”

“Not that. We’re not leaving. I like it here too. I just wanted to see how you’d feel about something.”

“Okay.” Wary; still eating.

“It’s been a while since your mother … went away. And I was wondering, well, how you’d feel if your old man …” He lets the sentence drift away and raises his eyebrows.

“What?” I hate it when he’s vague like this. Things ought to be spelled out clearly, like a geometry proof. That way nobody gets hurt.

“Well–if I went out. Dated somebody. That’s the word for it, I suppose. Dating.”

“Who?”

“Her name is Linda Olansky. She works at the barber shop I started going to. She’s really nice. It’s just a date. Dinner. A chance to get out a little.”

I consider this for several bites until I’m scraping the last of the syrup onto the last shreds of pancake. “You think that’s a good idea?”

He regards me carefully. We both know what I mean, but we never talk about the situation–never directly. Finally he says, “Yeah. I do.”

“All right then. You’re the boss.”

“You’ll like her. She’s pretty great.” He gets up and as he collects the dirty dishes he pats me on the shoulder in that awkward dad way, like he’s afraid he might touch a bra strap by accident. Though I don’t have one – my father hasn’t thought to get me a bra. My mother would have.

4.

Linda Olansky is tall and slender, with bright pink lipstick and long brown hair as smooth and shiny as an otter’s pelt.

When she comes to the door for her first date with Dad she smiles at me and says, “You’re Anna. I knew you were smart, but I didn’t know you were pretty, too.” Her voice is gentle and sweet with a southern lilt. I don’t trust her.

She looks around the room. “Are these your books? May I?” Without waiting for my answer she lifts one from the pile next to my seat. “Wow, Anna. Not your typical teen reading.”

“Yes. They’re mine.”

She nods. She ignores my glare.

“Linda!” Dad strides in from the kitchen and takes both her hands in his. “It’s so great to see you. You ready?”

Linda Olansky nods and smiles. She has weak little teeth.

Dad kisses me on the cheek. He smells faintly of shaving cream and mint toothpaste. “Be good–the movie is in the player already. Don’t wait up.”

“I won’t. Thanks.”

“Goodbye, Anna,” Linda Olansky says, putting the book back. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Bye.” They walk away, my father’s hand hovering close to her slender waist and I stand in the door behind them, waving. The sky is moonless, and in the dark I hear car doors whump closed, our car engine whines to a start, tires grind gravel, they’re gone.

I hope it doesn’t last. I don’t like her. She’s too phony, too full of artificial sweeteners.

I lock the door from the inside, curl onto the couch with my blankie and click the remote. The local news vanishes and is replaced by “The Poseidon Adventure,” the original. My favorite. I love it when the ship flips over and the passengers have to get through it when it’s upside down. The way the world is hanging over their heads and they’re crawling on the ceiling. That seems right to me.

Dad wakes me when he picks me up off the couch. I blink into the TV light – some late-night infomercial–as he carries me to my room.

“Night, kiddo,” he says, tucking me in. Through the doorway, in the hallway behind him, Linda Olansky lingers like a stain against the light. My father steps into the hallway and closes the door to my bedroom.

“She’s asleep,” I hear him whisper to Linda Olansky, and I am alone in the dark.

5.

A catalogue of me:

Thirteen. Small for my age. Dark in hair and eyes.

I excel in Math, History and Science. I am precise and careful and I dislike sloppiness. At the moment I attend Prince Charles Middle School. I dislike Government but study enough to get A’s.

I prefer not to talk in class. Also not on the way home, while shopping for food, while in the library, or while looking at (never buying) lipstick and eye shadow in the overlit drugstore on the way home.

I do not own a computer, though my father has one for his stock trading and I use one at school. My favorite movie is “The Poseidon Adventure,” as I have mentioned.

I have lived in six states and fourteen houses. We move to a new house, on average, every 11.3 months.

I am learning French.

I have one father.

I used to have a mother.

6.

I was four when I learned about my father, though I didn’t understand what I was learning. I woke late one night in a cloud of nightmare—something about claws and blood—and I stumbled half-blind in the dark to my parents’ room. I called for them. No answer. I slowly realized the sheets and quilts were empty.

I wandered toward the bathroom, thinking my mother was inside, and stepped into something soft and warm, like a bathrobe someone had just dropped on the way to the shower. I picked it up and in the window light I saw what looked like a costume: a mask with an empty, sagging face, two arms flattened and empty, two legs dangling like pants hung to dry. It crinkled wetly in my hands.

Startled, I dropped it back to the floor. Suddenly a pair of hands gripped my shoulders. I thought the costume had stood up from the ground and attacked, and I screamed.

“Hush,” my mother said behind me. “It’s me, just me.”

I fell into her arms, sobbing. I was afraid and confused. She picked the costume from the floor, folded it tenderly and placed it on the bed. She held me. She told me my father was working late, that he would be home by daybreak. “Everything will be all right,” she said, and I believed her. Remember, I was young and believed everything then.

7.

In the next month, my father spends many nights with Linda Olansky. “Got to make hay while I can,” he says to me, winking. This is disgusting. He makes me dinner (spaghetti spilled from a can, cold cereal), kisses me goodbye and goes to be with her.

He comes home late and carries me to bed. I push my face to his neck, breathe in the smell of his skin. Beneath it, I know, his wolf is hiding. I like to think of it in there: the teeth, the fur, the claws. No one else knows about them. Linda Olansky doesn’t know.

8.

My mother did not want to go. She cried wetly as my father took her away. She grabbed, but couldn’t hold me. She wasn’t strong. There was nothing inside her.

9.

I am walking home. It has been a bad day at school. Daniel Oh, a boy in my Government class, tried to talk to me about socialism. Afterward there had been volleyball, just as unpleasant. Now the sky looks dark and rain-filled.

“Anna!” It is Linda Olansky calling from an open car window. She has pulled her red Beetle car to the curb and she is waving me over. “Would you like a ride?”

I shake my head. “I’m fine,” I say.

“Anna, please. I’d love to give you a lift home.” Her face has that eager, weak look helpful people get.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Anna” —she’s about to give up, then comes up with a new idea— “how could I tell your father I just let you go on walking? Please.”

I fall into the seat next to her, dropping my book bag on the floorboards with a thunk. The car smells of lemons.

Linda Olansky beams at me. She’s always beaming. She’s practically a flashlight. “Anna, that’s great. I’ll just whisk you home in a jiffy.”

I don’t say anything as she drives. She thinks that if she is nice I will like her, and she thinks that if I do my father will not leave her. Wrong and wrong again.

She lets me out at home. “Here. I thought you’d like this.” She hands me a palm-sized book and waves goodbye as she drives away. It’s poems–Rimbaud, with the Beardsley illustrations. Despite myself I am impressed.

10.

O Lord, O Celestial Bridegroom, do not turn thy face from the confession of the most pitiful of thy handmaidens. I am lost. I’m drunk. I’m impure. What a life!

Oh, I am dizzy with words. I am reading this and it is like injecting him into my blood. Now he is alive in me.

11.

“Kiddo?”

“Hmm.”

“You know what day it is.”

Of course I do. We keep our days by a lunar calendar. “Yes.”

“Be a good girl and stay in your room tonight. Don’t wait up. Don’t talk to anyone.”

“Be careful.”

“Everything will be fine, Anna.”

“I know.”

I am lying.