Babayaga

The old woman stopped her work to look up at the girl. “I’ll barter a question for a question: Who ate the first egg that dropped out of a chicken’s ass?” She paused for a moment, waiting for Noelle to answer. When the girl said nothing, the old woman blurted out the rest. “A hungry person, that’s who.” Then she went back to her scrubbing, still talking to Noelle. “But it’s not always the fancy food that tastes delicious. My sisters and I camped for six seasons on a Yamna farmer’s land. He would scoop eel out of the river for us and fry it with truffles he’d foraged and fresh sweet butter from his cows. Delicious. He was a dense and stupid oaf, but he was strong and big and he always smelled like horseshit. Oh yes”—the old woman paused again in her scrubbing—“nothing is as good as the smell of horseshit. You know, the streets are swept clean now, and all the horses are gone, so there is nothing in the air but the soot of your burning engines.” She went back to her scrubbing. “That’s why I like to sleep in a barn, to be close to real smells. Horseshit and horse farts. Those are the smells of life.”

That made Noelle giggle. A little smile crossed the old woman’s lips. Then she returned to her work and did not speak again.

IV

So many enemies, countless routs,

even our most sacred rites and pious celebrations of renewal
snatched up by that insatiable and foul pope beast.
See him sit proud and poised,
branded with the crusader’s crucifix,
braying on about his mewling manger,
promising eternal life
and bottomless vessels of wine for all anointed.
Now there’s a pandering peddler.
He forever extols the virtues of love and compassion
while his crusading Knights Templar
slice at the bare babes’ throats.
He can bear no other tale, take no rival myth,
and in his absolute hunger to rule he tore down and cooked up
every sharp-tongued woman in his path,
even turning on his own, his blessed, his consecrated,
the poor, fevered nuns, no more than sick or delirious,
only mad with loneliness,
brokenhearted in their sunbaked convents,
suffering amid the spiraling vertigo
of eternal ennui.
There, standing stone-faced amid their magpie cries for grace,
the priest raised his hand for silence and said simply
and solemnly, burn
sisters burn.

Ghosts, they say, stay for three simple reasons:

they love life too wholly to leave,
they love some other too deeply to part,
or they need to linger on for a bit,
to coax a distant knife
toward its fated throat.

V

Vidot the flea was exhausted. He rested, hanging upside down beneath the couch of his rival’s apartment. Over the past two days he had learned all that he could possibly want to know about the man. He had been certain that his investigations would unearth evidence of a great villain, but what he discovered was a decent enough individual with a perfectly ordinary life.