Little Red and Me by Kathy Curto

Sean Benham CC




Little Red and Me


As far as I know, Little Red Riding Hood didn’t complain when her mother asked her to deliver food to her grandma. She just did it. Maybe it even came natural to her. Someone isn’t feeling well or is hurting? Bring food. Invited into the home of a loved one? Bring food. I relate. It’s what I do, too. 
I get it from my mother.

                                                                                                                                  ****

This, too, I get from her:  a little lipstick never killed anyone. 

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Like Little Red, I appreciate a pop of color. I have a waffle weave cotton neck scarf the same shade of yellow as French’s mustard. I wear it in every season. And I once wrote an essay about red shoes. I forget most of what I wrote except for my thesis:
A pair of red shoes can change things: the course of an evening, a mind, a love life.

So now, on days when nothing makes sense and confusion rules, I follow this recipe: combine one soft yellow scarf, a pair of ruby red flats and a handful of dreams about night and curiosities and real humans in love. 

Mix well. Let sit. Enjoy.

                                                                                                                                    ****

Oh, but then there’s the wolf. 
Ready and hungry to deceive, frighten and intimidate. To trick, to create pain. But mostly to devour.
Lipstick might not kill, but wolves do.
Why was there only one in Red’s story? Don’t they travel in packs? 
In my forest, the one that lives in me, the one that is of the heart-soul-mind variety and the one that rattles my bones when winds are cold and dark, there is more than one wolf. In my forest they travel in packs. Big, scary ones. They hide behind trees and jump out at me showing off glistening teeth and their grey see-through-me eyes. 

Sharp, sharp, sharp. Everywhere.

What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this happened? What if that happened?

What if? What if? What if? The wolf pack of what-ifs. 

Ready to eat me up, no condiments needed.

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“Snap out of it,” my mother might say if she were here. Her brown eyes might widen and her hand might be perched on her hip. There might be a long hard sigh, the final note of her directive. Her body telling me, “You’re stronger than any wolf pack.”

And that’s what I do. I snap.

Out of it and into the woods.

With red shoes and a yellow scarf. 

Like ketchup and mustard. Like blood and sunshine.




Kathy Curto is a writing professor and the author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood (Bordighera Press, 2018.) She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and can be found in her front yard, on most mornings, replenishing her Little Free Library with donated books. This practice has become one of her daily delights. Please visit: www.kathycurto.com or on IG @kathy.curto.



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