Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  She took out her pen, and the dragon didn’t twitch.

  Carefully, she started drawing on the page.

  “What are you doing?” the dragon asked.

  “I’m adding things,” Heather said.

  “Hmm. I guess that’s okay,” the dragon said.

  Heather drew a giant pair of scissors snipping through the net. She drew a file chiseling through the bars, and a key unlocking the chains.

  “Do you feel like you could let me destroy it now?” she asked when she’d finished.

  The dragon paused, then shook her head.

  Heather looked more closely at the words written around the pictures. Where it said “by words and magic the dragon is taken,” she put in a little ^ and wrote not so that it said “by words and magic the dragon is not taken.” She changed the word “bound” to “boundless” and “grave” to “gravel” and something that ended with “die” she changed into a short essay about “dietary law.”

  It didn’t make a lot of sense when she was done with it, but she didn’t think that would matter. But the dragon still didn’t feel like she could let her destroy the book.

  So finally, Heather took her own scrapbook, and cut out the picture she had pasted into the center, and pasted it onto the cover of the magician’s scrapbook, covering over the picture of the miserable looking dragon.

  The dragon leapt to her feet. “HA!” she shouted, and bolted out of the cave.

  Well, that seemed to have done it. Heather burned the magician’s scrapbook, just to be on the safe side. She figured the treasure wasn’t hers—it belonged either to the people it had been stolen from, or the dragon—but she couldn’t resist the Aeschylus and the Shakespeare so she packed those up and left a note saying, I borrowed the plays. I promise to give them back after I’ve read them.—Heather.

  She blew out the lamp, left the dragon’s lair, and looked around. She could see the dragon high overhead and hoped she’d stick to her word and eat the evil sorcerer before she left forever. And then she called for Bear and they walked back down the path to the city.

  Is that the end?

  No. The next morning, everyone in the city woke to the sound of a vast, enormous contralto voice singing a cantata—

  The dragon?

  Yes, of course the dragon. And when she was done, she told them that she’d been freed, and had eaten the evil sorcerer, and would now be on her way to explore new lands.

  Did she tell them who’d freed her?

  No, because she could tell Heather would prefer not to have to put up with being famous.

  But what about the reward? She was supposed to get a reward!

  The next day, she got a package through the mail; it was a box containing those heavy gold bars, which was enough wealth to keep her well-supplied for the rest of her life. The dragon kept Fillard’s game and Peter’s sheet music, though.

  She was also supposed to be a hot commodity. Romantically, I mean.

  Would you want to marry someone who was only interested in you because you were a hero of the realm? She went back to visit Fillard and Peter to tell them how things worked out with the dragon, and they were delighted to see her. And over time she and Fillard became best friends, and they got married and lived happily ever after.

  Did they ever see the dragon again?

  No.

  I want them to see the dragon again.

  Well, the dragon sent them postcards occasionally, from distant cities like Shanghai and Barcelona and Miami.

  That’s not the same as seeing her.

  I suppose.

  Surely the dragon would have come back to visit. Once. Heather freed her from the sorcerer!

  You’re right. She did. One night about ten years after Heather and Fillard had married, they were sitting on the beach with their child watching the sun set over the water. And in the clouds, Heather saw the dragon; for a moment, she thought it was just the sun in her eyes, but then she saw the huge wings and knew it was the dragon. And she shouted and pointed so that Fillard and their child could see her as well.

  They all saw the dragon, just for a few minutes, in the last light of the day. And as the shadows gathered and the stars came out, they heard her singing.

  Author’s Note

  In May of 2010, there was a benefit auction for a friend of mine who was experiencing a medical crisis. (She needed a liver donation due to a long-term medical condition; she was set to receive a living donor transplant from her brother, but money was needed to cover his travel expenses and the time he needed to take off work to recover.) My offer read as follows:

  Offer: I will write a SF/F short story of at least 1000 words with you, or the (consenting) real person of your choice, as the protagonist (or, if you’d prefer, the antagonist). If you want a child-appropriate story with your child as the protagonist, that is fine; if you want this as a surprise for a friend, that’s probably fine. (Basically, I don’t want to write real-person fic that the subject would object to.) You get to choose whether you star as the hero or the villain; I will do my best to make the character recognizable as you. I will accommodate specific requests regarding subgenre, plot, prompt, etc. I don’t usually write explicit sex, but if you want a story with explicit sex, ummmmm, well, bid high enough and I’ll do my best.

