You should watch her. You are sisters, you and she. Even if she can never know.
More and more, Baba Yaga is coming to him in his waking hours.
This should perhaps frighten him more than it does.
* * *
Every night, now, the seam burns. The whole mountain runs with flame like a river. He watches it, and it seems to him that there are figures in the flames, bright and beautiful. They are not in pain. They are dancing, and they are holding out arms of cinder and glowing coal and beckoning to him to dance with them.
His mother is there. His father. Their faces are alight with pride as they behold their only son. Only now they see him for what he truly is, and there is no blame and no shame and not a hint of rejection. They love him as he is. Iwanka, his mother sings, her fingers like sparks as she whirls through the dying trees. I have a lovely little dress for you, and look, I made for you this scarf. Look how bright it is.
If anyone touches you after this, to harm you, they will burn, and not with us.
He wakes up with tears scalding his cheeks. They smoke and steam.
* * *
Goddamn hunkies.
When at last he has enough scrip saved to buy a razor, the man in the company store overcharges him. He expects it, would have even borne it as yet another in a long line of harsh treatments, except that the amount the man is demanding is more than he has. He’s been borrowing a razor from one of the other men in the boarding house, but it’s too blunt and it hurts him, and the shave it gives is nowhere clean enough. It’s a small thing, and he doesn’t even know why it should be so important to him, except that he does.
Baba Yaga is teaching him to face hard truths. He’s not the quickest of learners when it comes to things like that but he does learn.
Goddamn hunkies, the man growls when Iwan tries, stuttering through the words, to explain, to try to convince the man to take what he has as sufficient for the blade. You come here, think you don’t have to speak the language, think you’re special. Owed special treatment. You won’t get it from me, you little rat. Give me the price of it or get the hell out of the store.
But it is special treatment. It always has been. Hunky. Polack. Little rat. For a long time now he’s been used to it, but Big Mary is suggesting that he shouldn’t be, that he’s more than just some hunky rat crawling on his belly through the shafts. And there’s Baba Yaga, folding all the hunky rats into her arms, her hands black with the coal, giving them firesides and warm porridge with milk, chalky with powdered bones.
There is something else that his saved scrip will buy. He stares at it for some long minutes the next time he goes to the company store to buy what little food he can. He stares at it for as long as he can, for as long as he thinks is safe, before he’s noticed. A pair of lady’s gloves, white and soft, very plain and, he knows, not fine. It seems strange to find them in a store that only stocks the necessities of the working people of Lattimer, but there they are, and to his weary eyes they seem to shine as if they were made of ivory. They are free of coal dust, pure, like the polished bones of someone long-dead. Of the stuff that Baba Yaga grinds for her porridge.
Strange things are beautiful to him now.
He wants to buy them. He wants them more than the razor. He imagines sliding his hands into them, the hair on his knuckles and the callouses on his palms and the black dust packed under his fingernails hidden by that elegant white. They would make his fingers look slender, he knows. Delicate. Before he turns away he reaches out and runs a fingertip along their backs.
Hey, hunky. He pulls his hand back as if he’s been burned; his face is burning, his neck and ears, and he’s praying that the big man behind the counter won’t see. Buy something or get out. You here to browse like a fucking woman?
Take me home, he whispers to Baba Yaga as he slinks out of the place, feeling her heat and her glee at his side. In the shadows of the town he could swear he sees a dacha shuffling, out of the way like any other house but for its legs. Take me back and bury me in the ground with the ashes of my family.
No, dochka, she laughs. Better for you, given that you’re mine. The things you want will be yours. They will have to be.
* * *
She tells him stories about ordeals, in the shafts, in the lukewarm water he uses for his quick baths, in the doorway of the boarding house kitchen. She tells him stories of walking on hot coals to prove one’s innocence, of burning women as witches and trusting to God to care for their souls if they proved free of the influence of the devil. They were all my daughters, Iwanka. They danced with me in the moonlight and the fire, as you do.
I’m not a witch, he insists. But he lifts his blackened hands and, as if they are someone else’s, his own fingers trace ancient symbols across his arms, his face. He smears coal over his lips, turning them dark and full. Baba Yaga nods in approval.
Not a witch, no, maybe. But were they witches? I tell you truly, dochka, there have always been those of us who simply didn’t fit, and those ones tend to be of a kind. And you are my sweet little daughter, and you will never be one of them. The others.
Why would you want to be?
She places his burning hands against the seam and Lattimer fails its test in an orgy of flame.
* * *
It comes in the fall, with the rain and the cold wind. The trees are aflame, red and gold, and as the strike is called, as the marches begin, he marches with them but his gaze is locked on those burning branches, each one like the embodiment of God sent to give him a message. Big Mary cries out to them, her arms lifted, praising them as if they are her children and newly learned to stand on their own. There is word that the company will shortly send in the strike-breakers, but there is fearlessness on the sharp wind, at least for the moment, and they tell each other to be strong. Even him, no longer just a hunky rat but, for a short and precious time, a brother among brothers.
