It’s warm here in his belly. When the muscles contract, I feel him embracing me again.

To be frank, he was not unwelcome. When he undressed me, he undressed me slowly, his saliva tracking wet on my thighs. I had to look away. No one had seen me unclothed since my husband left for the forest and never returned. I asked him first to trim my toenails so that I might disappear with dignity. He did so, taking his time, and then he began to eat. Tenderly. When I apologized for being too old and infirm to reciprocate, he looked at me and smiled, moved higher, nibbled my soft, moist parts. It was not fear that made me shiver.

“Waiting for you was the hardest part,” I confided. “I was tired.” I told him I knew who he was when I heard the thump of his boots outside, inhaled his musk from my window. 

The brush of his tail switched back and forth between my legs as his incisors seized my arthritic hips. A swallow or two and they were gone, along with the dull and pound of my bones. I told him how lonely I had been. No smoke could be seen from my chimney the last few years, but did the neighboring woodsman bother to bring kindling? No, he was only interested in grand gestures.

When his fervent claws tore at my breasts, I clutched his furry ears, whispered how even my daughter would not visit. Our quarrels wedged us. From time to time, she dispatched my granddaughter with a basket of meat I could no longer chew, sweets not good for my blood. Never the oils I needed for my skin. Never time for a quick game of rummy.

He watched me watch him dine on me, my face relaxing more with each bite­, smiling for the first time in years. It never hurt. I had long ago accustomed myself to pain, but his mercy made me wince. I had felt so unfit, yet he let me forget my body bit by bit. 

Soon nothing was left but my eyes, wet from weeping at the ease of his feasting. They wait under the bed’s darkness for the look on the woodsman’s face when he will break down my cottage door, find a wolf asleep wearing my bonnet. He’ll grin at the sight, look ’round to see who’s watching, proclaim himself a hero. He’ll raise his axe high, split the wolf’s stomach. Acid juices will spurt all over, my body by then dissolving. But my eyes? My eyes will slip and slide around on the floor, rolling. Watching.