A woman approaches the storyteller. He can smell her. He can hear her quiet breathing. The rustle of her skirt in the breeze. Everything about her seems soft and pliable, like warm bread.

“Come closer,” he says. “There’s nothing to fear.”

She clears her throat. It is a delicate sound, and he imagines her white neck. Her tongue, her teeth, her rose-petal lips. He wants to ask her what color her hair is. Gold, he hopes, and long.

There is a shuffling. Feet against sand-covered stone. She is closer now. Not close enough to touch, but it will do.

“Once upon a time, there was a golden-haired girl who was told to stay on the path,” he says. “Would you like to hear what happened when she left it?”

The woman hesitates. She is licking her lips, he imagines.

“The girl was given a basket of food: bread, meat, crisp apples, soft cheeses. Her mother wrapped her cloak around her shoulders and warned her: ‘Stay on the path. There are wolves in the woods.’

“But the girl did not stay on the path. Not long after that, she encountered a wolf.”

The woman gasps. He wants to be the air in her lungs, feeding the blood that travels through her red insides all the way to her heart.

Others join the woman. They too are hungry for a bite of story. They shuffle close. Touch shoulders. But he speaks for the benefit of the woman and the woman alone.

He wants her ears. He wants to make her feel things. He wants to change the rhythm of her heart and lungs. He wants to write his breath into her memory.

So he tells her what the wolf did to the girl. What he did to the food in the basket she carried.

“Wolves devour,” he tells her. He is generous with the details.

“And this is why you must stay on the path. Or better yet, avoid the woods altogether.”