That feeling of being watched, of being object or prey to powerful eyes. A sensation of skin shivering into goosebumps, pulse quickening, fists clenching - uncommanded - in readiness for...something.
'Something' was prowling the bramble-twisted thickets, stalking the path down which heeled boots of black leather strode. Yet there was no whimpering or quivering or prayer for sweet mercy to be heard - in truth, curiously, it only made Red hold his head higher.
Powerful eyes watching, yes, but a subject apparently self-empowered beyond objectification of any gaze.
"Fuck you", he snarled - low and steady - "Fuck you", own glare fixed only on the route ahead. The sapphire-winged butterflies that fluttered a courtship dance across the way, swooping swifts gliding and darting in lethal mid-air pursuit of gut-busting mosquito feast. Snuffles and spiny prickles of a hedgehog padding over fallen, damp leaves, ferns and needles, and the melancholic hooting of a lone Snowy Owl awake past it's bedtime on some overlooking branch.
Familiar scents of pine and soil and wild garlic filling Red's nostrils as he journeyed. The further he trespassed upon Mother Earth's kingdom, the stiller surroundings becoming - like the refocusing of nature's camera lens as the morning air about lost its sense of clock and thickened, darkened. Until, in time, the only sound remaining was that of his own breathing, the only movement his forward-marching feet...
And still those unseen eyes watched on.
//
"The wolves are back", Yaai Chanthira murmured as she dipped the corner of her plushki bun into a cup of sweet, whiskey-splashed tea.
"Ugh", Red nodded from his cross-legged position on the patterned rug beside the hearth, "I was being watched the whole way here...just like when I was a boy"
His grandmother's eyes leapt to him as he said it, leaning suddenly closer from her seat of a comfortably-worn paisley armchair:
"Being watched, you say? Did you see it?"
"Mai shai, Yaai. Only felt it"
"Yes...I see...but, why now? Is the time near?" - the old lady's eyes misting as she rested back against the cushions, words more for herself than any audience.
A frown nagged at Red's brow. His mae had confided on a phonecall some weeks earlier that she was worried about her mother - said that she seemed distracted, preoccupied of late. Circular conversations with herself as if trying to solve some stubborn solo riddle. He could see it in the hours he'd spent there that day. The usual sharpness of his yaai's mind suddenly blunted by some cloud of confusion.
"Yaai Chanthira khrab. Is everything...ok?"
She turned back to him with an urgent energy about her ever-careful movements, beckoning:
"Come to me Red, come Kanawut" - her grandson crawling on long limbs to kneel at clogged feet.
The old lady reaching wrinkled hands down to cradle his face as fern green eyes fixed upon his with a searching, sparking seriousness...
"Promise me you won't come into the woods at night, Red. Don't set one foot in this realm once the moon has harnessed the sun to drag him under each day, ok? Will you promise, child?"
A chuckle from the younger as he pulled one of those hands to his eye's lashes to flutter the family's tradition of a 'butterfly's kiss':
"Always so poetic. Don't worry Yaai, I'm not planning on any forest floor slumber parties, I swear"
//
Tea-less tumblers of whiskey later, Red found himself shooed from the cottage with an empty basket in the crook of his arm, assurances from his grandmother that she would visit the family at their condo in the few days before his return to work some 100km away. She detested the urban sprawl, he knew, but ventured there on occasion for the ones she loved only.
The sporadic sleet of earlier had turned to flurries of October's onrushing chill, Red's path's loose dirt transformed to mud and glassily-iced puddles across the hours he'd spent indoors.
It was only just after noon, yet the cloak of branch and cone and needle cast a shadowy tone of dusk about the place.
"Hurry home, Red", his yaai's whisper as they had parted at the cottage's low eaves.
And he was hurrying. Something inside him rushing him onwards - glancing up, in a clearing, to see the winged silhouette and feathered, flesh-tearing talons of a low-soaring eagle ruling the sky above. There was a creeping, strangling sensation, as if ivy was twining tighter, tighter about his neck as he stumbled over exposed tree roots that seemed to grab at his boots like demonic forest fairyfolk.
Realising, suddenly, that he had strayed off the beaten track, and confronted by a gaping, limestone canyon. But the bank was slippery with slush, and before Red knew it he was sliding in unstoppable, yet suspended, motion. Tumbling painfully, grazingly over jagged rocks towards the edge and then out over the precipice as he became keenly aware of gravity's greedy force and fell.
Fell.
Fell - then was caught, halted mid-air, body jolting to smack back against the black cliff face when sudden, white-hot pain pierced the backs of his hands.
And when Red tilted his face upwards to meet the eyes of this rescuer it was to pools of glowing, prehistoric amber, a steely coat of silver, and two gigantic wolf paws that secured his own blood-streaked hands as he dangled at fate's mercy.
YOU ARE READING
Si Daeng
Fanfiction'If you go down to the woods today...' Red is being watched by wolf eyes, but does the beast even know who he's f*cking with? A MewGulf reworking of Little Red Riding Hood: In a shifting world where not everything is as it seems, borders between myt...