  The auction was won by a college friend of mine, Fillard, who requested that I write a story starring his wife, Heather. Many of the details in the story are drawn from Heather’s real life, including the dog named Bear and the scrapbooking. (She and her sisters once co-owned a scrapbooking supplies store named Scrapdragon.) Fillard and another friend of theirs, Peter, got cameos.

  As I was kicking around ideas for the plot, I suggested making Heather a princess, which Fillard promptly shot down. And with that, the opening lines came to me, and the story unfolded from there.

  I wrote this story initially for an audience of two: Fillard and Heather. The fact that it had broader appeal was a pleasant surprise!

  COMRADE GRANDMOTHER

  —glorious Soviet—soon bring Hitler—complete defeat. Heavy casualties—Dnieper River—”

  The voice from the radio faded into the deafening hiss of static. Nadezhda knelt to adjust the tuning dial again, but lost the transmission completely. Her temper flared and she smacked the box in frustration, then thought better of it and returned her attention to the dial. “Please,” she muttered. “We need to hear this.”

  The other workers from the steel mill waited silently, their faces stony. Nadezhda brought in another minute or two of speech: a different voice spoke about patriotism, sacrifice, Mother Russia. Anastasya, the supervisor of their group, reached over and switched the radio off. “Go on,” she said. “Back to work.”

  They’re coming, and we won’t be able to stop them.

  No one dared to speak the words. Nadezhda had to bite her tongue to keep from speaking them—but it was better not to invite trouble. She retied the kerchief she wore to keep the sweat from her eyes and her hair out of the machinery. For days now there had been no real news. The official reports spoke of great Soviet victories, but these victories somehow happened closer to Moscow each day.

  Nadezhda returned late to the apartment she shared, pulling off her shoes in the cold stairway so as not to wake the others. Stepping over sleeping women, she picked her way to the kitchen in stocking feet. As quietly as she could, she boiled water for tea, then sat down by the window to stare out into the darkness.

  The Dnieper River was the last natural barrier before Moscow. And if Moscow fell . . . Closing her eyes, Nadezhda could see the face of her lover, Vasily, before he’d left with the militia to fight. “We’ll fight them to the end,” he’d said, speaking softly to avoid being overheard. “We’ll make them pay in German blood for every inch of Russian soil. But if Moscow falls, we’ll be fighting a lost war.” Vasily’s blue eyes had been hard with fear, but he’d pulled loose her kerchief to stroke his fingers through her hair one last time before he boarded the train
that would take him to the front. Vasily had no real military training—that he’d been sent to fight spoke of the Red Army’s desperation far more loudly than a thousand radio broadcasts.

  Nadezhda pulled her kerchief loose again and ran her own fingers slowly through her hair. She put away her teacup and took out her hidden bottle of vodka for a deep drink. Then she picked her way back through the apartment and out to the stairs, pulled on her shoes, and headed out of the small industrial city to the forests beyond.

  Nadezhda was young; she lived in a world of steel mills and radios and black-market cigarettes. Her grandmother, though, was from an older time. When Nadezhda was ten years old, her grandmother had stopped telling stories—but Nadezhda had never forgotten the stories of the ancient woman who lived in the heart of every Russian forest, and how she could be found by those who weren’t afraid to surrender to the darkness. As the sounds of the city and its factories were swallowed behind her in the night, Nadezhda pulled her kerchief out of her pocket, and tied it tightly over her eyes. Groping blindly with her hands in front of her, she continued down the path.

  Nadezhda could hear the wind around her, the trees overhead swaying in the night. She could hear an owl nearby, its call and then the beat of its wings. Then, silence. Nadezhda pulled the kerchief from her eyes, and before her in the forest was the little hut on chicken legs, rocking back and forth, turning round and round, dipping and spinning like like a wobbly gear.

