Just got set up on Substack and X under the handle BrainSoupFic, a catch all to include my diverse array of genre-spanning writing. Will be posting one new story each week. This is the first off 11 fairy tale retellings from my collection Not the Tales You Remember:
Little Red Ridingverse
Does my story sound improbable to you? Okay, I’ll grant you improbable. But not impossible. An infinite number of monkeys hammering away at infinite typewriters for an infinite time will eventually type out my story just the way you’re reading it. Along with infinite variations: some tragic, some absurd, some written entirely in emojis.
That’s the trouble with an infinite multiverse: every story is true somewhere, and every path to grandma’s house exists in some branch. And I’ve walked them all.
One of those paths leads to a chimpanzee wearing grandma’s clothes. Another to grandma wearing a chimpanzee’s clothes. But most lead to a wolf. Why a wolf? You tell me. Do I look like a type writing monkey?
All I know is that I tie on my flowing red cape, grab my basket of goodies and skip into the woods. Ah, but which path should I choose? Infinite possibilities explode outward like popcorn kernels in a cosmic microwave. Unobserved, I dance along all paths at once.
Until you open the book and – poof – my cosmic symphony of strings and probabilities collapses to one actuality. Robbed of my fundamental randomness, I skip linearly along the path to which you have confined me meeting a wolf. Or sometimes a giraffe. I won’t really know until I get there. Whichever it is, you will probably perceive our meeting as inevitable, or at least that a wolf is more probable than an armadillo. But that’s only because you have been conditioned to associate wolves with little girls alone in the woods. A reflection, dear reader, of your expectation bias.
He (or she, or it) inquires where I’m headed. I spare them—and you—the lecture about how their predictive model of “reality” is merely a stitched-together hallucination based on sensory limitations and cultural presuppositions. Instead, I answer: Grandma’s house.
But what even is grandma’s house? Is it the walls? The fence? The air trapped between fence and house? And for that matter, what constitutes grandma? Does her epidermis mark the extent of her being or is it the cloud of skin particles that surrounds her? How about the colonies of bacteria living on and within her? Are they part of grandma or simply grandma-adjacent? What of the mitochondria in her cells—mitochondria which, evolutionarily speaking, are alien squatters cohabiting her cytoplasm?
Where does grandma end and everything else begin?
(Answer: somewhere between “vaguely defined” and “don’t pull too hard or the universe unravels.”)
Well, we don’t delve into those philosophical rabbit warrens, not when speaking to strangers along a wooded trail. A girl could find herself in danger. So, after a brief interaction, I continue along the path toward the structure you choose to identify as grandma’s house, though the termites consider it theirs—and will outlive her by decades.
Inside, I find grandma in bed. Or someone in grandma’s bed. Or some thing. Without preconceptions, I cannot say if it’s grandma or an orca dressed as grandma. Or perhaps an orca dressed as a wolf. Who knows? Layers upon layers of probability costumes.
We exchange pleasantries to lubricate the gears of this tale as if we do not recognize one another from some branch of the tale or another.
But you don’t care about that. What you want to know is does the wolf eat me? You want closure. You want certainty. You want to shake the narrative box and hear whether the girl is alive, dead, or halfway through digesting the wolf.
You want binaries.
You want endings.
You adorable little determinist, you.
You want a reality that stands still long enough for you to measure it.
But here’s what you’ve missed while you watched the wolf’s teeth:
You are the observer collapsing my universe.
Every expectation you bring to this tale crushes infinite possibilities into one narrow corridor. Forget about the Big Bad Wolf, you dear reader, are the most dangerous force in the Ridingverse.
So, I’ll give you your ending—because you need one—but know that by reading it, you kill all the other endings that might have been.
Here it is:
I lean toward grandma. The figure in the bed leans toward me. For a moment we balance in quantum equipoise—girl, wolf, wolf-as-grandma, grandma-as-wolf, worlds stacked into infinity.
And then you blink.
And in your blink:
The wolf eats the girl.
The girl eats the wolf.
They both survive.
They both perish.
Grandma was never there.
Grandma was everywhere.
A lumberjack crashes through the door.
A lumberjack never exists.
The termites file a noise complaint.
Every ending happens the instant you imagine it.
Every ending becomes true somewhere.
And none of them matter more than the fact that you cannot observe this story without changing it.
And you—poor deterministic you—remain trapped in your single, lonely branch, wondering what really happened.
I’ll leave you with the cat.
Ask it how the story ends.
It knows better than I do.
