Wolf Soup

Mother was at her happiest when she was cooking wolf soup. She spent whole Sundays stirring the soup round and round with her thick arms, her red hair standing up on end like angry snakes, the fire flickering in her wild eyes. Once I told her that she looked like the witch from my book and she arched her back, lifted her head and let out a long, terrifying cackle. 

The rest of the time, when Mother wasn’t making wolf soup, she was sad and gloomy and pale. Like somebody who wasn’t there anymore. Like a memory. I didn’t understand why cooking the wolf soup made Mother come alive so. I thought she might have been playing pretend, like I did on my own in the forest, where I would become a hunter sniffing out the worst wolf or a pirate searching for buried treasure or a vigilante on the run from the law. For a few hours every Sunday, while she was hunched over the pot, Mother could pretend Father was still alive. That she’d heroically fought off the worst wolf and won and was boiling it alive for a celebratory supper. 

Mother didn’t like to speak much. But while she was cooking, she would sometimes ask me to run and fetch mushrooms or bay leaves, or to pull carrots and onions and turnips out of the mud in the garden. I never touched the dead sheep. Mother hacked its outsides and insides up with a metal cleaver I wasn’t allowed to touch. 

If Mother was feeling kind she let me boil the old wolf’s ashes. I’d stand on a chair and drop a little spoonful into the pot, watching as the soup bubbled and boiled into grey. The colour of a winter sky. The smell would then go out the windows and up the chimney, the smell that told the worst wolf to stay away, the smell that reminded him that while he had viscous claws and sharp teeth and the strength of twenty men or more, Mother and I had fire and knives and hungry grumbling bellies. 

Mother told me the ashes came from the old wolf, the one who was killed many moons before the worst wolf came. A hunter had spotted his yellow eyes glowing between the black tree trunks in the forest and shot him dead right there and then. Everyone clapped and cheered as they burned him on a pyre on the village green. 

Afterwards, the old wolf’s ashes were kept on the altar at church. Everyone sang songs and held hands and collected the ashes to take home with them for their soup. They were handed out by an old man in white robes. He wore the old wolf’s head over his, the teeth clamped over his forehead and chin, like it was eating him from behind. That was in the time before; the time where there were more people around than just Mother and I. 

Our house sat on the highest hill in the village. After the rest of the people were gone from old age or madness, or climbed over the fence and never came back, it seemed like their empty houses were slowly being eaten by the earth. Swallowed by ivy and crumbling like biscuits. Sheep were our only neighbours, they could go wherever they wanted. Nibbling their way through gardens, sleeping on the overgrown grass between gravestones,lolloping across fields. From my bedroom window they looked like fluffy clouds moving slowly across a bright green sky. 

At the edge of the village, beyond the forest where I played pretend and swam in the river and slept on the soft moss, there was the fence. A metal curtain with tiny square windows and sharp wire on top. Mother told me to never ever go near it. She said the worst wolf would smell me and rip it down and gobble me up. Father had gone over the fence when I was littler and never came back. Gobbled for good, I guessed. On Sunday’s, after we collected the old wolf’s ashes from church, Mother would light a candle for him. As we sat alone in the pew and Mother’s shoulders shook up and down, I tried to remember his face. But he wasn’t there. Less than a memory. 

Mother told me he’d gone to a better place, somewhere higher than the fence and the village, higher than the clouds, higher than the stars. I heard her through the wall at night praying to go there too.

I didn’t like going to church. I hated the way the sound drowned out to something quieter than silence, the cold, the echo, the smell of wet stones and dusty books. But I hated the window the most; the panels of coloured glass that showed villagers being ripped apart by the old wolf under a full moon, pools of blood and piles of arms and legs and heads with no bodies, crying mothers and cowering men, a boy screaming as his insides are pulled out of him like a string of sausages. I especially hated being there at sunset. The light shone through the bloody bits and painted the whole inside of the church red. 

Mother left in the daytime and came home just before dark. I never knew where she went, but I guessed that sometimes she went over the fence because she brought back all sorts of things I never saw anywhere else in the village. Chocolate, books, silver packets with little white pills inside, bottles of coloured water I wasn’t allowed to drink, small black mirrors called Apple, coloured creams for her face, sparkly dresses and tall shiny shoes she never wore. Mostly she just looked at these things with sad, heavy eyes like she missed them, even though they were right there in front of her. 

