Bayou Girl with a Scarlet Cloak

The girl woke to the sound of cicadas—thick, pulsing, feverish. Their rhythm filled the air like something ancient trying to claw its way back through time. Morning light spilled across the warped floorboards of her room, filtered through curtains that hadn’t been washed since her mother’s last heartbreak.

On the table: a basket. Inside: a slab of cornbread still warm from the cast iron, a jar of gumbo rich with dark okra and bone-picked chicken, a tin of pralines wrapped in wax paper, soft as skin. Beneath it all, tucked into a fold of linen, a feather. Dark. Oily. Out of place.

Her mother didn’t look up from where she stirred chicory coffee in a cracked enamel mug. “Your grandmother’s been taken by a hush,” she said. “Go see her. But mind the woods. The swamp’s been remembering things best left buried.”

The girl slipped on her cloak—scarlet, frayed at the hem, heavy with rain and inheritance—and stepped into the heat. The path was not a path. It writhed, opened, narrowed again. Cypress trees leaned like eavesdropping women. Water whispered over roots like a lover’s breath against the skin.

Somewhere between where the road ends and the dreaming begins, the wolf found her.

Not a creature of fur and fangs. No. He wore no shape, not exactly. His teeth were ideas. His hunger was old. His voice slid through the heat like a knife through butter left too long in the sun.

“Where you headed, scarlet girl?”

She didn’t stop walking. “To see someone, I love.”

The wolf grinned. Or maybe it was the trees.

By the time she reached the cabin—more sagging memory than structure—the oil lamp had already been lit. The air inside was thick with lavender and something metallic.

“Come in, my love,” called the voice.

She stepped in, but everything felt… off. The quilt too still. The rocking chair facing the wrong way. And those eyes. Watching her. Shining. Too alive.

“What big eyes you have.”

“All the better to see what you’ve become.”

She touched the edge of the basket. Her fingers trembled.

“And what big ears…”

“All the better to hear the lies you tell yourself.”

The cloak slipped from her shoulders. The wolf rose.

The violence that followed was not loud. It was soft. Muffled. Like two pages closing against one another. Like the hush her mother had spoken of.

But the door burst open just before the hush swallowed her too.

A man stood there. Or a shadow shaped like a man. Shotgun in hand, smoke on his breath. The wolf lunged, teeth first. The shot blasted like thunder, rocking her ribs.

Silence again. Real this time.

The man didn’t speak. He simply walked to the wolf’s corpse, knelt with strange tenderness, and opened him with his knife—slow and practiced. From the belly, the old woman slid out, gasping, eyes wide with knowing.

“I dreamed of cicadas,” she said. “And you.”

The girl didn’t cry. She just sat beside her grandmother on the creaking floor, both of them cloaked in breath and blood and the rising steam of the now-useless gumbo.

Outside, the cicadas resumed their song. The swamp exhaled.

And far above, beyond the branches, the moon watched without blinking.

Red helped her to the bed, hands shaking, heart galloping inside her chest like a trapped bird. She pressed a damp cloth to her grandmother’s brow, spoke soft reassurances she didn’t believe, and when she turned around, the man was still there.

The hunter.

He stood in the doorway like he wasn’t sure if he belonged inside. Rain tapped against the tin roof in a syncopated rhythm. His shirt was stained with swamp mud and something darker. He wiped his blade on his jeans and leaned it carefully against the frame. His eyes were gray. Not cold—just hard to hold onto.

“You don’t have to go,” she said. Her voice surprised her. Small but steady. “Not yet.”

He nodded once and stepped in.

They sat on the porch long after the oil lamp burned out. He didn’t ask questions. She didn’t explain. The silence between them wasn’t awkward—it had shape, and temperature, like the space inside a warm coat. The swamp hummed. A heron called. Somewhere, a gator grunted in the night.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Call me Jonah.”

“Okay, Jonah,” she said. And then, after a pause: “You’re not what I imagined.”

He glanced over. “What’d you imagine?”

She shrugged. “Older. Beard. Maybe a little more… scarred.”

He laughed once, under his breath. “Give it time.”

She watched his profile. The curve of his jaw, the quiet way he carried his stillness. He wasn’t beautiful. But there was something in him that felt reliable—like a good knife or a well-worn boot. She realized she was staring and looked away.

“I’m Red,” she said finally.

“I figured.”

Inside, her grandmother slept with the sound of breath that had fought its way back. The swamp held its tongue.

Jonah stood. “I’ll stay the night. Keep watch.”

Red nodded, not quite smiling, and reached for the cloak lying in her lap. She didn’t put it on. Just folded it slowly, pressing her hands along the scarlet fabric, as if taming something alive.

“I never liked this cloak,” she said.

Jonah looked at it, then at her. “Then maybe it’s time you took it off.”

Her breath caught. Not from the words. From how he said them—without weight. Without demand. Just truth laid bare beneath the cypress moon.

She didn’t reply.

Instead, she let the cloak rest on the porch railing. Wind moved through the trees, and the swamp, watching, said nothing.

Somewhere in the distance, a hungry wolf began to howl.And somewhere closer, something else began.