Little Red Riding Hood

It all started because my old Beldam wouldn't die off properly in the first place. Ancient enough that she used a bedside chamber pot (and made me empty it too) instead of toddling to the outhouse, she was still young enough to chase me around with a paddle if I would even so much as think insolent thoughts in her presence. My grandmama was a force to be reckoned with. As my mother's mother-in-law, she had done naught in the household save to cause injury, nitpicking the baking and all else she could. Besides that, taking meals to her old cabin in the woods and waiting upon the woman all day had plagued my three older sisters as a dreaded chore, before their childbearing prime. Now, as they were married off, the duty of taking care of the scaly taskmistress had fallen into my lap for the second year- and it wasn't as if I hadn't tried to avoid it, either. I had attempted to escape this day-long chore twice previously. Once, I picked a temporary solution: I gathered a beautiful bouquet for the hag all morning, and barely reached her house before I was to go home, claiming distraction. I was rewarded with a birch wood beating. Next, as all my sisters, and mother, had done before, I attempted cooking a "special" treat for Grandmama- Apples with a hint of arsenic. Now, either my family has no cooking skills, we received a botched recipe, or the old woman has intestines of steel, for again the endeavor for freedom only caused her indigestion and me a smellier chamber pot the next morning. Poison combs I couldn't figure out, and having the family troop out there and kill the aged witch purposefully was not something my father would even hear about. (He liked her: she doted on him, as well as claiming to be from a line of deposed queens.) So, my last hope was in a hitherto untapped resource, passed down as an adage from each generation of wrathful bakers in my family to the next: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
On my way to Grandma's one day, scarlet cape whipping in the sudden wind, I ran into one Stephen Wolf.