In the nighttime, Mother spent a lot of time in her room; the room where she had slept with Father. Most nights she’d stay awake talking to him, or crying, or praying. Some nights she screamed and screamed until her throat sounded like it had little rocks in it. 

I don’t remember many times when Mother was happy. But there must have been some before because I found photographs of her smiling and wearing different clothes with different hair in places I’d never been with people I didn’t know. None of those photographs had my Father in, but there were some where the faces had been scratched out. Sometimes I wondered whether it was Father’s face underneath those scratches. 

The old man in the white robes at church had told the story of the old wolf so many times. Holding his hands in the air, speaking into the sky, tilting the old wolf on his head up the moonlight. But one night, after she had finished a whole bottle of red water, Mother told me the story of the wolf who came after: the worst wolf. 

It was a summer evening and the sun was setting. Where the sky and the fields joined crackled orange and pink. Children my age were playing in the streets. Other Mothers and Fathers were tending to gardens or hanging laundry outside or coming home from harvesting the wheat and corn, hungry for their supper. As the sun fell and the moon rose, the worst wolf struck. It got the MacGregor’s first, ripping apart their sheep and their chickens and their young daughters, not seeing any difference between animals and people. Then the McCabe’s, the Campbell’s, the Smith’s, the Winterburn’s. The screams echoed through the forest and across the fields and into the village. Some went to church and prayed for mercy. Some hid and hoped the worst wolf wouldn’t find them. Some fled across the hills. The people that prayed for mercy in the church survived. The people who hid were found and eaten by the worst wolf. The people who fled told other people in other villages, and those people fled too. Mother and Father were among the people who prayed, the people who survived. The people who realised soup and prayers weren’t enough to keep wolves away. So they built a fence, first out of wood and wires, then the metal one that kept the worst wolf out for many, many years. 

Until one day it didn’t. 

It was a spring afternoon. Snow was turning to slush. Snowdrops and bluebells were desperately pushing themselves out of the cold hard ground. Mother and I walked along the edge of one of the corn fields. Hawthorns grew there, bursting out of thick brambles. I was gathering them into a wicker basket, sucking my thumb every time I got pricked by a thorn. I loved the taste of blood and juice. As I picked I made sure to walk a few paces behind Mother as she didn’t want me too close, said she didn’t like me on her coat tails, even though she wasn’t wearing a coat. I was about to tell her that the sun was about to go into the mud, that we needed to leave. But before I could she screamed and dropped her basket, the hawthorns spilling out onto the path in front of me. I wanted to move but she raised her hand in a way that made me stand completely still and hold all the breath in my body. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears and I felt hot butterflies in my chest, and then we ran. 

Once we got to the church she slammed the heavy wooden doors shut, yelling at me to help her drag one of the pews over. I didn’t see the worst wolf, but Mother said she had so I believed her and did as she asked. Mother must have been so scared, full of fear that she’d finally get caught by the worst wolf. Fear that she’d be ripped into a delicious supper for him. Fear that she’d feel its sharp teeth ripping her skin away and her insides out, the scraps of her sinking into the ground and becoming food for the worms and the flowers and the hawthorns. 

For the first two days and nights we didn’t eat or sleep, just sat and listened for the worst wolf. Wind blew the doors like someone was trying to get inside. Branches tapped on the windows and made shadows that looked like clawing arms. Foxes screamed like little girls caught in the mud, little girls about to get eaten by the worst wolf. Mother jumped at every sound, her eyes even darker and wilder than usual. 

On the third day we found a small wooden room that had stacks of the same book piled up the ceiling, tall upright t’s with a strange bearded man asleep on them, and a little something to eat and drink. Mother was so happy to find the red water. That night we sat on the pew together facing the window eating small, round crackers. Even though our bellies were empty and the crackers were filling us up, Mother looked guilty as she ate, like she was doing something wrong. 

Our beds were made out of scratchy cushions, the ones we used to kneel one. I liked putting mine together like a jigsaw puzzle. But the pieces were too small so I slipped between the gaps overnight and woke up on the floor. I’d never felt anything that cold and hard before. Mother told me it was that way to protect us from a hot, bad place far underground. She said being in church was the closest you could get to the place above the stars, the place where Father was. I asked Mother  how that could be, because the church was at the bottom of the hill and our house was at the top. But she didn’t want to talk. 