He accepts this with certain reservations. Baba Yaga leads the march in her chicken-legged dacha, standing on the porch and waving her spoon like a general.
What would his mother think of this? His father? If their spirits could travel from dust to dust, emerge from the mountain and see him now? Would they be proud? Would any of this surprise them? Their lost son, marching with the lost and demanding to be found again?
Still more lost than any of them, though they can’t see it now?
Does he still care?
* * *
Yet the actual moment, when it comes, isn’t in the rain or the cold wind but on a warm, sunny day in early September that still contains hints of dying summer, the last of the green before the fire begins to turn it to gray ash. It’s a big march – nearly three hundred of them, or so the rumor goes – and there is such a sense of quiet strength among them all that even Baba Yaga ceases her cackling, though he senses that this is not out of any particular respect so much as it is that she is waiting. That the world around them is holding its breath.
That the ground is heating under their feet.
There are fires far below, Baba Yaga whispered once, that have burned for hundreds of years. Longer. There is a single great fire beneath it all that has been burning since the birth of the world.
When the sheriff issues the call to disperse, Iwan barely hears it. It’s a voice far removed, present but ultimately not very important, and at any rate no one is dispersing. From somewhere far away there’s a scuffle, the sound of feet scrabbling and the grunt of bodies hitting bodies, but this, too, seems unimportant. Everyone around him is standing, standing like stones.
Then. “Give two or three shots!”
Now a murmur. Now people turning to each other, alarmed, the quiet strength drifting away like ash. And as the shots ring out, he looks to Baba Yaga and sees her grin eating up her face. Grandmother Chaos, he thinks. Grandmother Fire. And the people scatter into madness.
It’s the spark. He can feel it. It warms him as he runs with the crowd down the muddy streets, as more shots and screams ring ou
t, pain and anger, the sound of fighting. He looks behind and sees fallen bodies, clothes streaked with blood; he turns away again and keeps running.
He has always been running, since he was set into motion. Now it ends.
It comes to him that Baba Yaga has left the porch of her dacha and is on his back, riding him, beating him with her spoon like a horse. He goes where she points him, breaking away from the fleeing crowd, and isn’t surprised to find himself standing in front of the shop. Baba Yaga leaps up on his shoulders and shatters the glass of the front window with her spoon.
The razor. The gloves. In a few seconds he has them, though now his arms are bleeding from stray shards. It feels like fair trade. If trade was even necessary; perhaps these things are his, his from the very birth of the world, like magical things waiting for him in a dragon’s cave.
And to the dragon’s cave she is now driving him.
He runs past the fleeing bodies in the streets, running against the flow. No one notices him or the things in his hands. Once he thinks he hears the cry of Big Mary rising over the shots and screams, and when he turns at the bottom of a little hill he sees her standing there above him, her arms raised and tears streaming down her face. She’s muddy, dirty, but somehow she is shining in the sun like a piece of cut anthracite. Their gazes meet and he knows that she sees him, and that she sees him for what he is. Their fundamental kinship.
In this moment he has her blessing.
Give it to the seam.
He turns and runs again, and the shaft opens up like a mouth and swallows him.
* * *
It is so very much like a story. Baba Yaga has drawn him into it, him and his true self that waits for him in the shadows. She has spun it around herself like a cloak, from coal seams and fairy gold. This is his journey, from the green hills and forested mountains of his homeland to the coal and the black and the fire, and for once he feels that it is exactly as it should be.
And here in the glittering dark anything might be possible.
The line between truth and story is so thin, Baba Yaga whispers. Here, thinner still. You are a child of the story, dochka, half in and half out of the world. No one will tell your tale, but I will keep you safe and tell it to myself within the walls of my house; I will feed it to my oven and bake it in my black bread.
Now give the fire to the seam and dance with me in the ashes.
Iwan, Iwanka, Janus-faced and true to herself at last, presses her hands against the coal and finds a hard stone that holds a spark within its cold heart. She lifts the razor and strikes, and gives what lies inside to the seam that has run through her life and her world. She turns them both to ash and dust.
* * *
Wagons carry the dead into the lands beyond like fallen heroes. There are cries for vengeance. There are ordeals that are failed and others that are passed, there is condemnation and a trial, and in the end there is memory of a kind, though no one tells the story of Iwan-who-was-not-Iwan and who was no fool, and how he vanished into the dark after death came to Lattimer.
But there is fire. There is fire that burns forever in that dark, and in the flames Iwanka dances with Baba Yaga and eats her black bread and her porridge of powdered bone and sweet milk. She dances in the arms of her parents and the other dead, and she dances all the way back to the mountains, to the green and the trees, to the older fires and the memory that sits in the stones like glowing coals. She is with the scattered ones, even the ones who have been forgotten, and the great secret that Baba Yaga sings to those who can hear is that even they have a way of living forever, until, like wheat, they emerge from rich earth, green and new and reaching their arms toward a clear sky.
Art by Alice Meichi Li
Numbers
by Rion Amilcar Scott
* * *
1919
Maryland
1.
