A Ghastly Tale of a Girl in a Red Cloak
Our story begins as so many do - with a charming village nestled in the forest, the type with cobblestone streets and aromatic bakeries that are eventually burned to the ground by marauding ruffians. Amidst the quaint shops and half-timbered houses dwelt a peculiar family whose daughter went only by the name of Red Riding Hood. An appellation so ridiculous, I implore you to refer to her simply as Red from here on out to save us both prolonged embarrassment.
One bright morning, as the songbirds orchestrated their tiresome salutation to the day, Red's muddled mother bid her:
"Take this basket of remains to your grandmother's cottage in the heart of the foreboding woods. Mind you don't dawdle and certainly don't acquaint yourself with any suspicious rogues along the way."
Red's mother really ought to have known better than send her dim-witted daughter into the perilous forest alone. But maternal ignorance is among the great renewable resources in certain quarters. So Red went merrily on her way in her iconic crimson cloak - a beacon for any hungry carnivores lurking in the brambles.
It was not long before Red's limited supply of wits was utterly depleted. For there, whistling an ominous tune while picking wildflowers by the path, was the most feared creature in the woods - the Great Nuisance. A malodorous, flea-bitten, snaggle-toothed scoundrel of a wolf whose excessive body hair seemed to sprout uninvited from every cranny of his wretched person.
"Why, hello there little girl," growled the beast in a tone that could curdle fresh milk. "Where might you be heading on this perilous morn?"
Now, Red's parents had instructed her never, under any circumstances, to converse with shaggy, sharp-toothed strangers whose breath could slaughter a flock of geese at thirty paces. But this directive, like most eternal truths, went completely unheeded.
"I'm off to deliver these recently-deceased food morsels to my grandmother's домик in the forest," replied Red, whose grasp of the obvious was tenuous at best. She even revealed the location to the entirely untrustworthy wolf.
The Great Nuisance flashed the sort of grin one associates with underhanded schemes and digestive distress. "How delightful! Though the forest can be treacherous. Perhaps you ought to linger here and sample some of these lovely Wild Woodbine Berries. Perfectly harmless...if consumed in moderation."
Being as dim as a Lumberjack's Lantern in a Stygian abyss, Red eagerly gobbled up the toxic berries. Within moments, her head slumped down, her eyes drifted closed, and she crumpled into a heap on the forest floor like an ill-stuffed scarecrow toppling over.
"Mwahahaha!" cackled the wicked wolf, rubbing his paws together and licking his slobbering chops. "That's the last time she'll refer to me as 'Mr. Snagglefuzz' in that mocking tone!"
With a flick of his powerful tail, the beast scooped up the abandoned basket and scampered off through the gnarled trees toward the unsuspecting grandmother's домик. His nefarious plan for Red was temporarily postponed as a more tantalizing prospect beckoned -- devouring an old woman and lying in wait amidst her humble abode.
The wolf burst through the rickety door of the cottage, flung his basket of ill-gotten baked goods onto the floor, and pounced upon the startled grandmother with a snarl. The poor woman, being deaf as a doornail and blind as a subterranean Raskolnikov, initially mistook the poor woman, being deaf as a doornail and blind as a subterranean Raskolnikov, initially mistook the growling wolf for her rambunctious lapdog Fifi. "Oh, Fifi!" she wheezed. "Have you been exploring the swamp ag- GLCCKKK!"
Before she could complete her inquiry, the Great Nuisance had clamped his vicious jaws around her wizened neck, shaking her withered frame back and forth like a scruffy terrier worrying a rat. With one deft, ravenous gulp, he consumed the decrepit old woman in a single mouthful. A moist cracking noise followed as her brittle bones were masticated into powder by the wolf's powerful molars.
Barely stifling a belch, the noxious beast proceeded to slip into the grandmother's robe and nightcap, recline in her bed, and wait for the inevitable arrival of his crimson-cloaked quarry. No sooner had he situated himself than the cottage door creaked open once more.
Red, having inexplicably recovered from ingesting the berries, stumbled in clutching her woven basket. "Grandmamá?" she called out in her infuriatingly singsong voice. "I've arrived with goody basket in hand!"
"Yes, yes," rumbled the wolf in his most unconvincing falsetto. "Come hither to your...err...Grandmamá, my dear."
Unfazed by the fact that her grandmother now resembled an overweight lumberjack who had been savaged by a living mop, Red approached the bed, squinting in confusion. "My Grandmamá, your voice has certainly taken on a thuggish quality today. Almost as if you've swallowed a ragbag filled with gravel."
The wolf responded by batting his eyes in a grotesque parody of femininity. "All the better to sweetly coo in your ear, my poppet."
Red tilted her head like a lopsided gargoyle. "But Grandmamá, what coarse fur you have sprouting from those warts!"
"All the better to...keep myself enrobed and toasty in this drafty cottage," lied the wolf.
"I see," said Red, nodding with profound dimwittedness. "And those razor-sharp claws protruding from your stubby digits?"
The wolf hastily withdrew his lethal appendages into the folds of the grandmother's tattered quilt. "Erm...cuticle maintenance has never been one of my strong suits."
