Little Red Riding Hood and the Prince

Chapter 17 -Shredding the Hood

"Tristan stop tugging, Tristan-" I gasped in horror as I turned my head to look at my baby brother.

Tristan was two now and prone to get into all kinds of mischief. Presently I was staring at a toddler covered in reddish threads, hands still pulling at the strings still connected to my covering.

Mama's hood and cape. It had been unraveling bit by bit over the years, but there was no saving it now, I could already tell.

"Is everything" "okay?" The twins called from the back doorway. They had been working in the kitchen today while I was out tending the garden with Tristan. Once they had seemed so much younger than me, though in reality only a little over a year separated us. Since Tristan's birth though, they'd really grown up.

Katherine, the slightly older and more perceptive of the two, realized the situation first and came rushing towards me. "Katie grab the scissors!"

"Oh Ella, I'm so sorry." Her face filled with sympathy and understanding was what finally made me release the tears. I didn't watch as Katherine and Katie worked to salvage the small remainder of my cloak and untangle little Tristan from his mess, I just cried.

My heart felt like an abyss of loss. It wasn't fair. I had lost mother and father and grandparents with so little to remember them by.

Awareness came back to me slowly, but finally I realized that I was being hugged, enveloped from all sides. My eyes were swollen and the lids heavy, but I finally managed to open them, and there was my family. The Katherine, Katie and Tristan, all hugging me in the dirt.

My laugh came out kind of like a hiccup- still broken and disjointed. My siblings stared at me quietly, simply waiting.

"I guess I don't need a hood and cape anymore to remind me that I am loved when I have all of you" I warbled.

And then we were all crying, except for Tristan who looked adorably confused as I held him close.

It took a long time for us to move from there, but finally I remembered the things that needed to be done and-

"Ak, girls please tell me that you didn't leave anything cooking in the kitchen!"

Eyes widened. "Oh" "No" "The soup!" "Wait, we put a lid on it so maybe" "it's fine?"

They rushed back towards the kitchen. I was hot on their heels with Tristan.

"How is it?" I gasped out.

"Water now Katie!" Katherine turned to me. "We can still save it, it hasn't burned yet, but it's close to going dry."

"Here!" Katie thrust a pail half full of water into her sister's hands and Katherine immediately poured it in and handed the pail back.

"Go get more." "On it!"

Katherine stirred the pot over the hearth fire. "Whew. That was too close. It's hard enough to tempt mother into eating when the food is perfect."

It was true. She had never really recovered from that day, the day we got the news that father was never coming back to us. It had changed each of us, but stepmother was altered in the worst way. For more than a year she had been bedridden, refusing to get up, and more recently she had taken to wandering around her room but never coming out. Sometimes she was lucid, but other times... simply mad.

Finally, we got everything set to rights and poured up a bowl of the precious soup. Instead of just the usual vegetables this one was filled with rich chicken bone broth, a rarity for our reduced household. I shuddered to think how we had nearly ruined the pot.

"I'll take it to her girls." I said, already steeling myself. The twins gave me identical relieved looks. They loved their mother, but she could be extremely difficult to deal with, especially as the day went on.

Leaving Tristan to their care, I took bowl and spoon in hand to the bedroom.