Out in the middle of the Cross River there is an island. It appears during storms or when the river’s flooding or sometimes even on clear summer days. And sometimes it rises out the water and floats in the air. The ground turns to diamond and you can hear the women playing with the sparkling rocks. The skittery clatter of diamond on diamond and the high laughter of the women – I call them women, but they are not women. So many names for them: Kazzies. Shuantices. Water-Women. The Woes. I like that last name myself. The poet Roland Hudson came up with that one in the throes of madness. Dedicated his final volume, The Firewater of Love, to
Gertrude, Water-Woman, my Woe who caused all the woe… even though, my dear, you are not real, I cannot accept that and will never stop believing in your existence and beautiful rise from the river into my arms.
Drowned himself in the Cross River swimming after Gertrude and there’s something beautiful in that. Dredge the depths of the Cross River and how many bones of the heartsick will you find along the riverbed? So many poisoned by illusion. Don’t tell me there’s no island and no women rising naked from the depths, shifting forms to tantalize and then to crush. I’ve seen their island and I’ve seen them and gangsters love too; gangsters are allowed love, aren’t we? Sometimes there’s a fog and I know the island’s coming and I snap out of sleep all slicked with sweat and filled with the urge to swim out there to catch a water-woman and bring her back to my bed. If you pour sugar on their tails they can’t shift shapes on you and they have to show their true selves and obey you completely. If I had to do it all over again I’d dust her in a whole 5-pound bag and spend eternity licking the crystals from her nipples. And Amber, a man lost in delirium. Poor, poor Amber.
2.
Last year, 1918, ended bad for me and for Amber, and to think, it began with so much promise. My mother got me a job driving Amber around town in February and by summer I expected to be collecting numbers slips for him, and then Amber Hawkins fell in love with Joyce Little and became something like a lovesick pit bull puppy. Joyce’s brother Josephus got the money-making position I had my eye on and I was stuck being yelled at from the backseat as I swerved about the road. Amber was a killer, as was everybody I worked with. I tried to forget that, but sometimes it made me nervous, especially when I drove.
I figured Joyce would turn Amber into something akin to a decent human being once they were married. Most married people I knew became boring soon as they put on the ring; they lost some of their humor and spontaneity, but I had to admit they grew a little more humanity.
September 15, 1918: that was supposed to be the day. He booked the Civic Center for the wedding – displacing a couple that had reserved the place months before, but it was Amber Hawkins, nothing anyone could do. He ordered up nearly a hundred pastries. So many tulips arrived on the eve of the wedding that I joked a hillside in Holland suffered a sudden baldness. Hundreds of people swarmed the Civic Center that Sunday. Everything was to begin at noon. Those of us who worked for Mr. Washington, and even people who worked for Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jackson, put aside our differences to show up for Amber. Joyce’s family sat in the front. Mostly, I remember her cute little sister and the short socks resting against her tan skin. Her tall skinny father sat stoically holding the little girl’s hand. Joyce’s jellyrolled mother wiped at her wet eyes every few minutes.
And then nothing.
No word from Joyce up on through the wedding day. Amber made us get all dolled up and festive-like for his big humiliation.
Josephus was the best man. He stood near the altar wearing a twisted guilty smile as he swayed back and forth fingering a big, ugly purple flower pinned to his lapel. He was an arrogant fucking shitstain, but I hated seeing him squirm.
At about five in the evening it was clear all was lost, Amber’s father ambled to the front where Amber and Joyce should have been standing. His movements were sheepish and slow. For the first time, the ruthless killer looked as frail and as wispy as the old man he was. There were rumors that his lifestyle – the women and the whores he kept around town – had left him so syphilitic that his once sharp mind had rotted and his body was begi
nning to twist and fail too. I didn’t believe or engage in the talk. He’d been nothing but good to me.
Thank you for coming, people of Cross River, Elder Mr. Hawkins said to the wedding crowd. You have been more than generous to my family and all connected with us. I’m sorry, but there will be no celebration today. Again, I thank you for spending your time with us. We all slowly dispersed that night and the next day Amber was back to work, mumbling the day’s numbers from the backseat. Never mentioned Joyce or showed any signs of sorrow or pain. I knew the sadness was there though. Had to be.
Amber waited a month. He waited three. Then he had Joyce’s whole family killed.
A single bullet to each of their foreheads and their bodies dumped in the Cross River. It was deep in December, near Christmas, and thin white sheets of ice skimmed along the river’s face.
Three days after their disappearance, the family came bubbling to the surface, just as Amber wanted. The cold-hearted bastard didn’t spare even the 10-year-old girl. Amber’s own best man paid the ultimate price for his sister’s desertion.
With Josephus dead, I expected a promotion, but he gave that to Doc Travis Griffin’s son. I let it pass without complaint; at least Amber hadn’t tasked me with taking the lives of four innocent people. Frank and Tommy did the hit, I heard, and when I saw them I watched their muddy boots and thanked the Lord I didn’t have to walk in them. But who am I kidding, though? I stood amongst the killers and the dirt was all over me just as it was all over them. I would have done the job with sadness and emptiness; with revulsion and cold rage toward Amber, but still I’d have done it.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 7