So up until today, as it stood: She had wandered the city, weaved in and out of buildings tall and glistening. She strolled through the halls of undeserved luxury and shrugged off the sting with a joyful heart. She let the music wash over her time and again, and afterwards she carried it with her. She took in the smell of the air and felt the hot weight of the sun on her pale shoulders.

She wore her red mantle that nobody else could see, but they sensed it in her smile and the swish of her hips. The candy man sensed it and gave her a wink and a smile that lit up her afternoon. The music man sensed it and he cracked a crude joke as he held her hand. Her friends sensed it in her easy banter and her enthusiasm. Her lady companions shared it with her in the sunny court, as they traded tales of lascivious exploits and passed opportunities for love and lust.

They alone counseled her cheerfully, as she left to head for her grandmother's house: you know what happens to little girls on the way to their grandmothers', they cackled, they winked and nudged. She laughed, I'm banking on it, she said. That's what I'm banking on.

So she walked to the corner, with token in hand, and as she waited she saw him. Across the road and at the high metal gates that bordered the park, he was playing hypnotic riffs on an electric guitar plugged into a cheap portable amplifier. He caught her eye the moment she stepped into the sun in front of the bus shelter. Held her eye as he played to her, smiling, shaping his music to call her, beckon her. Come on little girl. Cross the street. Take the detour away from your destination, far away into my world, into my arms, into my insatiable yearning.

And though she had an undeniable fondness for wolves and the promises they held, she stood defiant and beautiful with hand to hip, holding his eye for the full ten minutes before the streetcar pulled ahead, and as she stepped from the curb he took his hands off his black guitar and beckoned to her, motioning, cajoling, welcoming her again, as if to ask: why aren't you on my side of the road, little girl, come over to the other side little girl, come with me and god you will see a different world and it will be glorious and good and evil and everything in between, all red, all the time.

And she smiled, as it was good enough to know that her inner heat was shining so bright that it would tempt a wolf to ask her all those things, silently, and it was good enough to know that she would carry it with her as a new shining facet that would glisten every once in a while, and he, well, he wouldn't likely forget her for a very long time.