Red Riding Hood is a silly story about a girl who gets lost in the woods and is eaten by the Big Bad Wolf, I tell you.
Not if someone saves her first, you reply, our lips close enough to kiss.
Years later, this is always how I remember it.
* * *
The air is sweet and golden. Mummy in her white dress, shimmering like a faery in the rain-scented grass. Daddy is setting up a monopoly board, while the little radio hums a tune. I’m licking my fingers clean. I’ve just finished my cheese sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice.
A red butterfly flutters in the bushes, gossamer and dream-like.
I reach out to catch it.
Look, I whisper gleefully, tugging at Daddy’s shirt.
He doesn’t notice me at all. Neither does Mummy. They are bickering about something, but I cannot hear the words. Flies buzz near my ears and the summer world tilts dangerously to one side.
I feel sleepy and tired, like the last page of a book ready to be turned and closed forever. I edge away, closer to the woods, hoping for Mummy to turn and look for one last time. For a while, I crouch in the thicket, watching them argue loudly. It could be a scene from a silent film.
A faint cry breaks the wind, shattering glass.
And suddenly, I am running through the sunlit woods, stumbling over nettle and dead branches. There is a dark wolfish shadow at my heels, the iron smell of blood, and a trail of blue and angry scars.
* * *
School is full of whispers.
The lavatory walls have my name misspelled, a slew of curses scrawled beneath. I return from PE to find my bag often wet with something that isn’t water or pages ripped from my textbooks. The other girls shuffle past, mouths curled in a sneer, a savage gleam in their eyes.
But sometimes, they invite me to join them. Beneath rickety desks, dog-eared pocket dictionaries and magazines with pictures of men and women doing things lie open on our laps. Our tongues fumble over new words and sensations, as we take turns passing them around. Some girls lock themselves up in toilet cubicles together.
I wonder if there’s something wrong with me, for not wanting that.
Once they play a game, where we place our arms against each other, comparing the shades of our dusky skins. The fairest one wins and is chosen to play Cinderella in the annual school play. I try auditioning for the chorus, but my voice is too hoarse so I become a step-sister instead: a dark, glittery fixture with a painted scowl.
* * *
One day, I come home and find a letter from my classmates in my bag, scribbled with the expletives my parents usually hurl at each other. I take them to Mummy so that she’d let me skip school for once, but her room is empty. She’d just packed her bags and left without a goodbye.
It surprises me that people can do that.
Daddy has holed himself in his study, drinking and howling to a lawyer on the phone. Sighing, I begin my algebra homework, tears silently trailing down my cheeks. A postcard falls out from my math textbook; it has a painting of a picnic.
Your name is on the other side, enclosed in a pink felt-tip pen heart, with a note: I know you think everyone hates you, but that’s not true. Here’s something to cheer you up.
I know your face. It is kinder than the other girls’, framed by locks of dark hair. We’ve exchanged silent glances in chapel and we were paired as lab partners once. Last year, your mum baked a strawberry cake and you shared it with everyone, even me, but we’d never really spoken. It had been a delicious, syrupy cake.
My fingers brush over the postcard. The painted family has fairer skin, flushed faces. They look so happy and dream-like in that yellow-green backdrop.
But you know nothing about my family.
You don’t yet know how this innocent picture reminds me of that picnic, the day it all fell apart. Images swim up, torn and faded: a stamped Monopoly board, paper plates stained with red juice, broken glass, a white ribbon fluttering in the breeze, a trail of ants and flies, darkness and blood between my legs, the wolf.
I cannot piece them together, so I carry these splinters of my past in my heart, rustling like ghosts. Later I will share these images with you. You will look aghast and fold me in your arms, scatter the fragments on the dusty floor, looking for a way to mend them.
That night, I fall asleep looking at your postcard and dream of running through the woods again, searching for a path to the past.
* * *
The other girls whisper stories about us, but we don’t care.
During class, we pass doodles and chits filled with dirty jokes. We stay back after school, laughing carelessly on the rusty swings. At the library, we read the same books together. Sitting so close, our knees often brush but we take no notice.
