In another life, the wolf is a composer, deep in his wood-paneled study where he’s lost in music, hunting songs into existence one phrase, one note at a time. Each piece has its own human scent, a whiff he detects, like a girl lost in the woods, who he must so kindly tempt into his lair.
His study exists at the bottom of a long staircase, down into the earth, through a door that opens into a concert hall in the stalagmite-dark of a cavern, where the drip of ancient pools provides percussion for the wolf’s fugues. He plays on an organ carved directly into the wall of the cave, the sounds and vibrations passing through the layers of stone and sediment. His only audience is the cave crickets and spiders, who pause in their blind creeping to listen. The wolf does not like the silence, does not like when the music stops, so it almost never does. He has been known to compose even in his sleep, his claws tapping syncopated dream rhythms on his stone slab bed.
He leaves the door at the surface open just a crack so that the girl-songs can find their way in, down the stairs, into the cave, as some always do, into this echoing chamber deep in the earth, where each trapped song reverberates on the lichen-covered walls like moths’ wings brushing against glass. Each girl-song is alive and pulsing with breath, innocent in a way he loves at first, before their soft glow of wonder is snuffed like a candle, leaving only smoke, a burnt wick. The bright notes become a somber dirge. How low he’s fallen, how listless he’s become, how foreign to himself. He hates it when they realize who he is.
And yet, sometimes the songs remind him of who he used to be, or might have been, before he left the meadows for the woods, the woods for the cave; before he retreated underground. He grits his teeth when this happens. Memory can be painful, unwelcome, and yet perhaps he’s more afraid of forgetting completely. There’s one song in particular who sings to him about the world above, and it’s like a cork has been pulled from his soul and he can’t stop the thoughts that come: memories of sun and leaves and wind and birds. Of voices, laughing. Of walking, running, instead of slinking. Of hands, not claws. Maybe one day, I will leave this cave. Maybe it is not too late. Perhaps. And the song sings back, Not too late.
