Bruinbun

Once Upon a Time, Little Red Riding Hood sat on her Grandmother’s bed. Next to her lay Granny, a smile on her face, her eyes wide open and a dagger through her heart.

Under Little Red Riding Hood was a pathetic creature, as old as Granny, with his wild eyes staring and his thick matted hair without a dagger in his heart. Instead, Little Red held a large kitchen knife to the creatures throat. Pity was not staying the final blow, instead she was wondering how much he would bleed over the bed and how she could avoid the extra work of cleaning up.

He saw a flicker of indecision on her face and said, with a halting voice and foreign accent, "She was a good sort, I loved her a lot." Which didn't go down the way he had hoped.

Instead, she cried out, "Beast!" And prepared to sever his head.

A tear squeezed from one eye, and he said, "Spare me a moment, and I will tell you how this came to be. I will tell you where your red riding hood came from, why you must wear it to cover you face and why dear Ethel here lived here, deep in the woods."

He started to tell her more of the stories he might tell her, but she was young and knew the wiles of the elderly and she really didn't need to know why the sun painted her face a golden tone and her hair straight black.

Still, she was a little interested in why Granny lived in such an inconvenient location. The provenance of her riding cloak was also the subject of lots of speculation, for the farm folk only knew of horses by repute as they had all been taken for the war before she was born. But the pathetic creature beneath her, with Granny's comb stuck in his greying curls and one of her hand sewn coats thrown across his shoulders, had nothing she wanted to hear.

Image: Where Grandmother’s place should have been, next to the Bridle Path, Bruinbun (the Wambool)