The first time I bunk a class, it’s with you and we sneak up on the terrace to eat plums, our lips and cheeks stained purple. I want to tell you stories but you’d rather play-act them. I don’t mind because I get to be Cinderella, finally, albeit in my school uniform.
We discuss endings, a lot.
You think Cinderella didn’t want to marry Prince Charming, that the wolf and Red Riding Hood could have been friends, that Sleeping Beauty was better off asleep than wake up with babies she doesn’t remember having. I especially agree with the last bit. I’d like to be a beautiful princess too, with roses in my hair, encased in a glass casket, wrapped in vines and ivy, forever dreaming.
But that saddens you.
Don’t you ever want to wake up in a better future?
No, I want to wake up in the past, a happier past.
How could you ever change the past?
You sound genuinely curious but I’m too scared and embarrassed to tell you that I think the answer is love.
It sounds so silly in my head.
I know it’s my fault, for imagining love like a reward. It is why people are so desperate to fall in love, I think, over and over. Because one drop of that strange elixir can change everything, even the past. The pain that twists and turns beneath our skin could fade, like a picture washed out and painted over. Cinderella’s lonely nights by the fireplace, in the ashes are all worth it for that one midnight dance, for that glistening glass slipper that fits.
I don’t know the words to tell you this.
Did I want to be alone in a bathroom with you?
Do I dream of you touching me in places that feel strange to me?
Do I secretly wish for you to call me something other than a best friend?
No, I don’t think I ever did.
But I will not say no if you kiss me, if your lips chastely brush mine or ghost over my cheeks or the curve of my neck.
Instead you lean closer, smelling faintly of plums and mint, and whisper in my ears.
Well, we’re going to build a time machine, but first we need to get out of school.
I think love is a spool of thread that unwinds backwards; a mossy forest path that I can follow all the way to a different, happier past.
* * *
The day the term ends, I invite you to my home, to celebrate our freedom.
My dad greets you at the doorway, promises to get Chinese for dinner. He talks to you for a bit, asks about your family. You say that your mum died of cancer last year and your dad’s planning to send you away to an all-girls’ boarding school.
I pause at the doorway, shocked still.
You had never told me about your family. I had never asked.
In the evening, we climb onto the terrace and dangle our legs over the edge, overlooking the constellated city, talking about our favorite stories. But our conversation is strained, as though something dead and invisible looms between us.
I rest my head on your shoulders.
I thought we’d run away after school.
I wanted that, too. To escape.
Your mother… you never told me.
I don’t like remembering it. If I don’t remember, maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe that’s the only way to change the past: to forget it.
That’s something I’ve never been able to do.
I don’t ever want to forget you.
You wrap your arms around me, as stars slowly bloom in the night sky. There are tears upon my cheeks and I do not know who they belong to.
We’re still crying softly when we slowly make our way downstairs. It is dark and Daddy has mistakenly turned off the lights. I miss my footing. That inky blackness swims before me again like the wolf in the forest but, in the next moment, you’re there. You pull me back, a wolfish grin upon your face.
Mind your step, silly!
* * *
Before you leave, you promise to keep in touch, whisper that we’ve still got a time machine to build. You hug me tight.
I’m the first to let go.
I cry a lot afterwards, hugging your old postcard to my bosom. Perhaps somewhere in the future, we’ve already built the machine and now we’re meeting each other in the past.
I remember the picnic, a sunlit world where Mummy and Daddy and I are playing Monopoly together. Then, I’m running through the woods, a wolf at my heels, and I turn and meet you for the first time.
ARCHITA MITTRA (she/her) is a writer and artist, with a love for all things vintage, whimsy, and darkly fantastical. She recently completed her Master's in English Literature from Jadavpur University and lives in Kolkata (India) with her family and rabbits. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Three Crows, Hexagon, Mithila Review, and elsewhere. She also reads tarot cards, loves blueberry milkshakes, has more hobbies than she can count, and is still waiting for the Doctor to show up with the TARDIS. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @architamittra and check out her blog at architamittra.wordpress.com.