My. Life. Stinks.

I closed my eyes and wished that I could jump into the pages of the book, instead of hearing the constant caterwauling in the three-room bungalow my family called a house. Okay, four rooms, if you count the little bathroom with the window and the door that never quite shut, but uttered moaning bursts of wind day and night.

It looked so simple for Little Red. She had a nice mom somewhere outside the pages of the story, a grandmother with a cold and a hankering for homemade cookies, and a great path full of wildflowers, flitting butterflies, singing birds, and cool, fresh air. And when the wolf came, Red was rescued by a super-handsome hunter, and the rest was left up to the imagination.

“Get in the car! We’re late!” bellowed through the thin walls of the house my father had built.

My older brothers looked in, each chowing-down on something dropping copious amounts of crumbs.

“You’re late!” they chorused.

“Illiterate boobs!” I taunted.

“You’re the one who’ll get boobs, boob-head.”

Brilliant. I had dug myself an even deeper trench of idiocy in which to wallow. I put down my book, and turned reluctantly to don the outfit my mother thought would be “sooo cute!” – a nasty yellow short-and-shirt set, with a large, blue-eyed giraffe with a grinning, banana-toting monkey climbing her neck, yelling “SWEET!” silk-screened on as decoration.  

I was only a very-precocious two, but, really, no one should be able to force someone else to wear such a thing.  Ugh.

And, because I was two, and in a hurry, there was some disagreement between my legs and my underwear, with the end result that one leg was through both waist and leg-aperture, and one leg, somehow, was not, or something, and when I ran to the car, the underwear fell down around one ankle.

My brothers were attracted by the flash of color, but I managed to kick it into some bushes before they could stop wrestling and really focus on me, so no one knew I was going commando under my giraffe-leg shorts. I didn’t think it mattered much, anyway. It was summer. I’d been dressing myself for over a year, because my mother didn’t know how to deal with girls, and my father was busy working, and playing with the boys.

I was always fascinated by the frilly leggings and multiple skirts Red wore. Maybe it was colder in the forests.

During the long car ride, stuffed in the back corner so my brothers could have “leg room,” I fell asleep from the monotony of being too short to see out the hot, sun-filled windows.

And I woke up in Redde’s ribbon-bonneted, plaid-skirted, pantalooned-splendor, basket of cookies on my arm, bundle of wild flowers in my hand, complete with butterflies, dappled-sun, and songbirds.

Perking right up, I smiled and took a deep breath, and started running over the hill just for the joy of it. Grandmother’s cabin was just ahead; my dream-self knew the way.

I was a bit taller in my dream, happily filling a top-shelf vase with water for the flowers, setting the kettle to boil for tea, and plating the cookies. We heard the door-knocker, and Grandmother startled awake and almost fell out of her rocking chair.

Before either of us could move, we heard some muffled rattling, and the door opened as a large, quite handsome wolf was pulling some thin metal-things out of the keyhole.

“I am Sergei,” he announced, piercing us with his grey-rimmed, deep blue-green eyes. “I have come to take tea with you.”

“He’s going to eat us, Redde!” my grandmother shrieked, clutching her knit-and-crocheted blanket tightly with one hand, and rummaging in the yarn-bag on her lap for some knitting-needles with the other.

“Nonsense,” I retorted. “We have cookies.”

“I always did like dessert,” Sergei said, reasonably. “I could have … both.”

“He’s going to eat us, Redde!” my grandmother howled.

“The nutritional value of my whole-grain, raisins-and-cranberries, extra-protein-cookies is quite sufficient to satisfy hunger, Gran,” I began,

“… and I am not so fond of, ahem, brittle bones and chewy skin. We mostly follow the Paleo diet nowadays.” Turning his attention from my sputtering grandmother, continuing suavely, “…the vulnerable, we leave alone … or rescue, if necessary,” Sergei murmured, staring at me.

O.M.G. 

My heart felt all tingly and my eyes got wide. I think my toes curled. My face practically split into a grin I could not suppress. This wolf was killer! I searched my two-year-old-merged-with-Redde brain for some scintillating repartee.

Suddenly a flailing fist, a damp superman action-figure and a flying shoe forced their way into my semi-consciousness. I fought it off, and got right back into grandma’s house, scrambling to regain the momentum of this great dream.

“Cream and sugar?” I squeaked.

Damn.

“Sweet,” Sergei said, supportively.

“He’ll eat all the cookies, Redde!” Gran fussed. I wondered when she’d become so conversationally-challenged.

“I made plenty, and he won’t want to carbo-load anyway,” I said, parroting something I’d heard my oldest brother say, once, during a football practice.

I finished serving the tea and cookies; we all sat. Sergei surreptitiously sniffed a cookie, hurriedly biting when he saw me watching.

“Yumm…” (chewing, washing down with tea), “…So…. why aren’t you afraid of me, Redde?” he asked, around another mouthful of cookie. “You can’t reform a predator...”

“…but you can inform his choices,” I said.

“His?” Sergei raised his eyebrows at me.

“Yours,” I said, raising my chin, all tough.

“Hmmm.” Sergei contributed. “…How old are you?”

“I’m…” Dirty dripping diaper pails! How old was Redde? “I’m…"

 A large hand shook my shoulder. “Hey!”

“The Huntsman!” chortled Gran.

The large hand flowed onto my father’s body. “Wake up!”

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the seatbelt was undone. My wonderful dream popped like a soap bubble. I knew I was in trouble when my father, the Huntsman, lifted me out of the car…

… because I think I liked the Wolf.