  Nadezhda spoke: “Turn, comrade; spin, comrade; stand, comrade; stand. With your back to the wood and your door to me.”

  The house turned to face Nadezhda, and the chicken legs knelt in the soft earth of the forest floor. The door swung in on its hinges. At first there was nothing inside but moist darkness. Then the darkness thickened and deepened, and a gust of warm wind from inside enveloped Nadezhda. Nadezhda smelled cooked kasha and fresh bread; she smelled sour vodka like Vasily’s breath in early morning; she smelled wet new-turned earth. As the wind swirled around her and the last of the light faded, Nadezhda heard Baba Yaga’s voice.

  “Russian blood and Russian tears, Russian breath and Russian bones, why have you come here?”

  Nadezhda had expected an old woman’s voice, cracked and rough like the voices through the static of the radio. Instead Baba Yaga’s voice was young and clear, honey-sweet and eggshell-smooth, but it echoed as if she spoke from the depths of a cave.

  “I’ve come to ask for your help, Comrade Baba Yaga,” Nadezhda said. “I’ve come to ask you to save Mother Russia.”

  Baba Yaga laughed, and now she sounded old. Two shriveled hands gripped the edges of the doorway for balance, and Baba Yaga stepped down to the ground. She was a stooped, hunched old woman with thin white hair. Her eyes were sunk deep in her wrinkled face, but they were a burning ice blue, and she had all of her teeth. “For everything there is a price, Comrade Daughter,” Baba Yaga said. “For everything there is a cost. We are not socialists here. Have you come to me ready to pay?”

  “I have brought no money,” Nadezhda said.

  “I do not trade in rubles,” Baba Yaga said. “You have come to ask me to destroy the German army, have you not?”

  “Yes,” Nadezhda said.

  “You are prepared to give your life for this, if that is the price?”

  “Yes,” Nadezhda said, though her voice shook.

  “Your life is not the price,” Baba Yaga said. “The price is Vasily’s life.”

  Nadezhda was stunned silent for a moment. Then she pleaded, “Name another price.”

  “That is the price for your salvation,” Baba Yaga said. “If you will not pay, ask me some other favor.”

  Nadezhda closed her eyes. She was too young to remember a time before socialism, and she barely remembered life before Comrade Stalin. But growing up, she’d known that it was fear of Stalin that silenced her grandmother’s stories and her father’s jokes. The first day that Vasily kissed Nadezhda, they found a secluded spot in the woods. Vasily pulled her kerchief loose to touch her hair—then met her eyes with a wicked smile and said, without lowering his voice, “Have you heard the one about Comrade Stalin, Comrade Lenin, and Ivan the pig farmer?” Vasily was only a mediocre kisser, but it didn’t matter. Nadezhda’s heart had been his from that day on.

  Vasily’s life?

  Nadezhda opened her eyes and looked at Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga looked at her with eyes as deep and cold as the sea. Nadezhda looked away from those eyes and said, “If we had more time to prepare, perhaps we could beat them. Turn the Germans away from Moscow.”

  “That’s an easy favor,” Baba Yaga said. “The price for that is your hair.”

  Nadezhda had brought a knife, and now she took it and cut off her hair. She wished that she had thought to bring scissors, because she had to saw through the thick hank of hair, and it pulled. Her eyes were wet when she had finished. Looking at her hair in her hand, she touched it once more, as Vasily had, and then gave it to Baba Yaga.

  “What did you do to your hair?” Anastasya asked the next morning at the steel mill. “You look like a bobbed bourgeoisie.”

  “I had lice,” Nadezhda said. “Picking out nits would use hours that I could be working, so I cut off my hair. It’s a small thing to sacrifice if it helps our army defend Mother Russia.”

  *

  Baba Yaga summoned the Fox, the craftiest of all the animals, who had fooled czars and peasants alike. “Run west to a country called Germany,” she told the Fox. “To a city called Berlin, and find a little German man with a moustache.”

