Mrs. Yaga by Michal Wojcik

Mrs. Yaga
    A urelia 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