The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

One day he brings home the rump of a cow, and his wife stares in horror at the great white hind legs splattered with blood and dung. He makes her come to him and tosses her onto the cow, pulls up her skirt, and seizes her slender thighs. The woman trembles—someday, without thinking, he will spread them brutally apart as well and crack them with a single stroke; her belly will be ripped open, he will flip her over and thrust himself into her erupting entrails. The Ogre finds no satisfaction in her, either; her body is too tiny. He brings in a live bull, binds its hooves to the four corners of the kitchen, and impales his wife on its member. The animal’s spasms, its bellowing and twisting, whip him into a frenzy, he breaks off its horns, shoves his member into its eyes, and crawls across the rough hide.

His wife is very white against the bull’s black belly, he slobbers toward her, crying, “The last hope! The last hope!” He still has not had enough, he throws himself down on all fours and sinks his teeth into the animal’s living flesh, where its limbs are stretched tight. Its agony causes the whole house to shake, and the wife atop its disintegrating body senses she has lost control; the monstrous member slides between her pale thighs and she doesn’t know what to cling to.

“Stop!” she cries out suddenly. “Stop, stop!” The Ogre looks up, and their eyes meet for an instant.

“Up there,” she says urgently.

At the head of the stairs, the seven little ogresses in their white nightgowns are crowded together, staring at their mother, naked atop the black beast, and at their father, on all fours with his penis in his hand and his mouth full of raw flesh. The seven little ogresses survey the carnage, but their faces show neither fear nor revulsion; their eyes are glittering.

“Go to bed!” the Ogre roars in a terrifying voice, and the disappointed ogrelettes retreat and vanish.

Pacified, the Ogre pulls his wife off the bull, politely stretches her out on the ground, finishes his business inside her with a modest convulsion, and then gets dressed again. He triumphantly summons his children and shows them the parts of the beast with care, giving them the names, the tastes, the scents; he quizzes each of them, and when they respond correctly he lets them throw themselves on the twitching mass with their pointy ogresses’ teeth, their dozens of pointy little teeth.

“Put on your napkins!” their mother cries.

But they don’t listen.

“Use your knives and forks!”

But they glance at their father and see him laughing, and they shrug off her recommendations.

“Don’t take such big bites!” their upset mother cries, but the little ones throw themselves even more greedily onto the beast, which has finally finished dying.

“Chew!” their mother says.

No one listens.

“They'll choke!” she pleads with the Ogre.

Sensing their mother’s helplessness, the ogresses continue even more eagerly, despite her despair. The Ogre finally deigns to hear her. “Go along with your mother now,” he says.

And the wife takes them off to the well and washes them one by one. Weeping, she washes their little lamprey mouths that tear at flesh so eagerly. She talks to them, tells them their sharp teeth wound and cause suffering, but the ogrelettes laugh, they don’t understand their mother’s arguments, they make fun of her, they’re aroused and euphoric. When they’re clean, their mother puts each of them in a white nightgown that still shows sharp creases from ironing. The children tolerate it, and now their mother sees all seven of them, clear and distinct among the pails gleaming softly in the moonlight, their little feet all white in the evening dew on the grass. She sees their round cheeks, their pink lips, their air of good health, and a door closes inside her on the bloody scenes as though they belonged to another time, another life. She kisses her children tenderly, and when they are all in bed she begins telling them a story.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a village. Her mother and her granny loved her to distraction, and they had made her a little red ridinghood—”

“What color red?” the ogrelettes call out.

“Poppy,” their mother says, thinking of the flowers she loves along the roadsides. “No!” the children say.

“Strawberry,” their mother says, thinking of the delights she has walking across the fields.

“No!” the children cry.

“Tomato,” their mother says, seeing her secret garden in the clearing.

“No way!” the children cry; a tomato is to them what spinach is to others. “Cherry,” their mother says, looking at the little pink print on the curtain at the window.