Forever Red

The cakes were the last of the flour, busy with weevils. The jam and wine, soured dregs. Hunger and the beast were closing in, so he’d sent her away rather than watch her wane, like her mother, to bone and wraith. Into the sharp and storied forest, where thorns clasped a cottage in a grandmotherly embrace; where toads crowned with yellow blisters hoped for kisses; where crones dangled hooked and greasy braids in ponds, angling for soused princes. Where once upon a time sucked toothless gums and mumbled “Come in, deary, come in.”  

 Still, he’d prayed the child would find a new story there. One shaped for her. One with a different ever after. Streaming out behind her, the cloak’s red ribbons threaded the wind like veins.

When he heard the beast sing, the woodcutter knew it was over. Dry-eyed, he sharpened his axe, hefted it, went to find the creature which howled its triumph and despair. He found only a boot, small as a felled robin in the snow. He left it where it lay. Maybe something beautiful would grow from it, in time. Things did, in stories.

The cloak appeared in the well first, a crimson peony blossoming on the water. It flapped through the trees, scattering ravens like peppercorns. It drifted through the morning mist. At night, it wound around the woodcutter’s dreams—a rosy shroud.

The footsteps came next. Small. Quick. Light. They left no prints except in the minds of those who heard them. In the woodcutter’s head, they tolled with the heaviness of iron, while his thoughts skittered and dodged: no way back, not possible, no breadcrumbs. When his blade bit wood, sap gushed in carmine streams.

The villagers hung rowan berries from the eaves. Rowan, blood-red, to ward off witches and ghosts. It worked in stories. They nailed the doors closed. The footsteps came on.

Dreamless now, the woodcutter crouched beneath his un-shuttered window. Outside, clouds panicked and fled from the crescent moon’s claw. The door hung open. He hadn’t even tried to bolt it.

The reek threw him backwards, retching, as red filled the room. Unshod, click and click on the stones, the footsteps came on.   

The cloak folded itself uneasily into a chair, like something unused to sitting. The hood was sagging, yet inhabited; eyeless, yet the woodcutter knew himself watched. Knew what every small squeaking thing knows as wings erase the sun and talons reach: this, now, is forever after.

The cloak’s ribbons rowed the air, questing. A voice sighed, “Come in, deary, come in.”

It was the last thing the woodcutter heard as the cloak flared like a hungry rose and wrapped him in an embrace bristling with the thatch of ruined cottages, slimy with the ooze of toad-blisters, thick with the musk of mildewed cake. Purring with ravenous love.

Donna Shanley lives and writes in Vancouver, B.C., where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her flash and micro fiction appears in Vestal Review, Ellipsis Zine, Flash Frontier, Milk Candy Review, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Citron Review, Nunum, Mom Egg Review, Crow & Cross Keys, and Best Microfiction 2024.