The Woodsman

t h e w o l f -pt. 02/10

They hadn't closed the doors fast enough.

The wolf had leapt on the man and the dry dirt was mucked up in crumbles of scarlet blood mixing with the ground. Rosalie had screamed, dug her face into Ezra's tunic as if rubbing snot over his clothing would make the monster disappear.

It didn't- it had taken nearly three minutes for four men of the church to close the doors to shield the villagers from the wolf- he had seen it- watched as the wolf burrowed it's snout into the man's neck before ripping it open.

The Wolf is coming.

*

There is a place in the Woods where it is safe to go, where you don't look over your shoulder and fear the Wolf standing above you with its reeking breath that would make you place death a scent.

It's a small grove where the Woods are sliced into by the men of the town, where hatchets and axes are the men’s extension of themselves and the low hum of 'Tiiiimber!' is always followed by the scattering of feet.

You don’t ever go past the grove, past the grove is where the Wolf lives.

It's a place where Ezra walks from his grandmother's humble home after dropping Rosalie off at the school-house in the middle of the village where it sits beside the church. It's the only work he'll do- though he is employed by an imbecile who still says a joke or thirty about how pretty he's looking.

Sometimes he hates it- the way his hands will come back with hot knots in his palm and the peak of blisters on the heels of his feet are something he can handle- accepted. But when it's unbearably hot and the rest of the woodsmen are throwing their threadbare shirts to the ground, he'll find himself cursing underneath his breath.

Because Ezra knew he was beautiful.

He's known it since his mother wiped her hands in his hair and sat him in her lap, cooed at him as she kissed his button nose and told him he's far too pretty for his own good.

And letting his chest be bare to the world was as scandalous as a woman going through town naked.

It was something he wouldn't do, even when the fabric stuck to his back and puddles of sweat sopped it. He didn't need the taunting that'd come from the woodsmen- while in reality they would throw snide comments at him to catch a sliver of his back for just a second.

Sometimes he loves it- sometimes when he feels the axe cut into the wood, he thinks of how he'll go deeper in the forest, how he could separate his village, his Rosalie, miles and miles away from the Wolf. When he feels blood curl out of his fingers because his knuckles are white from holding on so tightly to the wooden handle, he'll just plow that much faster. He won't stop until it's down, he'll work on a hundred year old oak for an entire month by himself just to prove that he's more than a pretty face.

He's cut through six trees during his three months working as a woodsman. After you turn sixteen in the village, you worked- and being a fresh-faced, bambi-eyed boy didn't put him in privilege. Of course it meant that his grandmother begged him to work at the baker's shop, that an opening could be squeezed in if wished, or maybe he could work underneath the hand of the preacher at the church. Anything but not as a woodsman, not so close to the Wolf.

He didn't listen.

He should've listened.

*

There is a reason why Ezra had never been taken by the back of his scruff and dragged off into the woods. There is a story behind why the Wolf only stayed away as long as he had to from the village, from Ezra.