Oktober Mermaids

The Ballroom

Red Riding Hood doesn't always visit her grandmother.

Sometimes Red heads to the club in her little crimson dress, imitation ruby slippers, and garnet earrings to dance with people her age, knowing wolves prowl the city, too; of course, they'll never catch her. She's good at avoiding danger.

But on Halloween night, after she passes the bouncer, maneuvers through the sweaty dancers, the strobe-lit hall, then descends the limestone stairwell to the basement of the club—a pit normally alive with neon lights, fog machines, and ill behavior—instead she enters a grandiose ballroom with an orchestra on a mahogany stage, couples swaying to-and-fro, and a cathedral ceiling that couldn't feasibly fit inside the shoddy hole-in-a-wall she's come to know.

So she mutters, "I'm out," yet when she turns to leave, the stairwell is gone.

"Great," she groans.

A man in a white tuxedo, tall hat, and silver bangles approaches her, his smile as radiant as the bling stacked around his neck. He checks his pocket watch as he says, "You're just in time."

"For what?" she asks.

"For me to ask you to dance," he says, extending his hand.

Then she rolls her eyes, swinging her hip, standing akimbo. "No offense, but I didn't anticipate spending Halloween at a ball. Do you know how I can get out of here?"

His eyes flicker a burning blue so fast, she thinks she imagined it. Then his teeth ripen into fangs, and his spine bursts out of his tux with spiky tufts of fur.

She stumbles back, shrilling, "What the hell!?"

As the man transforms into a bipedal wolf—still holding a pocket watch, wearing bangles and necklaces, all too small for him—the others in the ballroom turn to face them, their eyes glinting madness.

Again Red checks for the stairwell that isn't there.

"My, my," the werewolf growls, "what a big attitude you have..."

As Red runs along the edge of the ballroom, other guests turn into wolves with pelts of gray and white and brown.

She leaps over a delicate, white-clothes table one of them try to push over to stop her.

They continue to transform and reach just narrowly too late, so that her crimson dress is torn and scraped.

She manages to find the entrance to the ballroom, clear on the other side, where the flutes trill the orchestra with panic.

As she pushes the double doors to the outside, she stumbles to a standstill, just before barreling into a moat.

The whole place is surrounded by water. Her imitation ruby slippers glitter on the precipice of the murk below.

The werewolves press closer towards her, frothing. One of them whistles a cat call.

She has no choice.

She dives in.

Underwater, several dark-eyed mermaids circle around her, their mouths like piranhas.

They rush her, pausing only inches from her outstretched, pleading hands.

A woman, says a gentle voice in her mind. Not a wolf?

Red thinks about how the wolves will eat her, how she can't avoid danger at all. The wolves are too strong; and they won't  stop until they've devoured every free woman alive.

Come with me, the voice says, as the mermaid waves her barnacle-encrusted hand.

So Red swims with the mermaids, across the moat, away from the ball.

Occasionally, she has to exchange breaths through their piranha mouths, to avoid rising for air. Their lips are surprisingly gentle.

♦️

First draft: October 18

Word count: 597

Inspired by: The Halloween Vault contest "Ball Gone Wrong," located here:

https://my.w.tt/xVVec6ufiR