Hood

I saw this young girl, still pink with naivety, cross-legged in the hollows of the skull, the masses calling “Red Riding Hood, Red Riding Hood”—drone of the din, the modern monsters incessant. Crouched in back rooms, peyote fog, they say such a name was for the cap of red—visions of velvet!— the girl’s grandmother gave her in the empty solace of Western holiday.

This same grandmother soon suffered the fall of the ecstasy of life, age withered in the long face of Time. Holy illness that does remind us of our mortality! Red’s mother, in kindness of the very human soul, said to girl “Cake! Wine! The holy food of life, for grandmother’s return to it with full strength. Bear such goods to the lone woman, wrapped swaddling in her cottage like Eternity in Time, the fifth dimension incarnate.” Eyes burning with the wide fire of youth— youth I have burned in shallow pipes!—Red agreed to the task.

Yet Grandmother’s house stretched far through the bending trees and Mother had seen darkness stagger from these same woods, howling and naked on its thin knees, and so she bid, between thick marijuana drawls, “Careful! I’ve seen it all! Stay on the path! Move swift and straight!” 

Mad youth, Red howled, “I am careful! I will be!” Then she pulled red velvet across her pale naked flesh, took gifts in hand, and set out on that old road, that beating beating road into Eternity. Holy, holy, holy road! And Youth upon it!

But only seconds had died, fading jazz in thick night air, before a wolf staggered into Red’s path, bristling with the ecstasy of physical power incarnate. With a voice of heartless horror, that fell empty on those naïve pink ears, he purred, “Where does this holy road take you?”

Wide tooth grin, fed white on the teat of middle class America—Closed eyes in box houses! They know not the road!—Red replied, “To Grandmother’s! The Holy, Holy angel lies in the fallows of age. Age that will take us all!”

To which the wolf, creature of waking terrors, responded, “Those supernatural brilliant gifts—they are for her?” with a madman smile bending into the very mind.

Stupid youth, sightless youth—she should have known! Now off the bridge! Into Eternity!

For Red nodded, “Gifts from the warmness of my mother’s brilliant soul.”

And the madman smile stretched for miles, thin and flat and knowing like that same holy road. In the bending caverns of his mind, he thought, “What a meal this child would make, what feast! Hallucinations of plenty! Visions of content!”

But blessed, blessed satisfaction would come only on the naked back of guile, like saxophone groan at the price of hipster breath in floating nights of peyote pipe.

So as Red took to the road once more, the holy road that waits in thick silence for all to return, the wolf moved with her, fed on a new mental fire—the same that all best minds fall prey too, that of velvet desire, of supernatural lust, of waking fantasies.

As they beat on, the wolf pointed, “Open your eyes! Emerge from your mind! See nature, see sunflowers, see infinite naked trees!” Red’s eyes swelled, suburban curtains pulled back, and she gasped “Flowers! For grandmother! But is there Time to pick them? Oh, Time that winds down never-ending, creating machine continuum beneath the supernatural night sky!”

The wolf swayed, desire of desires consuming, and replied “Time is a fickle mistress, curved into track marks of past visions on tenement roofs and she lends all she has to us now.”

So stupid youth, Red strayed from the holy road and took to the flowers, contemplating this mistress and all the extra brilliant colors that burned her eyes.

Meanwhile the wolf bore on— sweating, shuddering madman of desire— to Grandmother’s house, knocking wildly on the curving, curving door.

“What soul, warm loving human soul that does bend always on, is that?” Grandmother’s weak voice called, fading notes of all-night bop that die as the sun hangs itself.

“Red Riding Hood! Red Riding Hood with gifts for the staggering Angel, from Mother. Oh, the human propensity to Give!” The wolf replied, angry now with pale hunger for the fix.

“Open the door yourself, my ecstasy does fails me, after so many stretching years of pipe and jazz and days that blend.” Grandmother gasped, floating flower eyes wilted in salt water.

And the wolf, the madman, burst forth, silent with single-minded desire and consumed Grandmother whole. Oh hunger that wipes the memory! Hunger that warps identity in Time and Time in identity!

Then with mad ecstasy, he pulled Grandmother’s pajamas across his bristling flesh, the drug of plenty coursing through twisted vein, and took to her bed.

Supernatural starriness, that clouds the eye and the road, had risen to consume when Red finally emerged from her fantasies of flowers to Grandmother’s cottage.

Silence, unwinding thinly like cigarette furls, met her soft knock, so youth shuffled forward, inwards with swollen arms of gifts. “Holy grandmother! Holy, Holy elder, staggering, holy matriarch!” Red called, throat twisted with salt fear. Grandmother, but the shadow of some figure— dark thin outline, coagulating essence like gathering notes—lay tossed across the bed, caught by wind or fatigue with blanket tatters bunched about the chin.

“Grandmother! What big ears you have! And eyes! And hands! And mouth!” Red exclaimed, holy power of the senses, infallibility of human observation!

The wolf, caught in the tightening hand of intrigue—intrigue that buzzes hotly in the ear and twists sharply up the bending throat—smiled thin and wide in the grasped hope of compensation, replying “The better the hear and to see and to hug you with darling, darling precious soul.” Then he added, itching desire finally swelling uncontrollably forth into the gnawing silence after fallen words, “And why this extra enormous twisting mouth is to eat you with!”

With the jittery speed of craving—of early morning withdrawal, felt thickly over the geometric city horizon in the fog of last night’s indulged consumption— the wolf leapt forth and devoured the poor, poor, extra brilliant but no more Red Riding Hood, erasing her as all things are in the face of blind, senseless! sightless! Eternity. Then nonsensical, with brain itself eaten up by the aluminum teeth of unchecked hunger, the wolf fell back in sleep, form curving about the swollen stomach.

But a hunter soon came forth, form gathering shape, outlines twisting into sense in the supernatural darkness.  Throbbing testosterone amongst the trees! Cock in flannel! Course facial hair! Brazen, billowing manhood at its blindly revered pinnacle!

Hearing the groaning of exhausted indulgence, so un-feminine in its timbre, the young hunter paused along the holy road, human fear juxtaposed jaggedly with a naïve desire to intervene and save and make hero out of common man. Courage pooled in skull caverns, dripping thickly down into the muscles and finally prompting jolting movement into the wide unknown, through the leaning cottage door and across to the sleeping terror incarnate. A wolf! Flesh not of a woman but of a beast— expected shock but nothing, never like this!

But as the hunter was preparing to strike the creature of waking terrors, of daydream chills, an idea lurched forth from the oblivion behind the skull—the holy, holy staggering angel of age might still be saved, pulled as only the brilliant human soul and hand can from the heated depths of intestinal darkness! And tearing with the naked ecstasy of imminent heroism, the fallacy of the ego, the hunter brought forth first the velvet of a cape, then the youth bound to it and finally, blessedly, the elderly grandmother—who, so warmly relieved to be whole, to be independent, once more, forgot all illness. Mad victory! Disoriented reorienting! Life again! Holy rebirth from the pit of indulgence! Holy the stranger who pauses on the road! And finally, holy cake! Holy wine! Holy company! Holy a stomach of rocks for the creature of waking terrors! Holy the supernatural all enduring all encompassing human capacity to emerge and go on with ecstasy!