  “Do you want me to eat him?” the Fox asked.

  “His bones are for me,” Baba Yaga said. “I want you to whisper into his ear that there is plenty of time yet this summer to take our Moscow. Tell him that the wise course is to divide the troops headed for Moscow and send some of them north, to Leningrad, and some of them south, to the Ukraine. Do not return until you are certain he believes you.”

  “I will do as you bid, Baba Yaga,” the Fox said. So the Fox ran west and found Berlin, and the man with the moustache, and whispered into his ear. And the man with the moustache called his generals and ordered his troops divided, some sent north and the rest south, to return and finish off Moscow later in the summer. There was plenty of time—weeks and weeks of glorious summer left to take Moscow. All the time in the world.

  *

  Fall came, and the armies returned from Leningrad and the Ukraine and moved towards Moscow again. It was possible to be executed for spreading rumors, but the rumors still spread. Nadezhda heard whispers in the mill of the death and capture of millions of Russian soldiers, and tried not to listen. She heard whispers of siege and starvation in Leningrad, and tried to think of other things. She heard whispers that there were German soldiers in Red Army uniforms, infiltrating their forces and moving towards Moscow, and she snorted in disgust—but the true rumors were bad enough.

  Nadezhda thought of Vasily often as she worked. They had quarreled sometimes, like any lovers, but only once seriously. Vasily had signed up for the militia, and Nadezhda had wanted to, as well. Vasily had first tried to dissuade her with humor, but when that didn’t work, he became angry. “Isn’t it enough that the sons of Mother Russia go to die in this war? Should we send her daughters to die as well?”

  “Are you a German, thinking that a woman is good only for bearing babies?” Nadezhda fired back. “I know as much about fighting as you do.”

  But Vasily refused to give up. The steel mill needed her. (“It needs you just as badly,” Nadezhda said.) The militia would endure terrible hardships. If captured, Nadezhda could be raped, tortured, killed—the Germans had no respect for women soldiers. Finally, Vasily wept in her lap and begged her not to join the militia. Nadezhda had given in, unable to bear his tears.

  As the air turned chill, Nadezhda went again to the forest, to the hut on chicken legs and the old woman who lived inside.

  “The Germans have returned,” Nadezhda said.

  “Yes,” Baba Yaga sai
d. “I did not promise that I would drive them away forever. You know the price for that.”

  “Name any other price,” Nadezhda begged, but Baba Yaga refused. Finally Nadezhda made a different request. “Stop the German advance, at least until spring,” she said.

  “That’s an easy favor,” Baba Yaga said. “The price for that is your youth.”

  “I give that willingly,” Nadezhda said, and felt herself grow more tired, her face grow more creased. She returned to the factory by daybreak.

  “You look old,” Anastasya said to Nadezhda the next morning. “Older than yesterday.”

  “I’m tired,” Nadezhda said. “Sleep uses hours that I can spend working. A little sleep is a small thing to sacrifice if it helps our army defeat the Nazis.”

  *

  Baba Yaga summoned Father Winter. “Go to the roads leading to Moscow,” she said. “Bring rain to turn the roads to mud; then bring snow and ice and freezing winds. There are ill-dressed children on those roads. They do not belong there.”

  Father Winter smiled his cold, fierce smile and bowed slowly to Baba Yaga. “When I am through with them,” he said, “they will curse every inch of Russian soil they must cross to flee my breath.” And Father Winter brought rain so hard the ill-dressed children thought they might drown, first in water and then in mud. Their tanks and their trucks sank deep into the thick black muck, and would not move.

  Then Father Winter blew out his cold breath over all of Russia. The ill-dressed children wore thin uniforms and light coats, without the felt boots and fur hats that the Russians wore. Some of them stumbled back the way they had come, dragging frozen tanks and trucks out of ice and snowdrifts. Their machinery and engines froze into cold, immovable blocks in the frigid breath of Father Winter, and the Russians on horses fell on the children and killed them by the thousands. The ill-dressed children cursed the Russian winter, and the Russian soldiers, and the Russian soil.