On the fourth day I found a toy to play with. It was made up of long white buttons all in a row with metal chimneys lifting a sound out of the box and into the roof. I remembered the sound from when I was littler, how Mother and Father and I had sung to it, all holding hands. But Mother wasn’t happy about the sound. As I pressed the buttons and the roof erupted, she ran up the little wooden stairs towards me and squeezed my neck hard and pushed me onto the floor. I didn’t make another sound after that, except my feet on the floor or the tinkling my toilet made in the bucket. 

On the fifth day Mother screamed and screamed and screamed at the doors, ordering the worst wolf to leave her alone. I lay on the ground and watched her with my cheek pressed to the cold, hard floor. I couldn’t feel the hot bad place underneath at all. Mother asked if I could hear scratching and snarling outside the door. I said no and she looked at me with the same angry, glowing eyes as the old wolf on the window. Like she was about to howl and pull out my insides.

On the sixth day we ran out of round crackers and I got so hungry I could feel my belly eating itself. I dreamed that my insides melted into an endless black puddle. I rose out of my body and jumped through the hole in my belly and swam down to the hot bad place underground. I woke up screaming and Mother told me to be quiet, her voice high and wild like the foxes at night. 

Sunday came and we had no ingredients for wolf soup other than the ashes. Mother hacked a pew to pieces with an axe and set the pieces on fire. She boiled a pot of old wolf ashes and red water and drank and drank and cried and cried. I asked if I should go home and pull the vegetables from the garden and chop the wet piles of sheep with the cleaver for her, but Mother didn’t like that idea. She threw a metal cup full of red water and old wolf ashes at my head and lay under a pew, her eyes so dark and deep I thought they’d fallen backwards out of their sockets and into her head. 

After an hour or two, I approached Mother to see if she was feeling better. I watched her chest rise and fall, the rows of bones pushing out from under her top. I touched her head and it felt cold and wet, like the ground after a storm. I shook her a little and patted her head and asked her to wake up, but she didn’t. I decided there and then to go and fetch her some more red water and a few pills from the silver packets. Those things usually made her feel better.

I found a window that opened without squeaking too much and jumped out into the graveyard where the sheep slept on the grass on top of the old dead people. As I ran between the graves and out into the night, I was scared of coming face to face with the worst wolf. But I was more scared of Mother getting colder and wetter until she wasn’t there anymore. 

At home I found nothing but empty bottles and empty packets. Mother must have run out before we went out to collect hawthorns. I ran across the hills and looked in every house, but there was nothing but empty cupboards and carpets covered in moss and bats hanging from rafters. I found animals and plants where people used to be which made me feel sad and wonder whether the wolf had got everyone in the world. Whether it was just Mother and me left.

From the top floor of one of the houses I saw the fence glinting in the distance. It seemed so small compared to the hills that rose and fell behind it. It was hard to see in the dark, but I could just about spot the flickering of a fire on the other side of the fence, faraway over many many hills. It was a house, just like mine. If they had fire, then maybe they had pills for Mother.

The moon was huge and round and helped me find my way through the forest. I kept my eyes on the ground, careful to avoid twigs or stones or anything that would make a noise. Father must have been much bigger and heavier when he went over the fence, so the worst wolf must have heard him coming. Slowly the forest emptied and I found the bottom of the fence. Standing right at the bottom it seemed so tall, taller than the sky even. But it was easy to climb; my fingers fit neatly into the little metal windows. On the other side I could see the same trees as ours, the same mud, the same empty squares of field illuminated by moonlight, the same stars twinkling between wisps of cloud. Father was up there somewhere, I thought. 

That’s when the worst wolf got me, scratching at my leg, snarling and spitting and screaming, pulling me down off the fence. As I fell my head hit a rock which made my vision go blurry and the world around me felt light and quiet, like my head could blow away from the rest of my body. The worst wolf, which to me was nothing but a looming shadow, scratched at my face, bit my arms, dug at the empty hole in my stomach, pounding my chest, hitting my head with the same rock. It sounded like the worst wolf was crying and talking to itself, its voice higher and wilder than anything I’d ever heard. It smelled just like Mother, too. Of sweat and damp and red water. The worst wolf must have got her first. 

As I lay there, my head floating like the sheep moving across the fields, my body going colder and my life going away, I didn’t feel sad. Above the clouds and higher than the stars I could see the place where Father was. The place where Mother had wished to go so badly. The place where the three of us would be together again. The place where the wolves couldn’t hurt us anymore.

Artwork by Esther Lalanne
Originally published in Gnome and Bone.