The Acceptance of Little Red Riding Hood                 Joachim Frank

(1231 words)

The muffled voice on the phone was the voice of an editor.  He wanted to talk to me, but about what?  My immediate thought was that editors of literary magazines ought to be more articulate.  Some of his sentences went unfinished.  Some had no verbs, a no-no in this line of business.  I asked him to repeat what he said.  I became impatient, almost rude.  In an inexplicable role reversal, I enjoyed being rude to the editor.

               “Isn’t that your story?” he said.  “About Little Red Riding Hood?”

               “Little Red Riding Hood?  Did I write that?  Why exactly do you want to print it?”

               And here his voice became excited, as he said yes, yes, yes, as though trying to make up for the slow and vague start of the conversation.  Still no verbs.

               The fact is, I did write a short story called ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and vaguely remember its concept, an intentionally confused interplay between the children’s story and the struggle of a writer to get published, but I don’t remember exactly how the story went. All I could remember is there was no plot.  Yes, there was a girl, but was she little?  She might have been in the forest, but was there a wolf?  The wolf, if indeed there was one, might have been a metaphor for the publisher of the magazine I tried to launch my story in.  And this business with the hood was too cute to come from my pen.  This is where doubts begin to raise their ugly little pinheads.  But the fact that the story was accepted made me run to the attic, way up in my house, to secure a copy of the manuscript, so that I could breathe in, slurp up the words I had written, with all their elegance and sagacity.  With their significations and stealth.  With their utter playfulness and lust.