Vera and the Witch

This, like “Fish Out of Water”, is a piece of short fiction leftover and still cherished from my college days.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately listening to the Myths and Legends podcast, and Aaron Menke’s Lore. I adore myths and folklore, ghosts and fairytales, and all manner of old and mysterious things.

One of my absolute favorite figures in folklore is Baba Yaga and her turning house on chicken legs. With my childhood love for Cinderella variations and my swift, thorough, and enduring appreciation for Howl’s Moving Castle–both the book written by Dianna Wynne Jones and the movie adapted by Hayao Miyazaki–there was really no way I would have ever been able to resist this spooky Slavic witch.

I’ve taken some liberties with Baba Yaga in this tale and created my own lost girl to meet with her. This Baba is a lot more like a grumpy old Sophie Hatter than the devilish pestle-wielding crone in the Cinderella-adjacent story of Vasilisa, but there have been many Babas Yaga in Slavic folklore–sometimes multiple in the same tale–so I don’t think I’ve strayed too far beyond the realms of possibility here.

Vera was fifteen when Baba took her away. That was seven years ago.

The moon was waning on the eve preceding her birthday. She watched the last crescent smear of it glow against the black silk sky, the round shadow of the great dark lid slowly closing over its silver eye. “It’s nearly time that I go back,” she said.

Vera did not say ‘home.’ It was not entirely right.

Baba coughed dismissively. She hobbled over on skinny ankles bundled up in wool socks and handed Vera a steaming cup of tea. The cup was little more than a small, lopsided clay bowl, but under the curve of her grateful fingers was painted an intricate pattern of flowers and herbs. Vera had first learned to identify which of Baba’s forest plants were edible by what had been painstakingly portrayed on the rims of her old plates.

For Vera, it seemed like lifetimes ago. For Baba, it was minutes.

Vera held the cup close to her face and inhaled the damp, earthy steam. It was sweet with honey. She supposed that one of the things she had missed all these years was lemon. When Vera was a child, drinking tea with her father, there had always been lemon. There were no lemon trees in Baba’s forest, and no markets.

Baba sat down at the soft-cornered kitchen table, across from Vera. Her wooden chair creaked, and she sipped lightly at her own steaming drink.

Vera watched her. Baba’s back was hunched and her knuckles knobby. Her nose was hooked and her skin weathered. Despite this, Vera had never thought the witch seemed particularly old. Baba’s eyes had a fire in them that defied her age.

“You had better visit. Understand?” Baba did not look up from her drink as she said this. She bent one finger, rubbed the nail across the rim of her cup, put it back.

“Yes, Baba,” Vera said. She smiled smally and peered down at her own drink again.

They had grown close, Vera and the witch. She hadn’t always thought they would.

 

It had been a harsh midwinter, and Vera’s father had fallen ill. That was the short of it. “There is always a problem,” Baba had said. “No one comes just to visit. Either they have a need or they object to my being here.”

It was true. “Please,” Vera said, falling on her knees in the snow. The hem of her red gown trailed behind her. “I can give you anything.”

Baba scoffed. “I don’t want your money or your trinkets.”

The witch shut the door on her, and with a protesting crack, the house wobbled. It creaked and groaned, and slowly the foundation began to peek above the shimmering drifts. In the gap below the house, Vera saw two large wrinkled legs, like that of a taloned bird. They shuffled and stamped, and the house began to turn. It did so haughtily, and plopped back down with its back to Vera.

What was meant to deter her only made her curious. Vera stood and brushed the snow from her shins. She circled the house, eyeing the ground where it sat, and knocked again at Baba’s door. She stood on the short stoop, on the tips of her toes, and tried to peer in through the stained glass window.

The witch did not answer. Instead, the house began to move again. It rose steadily this time, stretching up on its strange legs.

Vera shrieked and held fast to the door handle. The house rocked as it raised one of its feet and began to walk. It bumbled through the trees, twisting and sucking in its square gut to avoid crashing through every branch. The thin fingers of leafless twigs swiped at the girl attempting to plaster herself to the narrow door. They pulled at the tangles in her hair and snagged the fibers of her clothes. The house traveled deeper into the forest, thoroughly distracting Vera’s sense of direction. How would she get home?

Baba’s house finally found a new clearing. It sighed with a long wooden creak, and nestled into the fresh snow. One corner of the house dipped lower than the rest. The tattered shingles ruffled like feathers on the roof. The door opened and Vera, still clinging to the handle, tumbled over the threshold.

“You’re still here!” Baba said, outraged. She nudged Vera’s ribs with her soft leather shoe.

Vera held Baba’s foot. “Please,” she said. “Help my father.”

