Mrs. Yaga
by Michal Wojcik
Mrs. Yaga
For all the Baba Yagas out there.
Aurelia grew up in a cabin a little ways outside of town, the one with the red mailbox and the twisted iron fence surmounted by skulls. Sometimes the house would groan and shift and flex its long chicken feet; every so often it would stretch out its legs, lifting Aurelia’s room up over the trees and making crockery slide and smash. Then Mrs. Yaga would speak to the walls and soothe their domicile into settling back down again, to fold its legs like a hen does. An old black-and-white TV stayed perpetually switched on and soundless in the living room, drawing static off the aerial that spindled from the peak of the thatch roof. No wires came in off the main line but there was always power for the TV and the radio and the Mac Classic; as for a phone line, Mrs. Yaga had a cell.
“Did you have to do it, baba?” Aurelia asked as she washed dishes. She was nineteen, her hair black as electrical tape and her skin as white as bone. “He was so sweet.”
“You think I took you under my roof just to let the next chłopak with a strong chin and a guitar sweep you away?” Mrs. Yaga cackled, bending into a fridge that dated from the 40s at the very least. She didn’t look like Aurelia’s mother (because she wasn’t), not even her grandmother (because she wasn’t that either). She was old, gnarled like old branches left out in the sun and dry as a pomegranate husk, a collection of spikes and corners. She always wore fur over her shoulders, winter or summer. She always wore a necklace of claws from bears and wolves and tigers that clinked wherever she went.
“Greg doesn’t play a guitar. He draws webcomics,” Aurelia replied stubbornly, making the water splash with the vigour of her scrubbing.
Mrs. Yaga extracted an oversized egg coloured deep violet, clicking her tongue happily before slamming the fridge shut. One tap from her fingernail and a small hole cracked in the egg’s top. She held that to her lips, slurping down its contents, liquid red and thick as blood dribbling down from the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry,” she said. “If he’s worthy of you he’ll be back. The tasks are simple.”
She wiped her chin clean with her sleeve and shook the shell, eliciting a dull rattle, then split it open on the counter. Out tumbled a foetus with a lizard’s tail and a rooster’s head, its eyes screwed shut tight. Mrs. Yaga held it up and squinted at it a moment before popping the creature into her mouth, crunching the bones with her pointed old teeth. She tossed the broken shell into the compost bin.
“All he has to do is bypass the gatekeeper of the thrice-tenth kingdom and bring me a fern flower, a dragon’s heart, and a rusałka’s lock of hair. Easy.”
“They never come back,” said Aurelia. “Not Daniel. Not Brendan. Not Steve.” The three suitors never returned from their easy tasks: the first was killed by a great grizzly (unlike our grizzlies, the great grizzly is wise and terrible and prowls the Mountains of Dusk leaving the clean-picked corpses of mammoths in its wake); the second was frozen by a basilisk’s stare; the third, less stupid than the others, simply wrote off Aurelia and her baba as irrational and ceased his romantic advances.
“You deserved better, my little chick. A girl with your hips needs a true bohater. Besides, I gave him a sword, which is more than I ever gave the others. Isn’t that good enough?”
Aurelia bit back her next words, let the slosh of porcelain plates in water drift up over their absence. Why must you do this to me? You aren’t my mother. You aren’t of my blood. I don’t even know your first name; all the years I’ve been here you’ve only been baba to me.
Mrs. Yaga leaned in closer, claws clicking together, unfelt wind stirring her wild white hair. She’d always seemed to know what Aurelia thought, her deep grey eyes filled with knowing. But now she only grunted before shuffling out of the kitchen, leaving Aurelia to wipe the counter and sweep the floor.
Mrs. Yaga had no steady job, received no regular income or pension cheques. Whatever money she made came from the strange trinkets she sold every Thursday at the market: charms and amulets and love potions and little statues of Slavic gods that no Canadian would have known but that they bought anyway. Sometimes strangers would come from afar asking for private audience, promising countless rewards, but if Mrs. Yaga decided to aid them she seldom asked for cash. Instead she requested less tangible things: a stray dream caught in a web, a bundle of love letters exchanged before the First World War, their soft pencilled marks long faded into illegibility, the soul of a firstborn son. These she all kept in a great iron chest that doubled as a coffee table, until she had need of them.
As far as Aurelia knew she was one of these gifts, left here by her parents after some great favour, though Mrs. Yaga didn’t keep her in the chest. Instead she ordered Aurelia about—to tend the cows and chickens and demons, keep the cabin clean, stoke the fire, cook meals, awaken the skulls at night so that their gazes would roam the yard like searchlights. In return, Mrs. Yaga taught her how to read and do arithmetic and advanced chemistry, how to speak Polish and Russian and Czech, how to churn butter and spin wool. Later, she tried to teach Aurelia how to chant spells, but Aurelia was rubbish at magic. She could sing the words prettily enough, but she could not make the words come true. She couldn’t even transform a secret visitor into a pin to stick in her embroidery, to hide away from baba’s prying—the most basic of spells for any ward of Mrs. Yaga.
The one thing Aurelia didn’t learn much about was Mrs. Yaga herself. She was unaccountably old, and yet she seemed to have no past, no youth, as if she came into the world already bent and bruised. Only once had Mrs. Yaga relented to Aurelia’s pestering about what her life had been before coming to Canada, saying, “I am a Yaga of a sisterhood of Yagas. When folk came across the water to this land from Ukraine and Poland and Russia, they brought their babas with them. I was a jędza baba of Poland, so I joined my sisters and crossed the sea in my mortar. Wherever the Slavs go, the Yagas follow.”
That was as much an explanation as she ever gave.
Aurelia had a lingering sense that the old lady was constantly appraising her with eyes that betrayed gnawing hunger. She feared that one day Mrs. Yaga would bake her in the oven and eat her, but that hadn’t happened. Not yet, not for nineteen years.
The mortar still loomed in the attic, but these days Mrs. Yaga preferred driving the pickup she kept parked outside. The crone puttered into town that night, leaving Aurelia behind to lie in her room and listen to Greg’s mix tape on her battered old Walkman and think on what life might’ve been like if she weren’t Mrs. Yaga’s ward, the people she might have met. The boys she might have met.
Since she turned thirteen, boys cast longing glances when she ran errands in town. They were terrified of Mrs. Yaga, though, who would grab tight hold of Aurelia with her bony fingers and affix any who stared with the evil eye. So when Aurelia started going out alone some years later, few men worked up the courage to talk to her. Even less to try and kiss her. And inevitably, if things went far enough and Aurelia couldn’t keep the relationship a secret anymore (she never could keep secrets from Mrs. Yaga, baba knew them all) then her suitor would meet Mrs. Yaga and Mrs. Yaga would send him on a quest.
Poor Greg. He was by far her favourite. He’d come back from uni for the summer and would wait every week with a bouquet of hand-picked flowers on the path Aurelia took from the grocery store. She should have done more to resist his advances, drive him away, because now Mrs. Yaga had sent him to the thrice-tenth kingdom wherefrom few mortals could return.