It’s a strange sort of parlour,
the inside of a wolf.
Not quite dark (no, not that cliché)
more a dim, burgundy hush,
like sitting inside a badly made wine
that’s thinking about apologising.
I’m here, you see.
Cloak slightly chewed. Basket gone.
Dignity… negotiable.
“Hello?” I say, to the lining of things.
It replies by being digestive.
Outside: oh, I can hear it,
the pigs are having a crisis.
Not a mild one.
Not a “where did I leave my keys” situation.
No.
Full-blown porcine apocalypse.
The first little pig is hyperventilating into a straw hat
(which, frankly, is structurally on brand).
The second is drafting plans,
blueprints, diagrams, manifestos—
none of which survive contact with panic.
The third,
ah, the brick one…
is trying to hold a meeting.
“No, listen,” he insists,
with the quiet despair of someone
who has always been the only adult in the room.
“We need a strategy.”
“We need a therapist!” squeals Straw.
“We need a new narrative!” shouts Sticks.
“We need snacks!” adds someone unhelpfully.
Inside the wolf,
I sit cross-legged on a rib of inconvenience
and wonder:
how did we all end up in the same story?
I mean, I was doing quite well.
There was a path, a grandmother,
a mild sense of foreboding…
the usual.
Then suddenly—
wolf.
One bite,
and now I’m interior décor.
“Excuse me,” I say to what might be a spleen.
“Is this temporary?”
No answer.
Organs are notoriously non-committal.
Outside, the pigs have escalated.
There are charts now.
There is blame.
“This is your fault,” says Straw,
pointing vaguely at concepts.
“This is systemic,” says Sticks,
who has read something once.
“This is why we build in brick,” says Brick,
to no one who will ever admit he’s right.
And then…
hoofbeats.
Oh, you can hear destiny when it gallops.
It’s terribly loud, slightly theatrical,
and arrives exactly when things
have become unbearable.
Enter: the Prince.
Handsome in that improbable way
that suggests excellent lighting follows him around.
White horse (of course).
Very committed to the aesthetic.
He surveys the scene:
three pigs mid-existential collapse,
a wolf looking smug in a digestive sort of way.
“Right,” he says.
Which is reassuring.
No speech.
No monologue about courage or legacy or branding.
Just—right.
Inside, I feel a shift.
A pause in the wolf’s philosophy.
There’s a glint of something:
steel? resolve?
possibly both.
And then
action.
Now, I won’t go into details.
This is, after all, a family-adjacent narrative.
But let’s just say;
there is a decisive intervention,
a brief but meaningful disagreement with anatomy,
and a sudden, glorious
uninterior-ing of myself.
I tumble out into daylight
like an idea that’s been waiting too long.
The pigs gasp.
The wolf… reconsiders his life choices.
The Prince wipes his hands
with the calm of someone
who has done this sort of thing before Tuesday.
“Well,” I say, adjusting what remains of my cloak,
“that was educational.”
Straw faints.
Sticks takes notes.
Brick nods, vindicated unto eternity.
And the Prince?
He’s already halfway back onto his horse,
as if rescue is just another appointment
between breakfast and something heroic at noon.
“Wait,” I call.
“Aren’t you going to,
I don’t know… explain the moral?”
He pauses, just slightly.
Smiles in that annoyingly luminous way.
“No,” he says.
“You lot will argue about it.”
And off he goes.
Later, as we sit together,
a girl, three pigs,
and a lingering sense of absurd survival,
we try to make sense of it.
Was it about preparedness?
Architecture?
Trust?
Wolves as metaphors for late-stage chaos?
Or was it simply this:
that sometimes you find yourself
in the belly of something vast and inconvenient,
and somewhere, hooves are already on the road,
coming closer than you think.
I dust off a crumb of wolf from my sleeve.
“Next time,” I say, gently,
“we bring a better story.”
The pigs nod.
Even Brick.
And in the quiet that follows,
there’s the faintest feeling.
Not loud, not grand…
just a small, steady sense
that we are, somehow,
looked after…
even when swallowed whole.
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