Baba gave her a hard stare.

She rolled her eyes. “Fine,” Baba said, hands swatting the air. “I’ll go.”

Vera’s face lit up. She sat up taller and threw her arms around Baba’s knees, crumpling the old woman’s fraying skirts. “Thank you!” she gasped.

“But you stay here,” Baba ordered.

Vera reared back. “What?”

“Stay here.” Baba stepped back and began to putter around in the pantry. She emerged with a roughly woven cloth satchel, and plucked herbs from bundles tied to overhead beams for drying. A cloak hung from a sturdy hook near the door. Baba nudged Vera away from it.

“I need to make sure he is well,” Vera said.

“He will be,” said Baba. “Your trust and your time will be your repayment to me.”

 

They had gotten off to a rocky start that way. Vera hadn’t seen her father since, although she longed to, and Baba had become her new guardian. In hindsight, even if her father had died then—for reassurance that this was not the case, she only had the witch’s word as proof—Baba was still doing Vera a favor by giving her a place to live. Baba had taught her things about survival, healing, magic. Things she would have never known otherwise.

Now, Vera thought, I have the ability to help myself.

Vera reached across the kitchen table and touched Baba’s hand. “Thank you,” she said.

“Bah!” Baba rasped, but squeezed the girl’s fingers gently.

 

When the moon had closed its silver eye and relinquished its place in the sky to the bright winter sun, there came a knock on Baba’s door. The house had not turned. It had not made a single creak in response to the forest intruder. The knock was deep and soft and somewhat timid. The latch clicked, and the door drifted open. White-gold sunlight reached its arm across the weathered floor.

A man’s low voice tiptoed in behind it. “Hello?”

“Come in, come in,” Baba rasped. She shuffled toward him, sharply waving her arm. “You’ll let the heat out.”

 

Vera had woken early with anticipation. She pulled on her cloak, which was shorter since she had grown and stained at the hem, and ventured out of the house with a basket on her arm. She inhaled the crisp, cold air, and wandered in search of witch hazel. The small bushes grew up through the snow in long arms, which held small clusters of purple bodies circled with bedraggled yellow petals like the legs of spiders. It was the pale green leaves and small cuts of the thin bark that she sought. Although the plant sprang up during the winter, it was useful for a myriad of summer ailments, like bug bites and ivy rashes. It soothed the red burn of the high sun.

Gathering it soothed her nerves.

 

There had been a garden behind her father’s house. It had been surrounded by shoulder-high shrubs bearing small, five-petaled suns. A mass of berry bushes huddled together beside the dense greenery. Gooseberries abounded in the spring. Vera and her father entered the garden through an archway long overtaken by climbing roses. Together, the two of them knelt in the dirt to pick vegetables and herbs before the first frost. They worked quietly, digging up potatoes and carrots, and snipping fresh sprigs of dill. Her father hummed while he worked. His voice was low and sweet and rumbling.

It came on gradually, the sickness. He coughed and cleared his throat. Pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and his chest rattled. He had tried to hide it from Vera, so she wouldn’t worry. While he coughed, Vera hummed, picking up the tune where he had left off, until he was well enough to join in again.

 

By the time she was finished peeling spindly branches with the edge of her knife, Vera had once again made peace with the possibility that her father was not going to come for her at all. She might return to the wandering house, and only Baba would be there, as she always was, bustling about and grumbling to herself about this and that. They would fall into a familiar pattern, one they had developed over years of living together. Baba would show her another passage in one of the old, fat tomes with the yellowing pages. They would assemble the ingredients, draw symbols on the floor, and Vera would cause the spell to do something it was not meant to. A spell for cleaning would rearrange the interior walls of the house, or turn Baba’s socks purple. She would write it all down in her own leather-wrapped journal while Baba muttered eccentricities and rubbed charcoal lines from the floor with the sole of her shoe.

Looking at the crumbling façade of the old house, its odd ochre legs tucked snugly away beneath the foundation, Vera took a deep breath. It came out of her as a cloud in the chilled air, like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils.

The door swung quietly open—the house was never so silent as it was that morning—and there, at the kitchen table, sat two people with cups of warm tea cozied in the palms of their hands: An old woman with long grey hair that fell over her shoulders like a layered shawl. A man with more lines below his eyes than she remembered, but a posture and a smile she could never have forgotten.

Vera and the man were still, speechless, gazing at each other. Their happiness beamed like the sun at Vera’s back. Tears welled in their eyes, streaked from their cheeks to their chins.

“Hi, Papa,” Vera squeaked.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

“Vera and the Witch” by Mariah Lamour © 2017
Featured photo courtesy of Gaelle Marcell on Unsplash