PodCastle 834: All the Better to Taste You PodCastle

* Author : Marisca Pichette

* Narrator : Julia Rios

* Host : Kiran Kaur Saini

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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PodCastle 834: All the Better to Taste You is a PodCastle original.





Content warnings for end of life and misgendering.





Rated PG-13

All the Better to Taste You

by Marisca Pichette

 

This morning I swallowed the Wolf.

I started with oatmeal — sweetened bitter by fresh maple syrup, sticky all the way down. On top I poured mead inherited from drunken bees bumbling through the windows I always leave open — wide, gaping, hungry.

I finished with the Wolf. He’s quite small now; time and peace have removed his claws, decades of sweetness have rotted out his teeth. An infestation of fleas conjured by my stepsister forced him to shave completely. His final years were pale, bald, shivering as I carried him from room to room.

At the end, all that remained to feed his once-formidable muscles were nightmares. First mine, then his — rousing him gasping at midnight. I brought him cocoa, warm milk with a dash of honey.

At the end, I slept soundly, snuggled in a bed that learned to fit me. I stopped having nightmares years before I swallowed the Wolf whole.

He stirs in my belly now. Treacle-slow, contemplative, tame. He knew today would come before I ever thought to make his end.



“You’ll eat me up,” he said the day we met. I wore my white cotton dress, cornflowers embroidered along the hem. He lay in bed under a blanket stitched of lace and grandmother skin.

Then he was large, gray as ashes, eyes algae-green. I’m sorry to say I was scared of him, thin as I was, still within reach of my teenage years. I couldn’t imagine a day when I would be stronger than the Wolf.

“With treats and dreams and moon-blood,” he told me the day I moved into the guest room. One suitcase, a twin bed dressed in faded linens. My hands — naked, cold. Standing there, one hallway away from him, I wondered if I’d made the right choice. I wondered if I’d had any choice to make.

We’d run out of space in my mother’s house. After college, my stepsister had married and brought the Woodsman home. It had never been a mansion, equipped with only enough rooms for a mother and her daughters. The addition of the Woodsman meant the subtraction of someone else.

My mother asked if I would mind moving out, living with our only other relative: the Wolf.

“Don’t let her bite you,” she told me as I packed pads and protein bars into my suitcase.

“It’s he,” I replied, resentful and a little petulant. I knew a little about wolves. My stepsister had known a few in college, though only tangentially. They came more to some families than others, and never before the age of sixty. He was our first, as far as I knew.

“No, it’s she,” my mother huffed. “She was your grandmother, before.”

“That doesn’t matter. Now he’s a wolf.”

She gave me a hand-me-down cardigan and left the room.



When I moved in, he cooked for me. Quiche in the morning, martinis at lunch, Bolognese for supper. His table manners gave me my first nightmares, mixed up with cold toes and shifting shadows. I rose each morning exhausted, longing for home. The cottage was too quiet. The Wolf didn’t speak much. He seemed as uninterested in my presence as he was unbothered by it. He spent more time in the garden, while I perused the living room,