Bon Appetiting on Sauvignon Blanc and tiramisu. Little Red sits alone on a stump in
solitude of a wood. Sweetest girls chaperone a weapon. Sits she, Little Red: a worn slump of disladily spread-eagled so menstruation wafts cursively in cerise. Clots cherry her pubic hair in red cement. These thighs no cotton can tame.

     The wolf: stumbledrunkedly is patriarchy on four, furred legs. He’s ecstasies on Little
Red’s pubescent secretions and dreams of fallopian tubes to muzzle his snout. Little Red’s lips guzzle the Sauvignon Blanc. She burps. The tiramisu is detonated in omnivoric grace. Woozies is what wine and mascarpone give but Little Red smells like cracked peppercorn, not plum compote.

     Nature sees all that beast nor human don’t. The Birch trees undress their negligees. Bark unpeels into wooden strings that twine around Little Red and scream composts of caution at her feet. Nature tells her to look, look behind her. She glances over her shoulder into the 16th century and stares at a tale’s origination that’s rusted.

     Closer, the wolf claws. Its nails lacerate oxygen and mutilate the water they needle into. Desire glides down the wolf’s fangs into acidic froth that foams the green forest floor. A wolf is the blackest bow furred archery to arrow its prey. The wolf’s lust to vandal Little Red’s body infinitely for what Little Red’s body excretes intermittently.

     Autumn convulses and dis-stresses its head. Almond-shaped eyes of leaves swirl around Little Red so she’ll see. She turns towards the mammal’s gluttonous pounce: a rabied past still wants full ravage of a girl’s frame.

     Little Red spreads her legs. Legs widening is grander than the stretchening of her pucked mouth which can’t more powerfully say what spread-eagled does. Little Red slumps further into dismantle me. I’m yours. Cannibalize me into history.

     The wolf snouts her hem. Its fur dilates into upright hair that salutes taller with each
cerise inhalation. The whites of its eyes roll back into the skull, then to Little Red. Leaves swirl terror. Birch amputates its bark, but Little Red feels no horror. Done this before, she curtsies up her apron higher for the wolf’s first lick of a blooded curdle that clots radish big. The wolf collapses to unroll its tongue for a taste of lost youth liquid before mincing her body.

     Little Red’s lungs grenade soft pumps of ins and outs without combustion. The wolf’s
Velcro tongue scrapes Little Red’s inner thigh. Shards of cerise glimmer on the tip of the wolf’s snout.

     And the ax. There’s the ax in want of a girl’s hand whose handle the hand wants to raise. Little Red’s cape flies down her back, unable to cap violence that howls blonde out her head. Little Red’s eyes of ax during axing ponders violence upon violence’s worth as the wolf’s black fur detonates into air and syringes into moist pores of Little Red’s own… until Little Red’s skin becomes prickled mammal too. Mortising between her legs, the wolf’s tail slows its sway.

     Little Red’s own hand guillotined the feral because the beast’s incisors couldn’t. The
wolf’s viscera mists gutbroth that ruffles warmth up Little Red’s skirt. The wolf is a
disembowelment that spluttles out Little Red’s legs longer than the centuries that beast her. Cranium crushed is sanctuary of Little Red’s foot to rest.

     Come night, the ax cuddles under two patchwork pillows where lays Little Red’s head.
She counts the metronomic rhythm of tame un-taming, knowing this the act of many, many.

Danielle Lea Buchanan’s poetry, hybridities, collaborative art, fiction, book reviews, interviews, teaching guides and oddities have appeared or are forthcoming  in McSweeney’s, Mid-American Review, New Orleans, Puerto del Sol, New Delta Review, Noemi Press, Psychopomp, Robot Melon, Cosmonauts Avenue, Literary Orphans, Dinosaur Bees, f(r)iction, New York, Whole Beast Rag, Crag and other elsewheres. Currently, she’s a MFA candidate at Iowa State University and visual art director for Flyway. She was shortlisted for the Master Review’s Fall Fiction contest judged by Kelly Link, and winner of Passages North’s Ray Ventre Nonfiction prize selected by Jenny Boully.