Don't Eat The Apple.

“WOLF!” I cried at the top of my lungs while pointing at what was really a four-year-old Belgian Tervuren.

Well, it isn’t “me” but instead the five, or maybe a six-year old version of me. My face is beet red as the high pitched scream ravages the rooms and hallways of my grandmother’s house. The bright blue pastel colored walls, almost to the point of neon, reverberate the non-sense noise back and forth. The light blue shag carpeting sprouts between my toes. Slowly my grandmother walks over from the pink walled kitchen and her shoes make a Velcro sound against the old linoleum.

“Oh a wolf is here?” she said. She always had a soothing quality to the tone of her voice. At this point, the screaming stops and the blood begins to retreat from my face.

“Ya Sweetie is a wolf!” I said.

“Oh is she now?” “Have you ever heard the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?”

At this point in time, the stories I had heard rarely had carnivorous animals in them, although in a few years my mother would read to me, at my request, Stephan King’s Cycle of the Werewolf. It had pictures too. I am still not sure if she wanted to scare me or permanently deter me from asking questions about what she was doing.

So I responded, “No.”

My grandmother sits down on a wooden framed chair with white leather paisley print inserts and motions for me to sit across from her. I sat down in an identical chair at the tall dining room table with what I perceived was a tablecloth raincoat due to its yellow plastic appearance. Impairing my field of vision was a rather large house plant, and by rather large I mean obnoxiously large, that is some cross breed between a pine tree and a palm tree. That damn tree served as the "bird in the house omen" for my family for so many years, but that story is for another time.

My grandmother is a semi-heavy set woman with short white hair. She dresses like a grandmother too. You know those grandmother type outfits that are based on one singular color and rarely differ in style from day to day unless it’s a holiday of some sort. She adjusts her thick glasses then takes a sip on the straw almost falling out of the Ginger Ale can. She would later tell me about carbonation, but I insisted it was the bubbles that pushed the straw up.

“When I was a young girl,” she said, “my father told me about a boy in his village who cried wolf.” He told me that Edward, a young boy, and he used to play together after they had finished their chores for the day. They tended the live stock, cleaned their rooms, made their beds, and brushed their teeth. Sometimes wolves would try to get at the livestock during the night while everyone was asleep. Around this time, the wolves had become a big nuisance to the villagers. Everyone was on alert for these deadly creatures that seemed to lurk in every dark crevasse of the surrounding forest. So the young boy Edward was out in the field one day just like any other day. Until he started screaming, “Wolf!” It was the cry of this one word that sent a panic through the whole town. My grandfather, my father, Edward’s father, and masses of other men from the village sprinted to Edward’s position in the field. Edward still bursting out with intermittent cries of “Wolf” broke into laughter as the men came barreling through the tall grass of the field in sight of him.

“Hahaha, I got you all, fools!” Edward said. All the men start yelling at the boy in some sort of mob unison.

His father said, “You shouldn’t cry wolf Edward if you keep it up one day there will really be a wolf and no one will come to help you.” He turned his back on his son and walked with the rest of the men back to town.

The days pass by and once again Edward plays his practical joke. The men from the village all rush to the field and once again Edward laughs at them all. “You shouldn’t cry wolf Edward, if you keep it up one day there will really be a wolf and no one will come to help you,” Edward’s father says again.

So fall soon approaches and wolves become more aggressive knowing that food will become more scarce in the winter months. My father was in his field helping finish the harvesting; his field was in the opposite corner of the village from Edward’s family’s field. Once again the cry came, but this time the cry was not answered. Edward cried, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! WOLF!” For what seemed like hours, but no one came. Then the cries stopped. Ceased to exist. My father thought Edward had tired himself out screaming or maybe just gave up. When dinner time came a new cry stirred from the lingering light on the horizon. It was not “wolf” and it was not Edward’s voice. It was his father’s voice. A cry of such pain and sorrow that the villagers ran to the sound. My father was first to arrive, as he was the fastest in the town. Edward’s father was on his knees with the torn and tattered corpse of his son pulled tightly to his body. Tears streamed down his face as he yelled, but not a loud yell, one of those inaudible yells when the pain is so unbearable the body and mind cannot communicate the feeling.

“So there really was a wolf?” I asked to confirm my five-year-old logic.

“Yes, there was but Edward had lied to everyone so much, that no one believed him,” my grandmother responded. She then proceeded to make me a milkshake since I had somehow remained silent and listened the entire time without interjecting my usual barrage of questions and concerns.

For the next few weeks, I was scared a wolf would eat me in my backyard and no one would help me because we had high stockade fences, that obviously only wolves could get over. Other than that I knew I should not lie. If I did, no one would help me when I was in trouble like Edward.

During the twenty years after this time, I have lied. I am not George Washington. I don’t even think George Washington was George Washington. “I cannot tell a lie”, good old George said. I think political lies started this country. I digress; the point is that I have lied since my grandmother told me that story. I can assure you that every time I lied and I got caught, I thought of Edward in the field. Lies are the wolves of the world. They sit in the darkness until they are big enough to feed on their own. Or maybe they hunt in packs. When that wolf comes out you will wish you have told the truth.