The Girl in the Golden Hood

Matt Bell
· in

Despite watching her grow from a toddler to a child to a young teenager, the wolf had never dreamed that the girl he often watched upon the path was actually two different girls. How was he supposed to differentiate the twins from each other, when, like all humans, they looked so similar, separated only by their choices in capes and hoods?

It was the sister in the red hood that the wolf had tricked into believing he was her grandmother, but it was the other, cloaked in gold, that glowered above him when he awoke from his satiated slumber in the cottage bed.

The girl in the golden hood, she looked so much like her already-devoured sister that the wolf could not stifle the yelp in his throat at the sight. The sound started as surprise but quickly turned to fear, and then, after the girl started in with the hatchet and the knife, transformed again into the most miserable of howling, as if the wolf believed there was some finite amount of pleading that might buy him this sister’s mercy, might allow him to keep within his belly the bright prize he had so recently swallowed.

Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as two previous books, How They Were Found and Cataclysm Baby. He teaches creative writing at Northern Michigan University.