"Fair enough," conceded Red in that maddening lilt of hers. "Though I must ask about the tufts of fur sputtering from your bulbous nostrils with every snorting exhalation."
"Nasal pruning difficulties at my age," growled the rapidly exasperated wolf. "Now be a good lass and step a little closer."
Unperturbed, Red sidled up to the bedside and found her gaze transfixed in grotesque fascination on the beast's slavering jaws. "Oh, and what unique incisors you have, Grandmamá! Why, they're nearly as long and sharp as a sabre tooth's!"
To the wolf's dwindling credit, he attempted to keep up the ruse with surprising elan. "All the better to...eat hard tack biscuits with, my dear." Here he licked his lips with a tongue that resembled a landlocked eel having a seizure.
Red's blissfully naive demeanor finally cracked and she stumbled backwards, shattering the illusion into tiny shards. "Dear Newton's Knickers! You horrible, masticating charlatan! You're not my beloved Grandmother at all, but some sort of slobbering Fell Beast with atrocious halitosis!"
In a flash, the wolf sprang from the bed, overturned the mattress, and advanced on his outmatched victim with murderous intent. "Curses, you meddlesome brat! I'll make a stole of your sorry pelt to accessorize with!"
Just then, the sound of raucous laughter erupted from the adjacent wardrobe cabinet. The doors burst open to reveal a cackling, one-eyed woodsman decked out in buckskins and an absurd coonskin cap. In one calloused hand he brandished a double-barreled hunting rifle.
"Did somebody say 'Fell Beast'?" he chortled, wiggling his solitary eyebrow lasciviously. "Well arrive straight from the Lower Khyber Pass in Afghanistan, you foul, shag-pelted scavenger!"
With that, he leveled his blunderbuss squarely at the confounded wolf and let fly with a deafening BANG! Upon hearing the thunderous report, the Great Nuisance promptly evacuated his bowels, defecated out the window, and fled into the forest, never to menace the village again.
Here is the continuation of the silly fairy tale:
"Well now, that's more like it!" bellowed the woodsman, retrieving a well-chewed corncob pipe from his vest pocket and igniting it with a lucifer match. Pungent clouds of viscous smoke billowed forth, stinging Red's eyes and nostrils until she feared she might asphyxiate.
The hoary grandmother, having caught her putrid breath, affixed the woodsman with a withering glower. "Ebenezer Bramblebush, you daft, cyclopic jackass! Must you always make such an uncivilized entrance?"
Ebenezer grinned around his pipe stem, his lone eye crinkling mischievously. "Can't say as I don't relish the opportunity to shoot first and avoid those interminable pleasantries." He gestured with the rifle barrel. "You're away from that mangy beast's gullet now, ain't you?"
The old woman pursed her lips, unamused. She retrieved a damp lace handkerchief from her cardigan and commenced mopping off the wolf's gastric juices. "I obliterated three freshly-starched antimacassars in that unhygiric belly, you realize." She shot Red an acrid look. "And as for you, young lady, whatever inspired you to dawdle on the forest path?"
Red flushed a deep beet red, staring fixedly at her scuffed mary-janes. "The great shaggy brute waylaid me and fed me Wild Woodbine berries that induced a stupor, Grandmother."
"Likely an Oakmoss Toadstool larded the spiked confection," muttered Ebenezer around his pipe stem. He shuddered ostentatiously. "Beastly hallucinations, that. Though not as dastardly as the Molly Mosquito Berries which induce..." Here he frowned and spared a glance at Red's innocent countenance. "Well, never you mind about those, little lady."
Grandmother fixed Red with her sternest glare, easily visible now that her trifocal spectacles had defrosted. "This incident will not be repetitioned, I trust? No more cavorting with outlandish strangers or consuming unidentified forest comestibles?"
"No, Grandmother," gulped Red, chastised.
"Capital!" Ebenezer took a last puff from his pipe, then stomped it out in the soiled rushes. "And say, how's about I regale you ladies with a spot of hot charabang while you tidy up?" He fished a tarnished tin mug from his deerskin pack and took a rebellious swig.
"Must you imbibe that rotgut mash liquor at every opportunity?" Grandmother sniffed disdainfully.
The woodsman smacked his lips with relish. "Finest blind-tiger charabang this side of the Monongahela, hazelnuts! And it's Sassafras Persimmon season in them hills yonder." He indicated the shadowy forest through the window with a tilt of his mug.
Grandmother pinched the bridge of her nose in a longsuffering gesture. "Oh, very well. At least attempt to conduct yourself with a modicum of decorum in front of my granddaughter."
And so, as the errant wolf slunk off to lick its wounds and Red's traumatized psyche slowly restored to its previous imbecilic factory settings, the unlikely trio whiled away the afternoon listening to Ebenezer's latest tall tales and improbable exploits. Tales that grew more fanciful and unhinged with every busted cork he pulled from his bottomless jug of charabang.
Which just went to show, I suppose, that sometimes the most intoxicating beverages lead only to hangovers and regret. While other times, they lead to the sorts of colorful anecdotes and dubious heroics that enliven even the dreariest of afternoons spent cloistered indoors with one's eccentric relatives. The choice, as is so often the case in this turbulent life, is yours alone.
The End
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