Raven Hair

Spring

You were the wolf, the witch, the unnamed monster in the woods. Instead of blood offerings, the townspeople left you woven baskets full of waxy red fruit. I left myself: red cape and fiery virgin blood.

I was the one who lifted my hand and knocked. I had black hair, dark as a raven, and the dress my mother had sewn for me. You saw me just the same: my already curving hips, my waiting breasts.

My wolf, my witch, my monster: you had yellowed teeth, crooked, with one pointed canine peeking out over your lip. Your clothes were white, crusty, and full of angry stains. You were pretty even so with your salt-and-pepper hair, the sunrise of wrinkles radiating from both eyes. Gray eyes, of course, except on your soulless days when your stare was as blue as an ice-bound ocean. On those days you begged me to be silent, breathless, mute.

Trapped with all my unspoken words, I never felt quiet when I was with you.

Summer

Our bedroom was on the second floor. Next to it was your den, carpeted in gray with carefully whitened walls and a scratched closet door you told me not to open.

"It's mine," you said. "A closed door means keep out."

Some days the door's metal handle shook like a cornered snake. Other days it was silent.

On your ice-blue days you roamed the woods while I watched from our bedroom window. Step after step, you bent to examine the forest's undergrowth, searching for the waxy white stalks and scaly leaves of your favorite corpse flower, the Indian pipe. Your favorite was just as elusive as you. I watched until your bent back disappeared into the trees, and then if the closet handle was silent, I stole into your den.

You kept unspooled rolls of 8 mm film in dark green garbage bags stacked against the wall. Your film lacked the black glossy sheen of store-bought. Orangish-brown and subtly dimpled, each length contained a string of tangled images: a felt puppet on a twig broom, a seemingly unending line of girls with freckles or milky-tea skin and sharp-toothed smiles. And that one repeated image—a woman with wolf-grey hair—not you. Words were printed in precise block letters on the bottom of each frame of film, so small I couldn't yet read them. The lettering, I could tell, took hours, a magnifying glass, a steady hand.

It was fairytale time. I pretended the lettering, not the film, was your daytime passion. Your evening passions were easier to ken. Your evenings were spent with me.

________

I took my time, silent, lips soft against your stomach. Tangled sheets. My hands clutched your narrow hips, then slipped higher until I felt the outer edges of your breasts. I tasted the dampness trickling from between your thighs, salt and musk. Like 8 mm film, my movements took sixteen frames one slow second at a time.

Afterwards, you held pieces of your special brown-orange film up to our bedside light, sharing your work. Each cell was marked, scratched, the original image buried somewhere underneath. Your art, you told me, was about transformation.

Even then I made mistakes. Pointed out a slash mark, an odd corner of red. Left the ghost of a fingerprint behind. "Love me," I cried, finally deciphering the film's tiny words. The long L and five smaller letters suddenly clear.

Yet another transformation: your gray eyes glared, now ice-bound blue. Head bowed, I whispered my own special words: sorry and sorry again while your head nodded its agreement.

I was never as sorry as when I lived with you.

________

My fairytale monster. My lover. My witch. As with all witches, the kitchen was your domain: bones and gristle, amber syrup clinging to your lips, green herbs disfigured across the chopping board. On late afternoons heat and flames rose up against the slaughtered flesh. I never asked you where our meat came from, the brown-and-pink flesh so tender as it fell from the bone...