We were in a clearing, with trees all around. The trees didn’t look quite right. Was that a mulberry? Except the fruit on it looked like tomatoes; purple and yellow striped tomatoes. And over there; coconut trees? In Toronto? There were bushes growing all around the edge of the clearing, with ivy winding over and around them to make the clearing difficult to get to. If ivy leaves were long, pink tongues, that is.
I clambered over the side of the eggshell. As my feet came down onto the ground, the witch grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. Did I mention that she was strong? “Just to make sure you don’t try to go anywhere,” she said. There was a smile in her voice. I tried not to think about what that might mean. I didn’t succeed.
There was a tramping sound from outside the clearing. Izbouchka came into view, stepping on and crushing bushes that were in her way.
“Hello, darling,” said the old lady. “Rocky keeping the egg warm for you?”
Izbouchka made a soft whistling sound through her chimney. She folded her legs and settled down on top of them, almost exactly like a higgler woman gathering her skirt around her to settle in for a day of selling her wares at the market. As soon as she was still, a pigeon flew in through the soft, sparkling morning sunlight and landed on her porch railing. Then another and another, with sparrows flitting in among them. They all jostled for place on the railing. When there was no more space, the newcomers took up perches along the edge of Izbouchka’s bumpy roof of human skulls. There must have been hundreds of birds. Looked like she was wearing a big ol’ Sunday-go-to-meeting hat trimmed with birds. Except, you know, a hat from hell, because of the skulls. The pigeons cooed, the sparrows chirped, and Izbouchka made this kind of purring noise back at them. For them, she opened her stealth window eyes and batted the lids every so often with a rattling of her shutters that sounded like a light, happy laugh. The kind of laugh of sitting under a spreading tree with your friends on Toronto Island on a bright summer afternoon, and you’ve all just had ice cream and you’re thinking maybe you’ll go ride the swan boats on Centre Island, and you and Glory are teasing Ben about his tight white T-shirt and he’s blushing ’cause he’s not mad, ’cause he understands that it’s your way of telling him he’s looking really cute and buff this summer and he’ll probably have to beat the boys away with a stick, not like last summer, when he was always fretting about his zits and his hair, and he wore thick, baggy sweatshirts all season. And this year he still has zits, but something’s changed about him and the zits just stop mattering so much. Like that, you know? Just a chick and her pals, hanging out and shooting the breeze. The witch sighed. “You wouldn’t think they were so charming if you were the one spending hours sweeping dung off the porch.”
Izbouchka made a sharp noise.
“Oh, you’re right about that,” the witch replied. “The manure is good for the radishes. Just don’t let this lot into the kasha bin, like you did with your other friends.” She turned to me, shaking her head. “That buckwheat was supposed to last us all winter. There was so little, I had to add the ground-up bones of a Vassilisa to the porridge to thicken it.” She made a face. “Chalky. All winter, the porridge was chalky.”
She twirled her pestle, looking thoughtful. She said, “Though, that winter, both the eggs Izbouchka laid had good, thick shells. Neither of them broke.” She nodded slowly to herself. Then she seemed to make up her mind about something. She said, “Well, child; time to go in.”
I tried to pull away, but it was like being moored with heavy chain to a big cement block. So I stayed there beside her while she said something I didn’t understand to her house, and it stood up and gently shook the little birds off. They flew away. “You might have kept one or two,” she scolded Izbouchka. “That fat one with the black wing tips would have been just right with some onion and sage stuffing.”
Izbouchka made a yowly cat noise of protest at that. But she obediently turned all the way around until her other side was facing us. There was the door; at the back of the house, not the front. There was a human-looking skull embedded in the door where a normal door would have a bolt. The witch said something else in her language. The skull’s mouth opened with a metallic thunk, like the sound you hear when a bolt slides open in a big, old lock. The door swung open. It was black inside the house. The witch pushed me on ahead of her toward the door. “Come along,” she said, “good little Vassilisa.”
Oh, crap. I was going to be a Vassilisa after all. I was going to be her black maid who swept up the pigeon shit and cleaned her toilet and dusted. ’Cause who else would want me, anyway? And when she got tired of me, she’d go all Nightmare on Elm Street on me and slice me up into steaks and grind my bones to make her . . . porridge. I thought about all that as she was practically frog-marching me to the doorway. Only I didn’t think it that calmly, or in words, exactly. I was pretty much one big ball of panic with a side of panic sauce, going OMG OMG OMG.
The skull in the door gaped, open-jawed, at me, as though it were surprised to see me going into the witch’s house more or less of my own free will. Frankly, I was pretty astonished at that, too.
The teeth of the skull had been sharpened to points. When I saw that, my fear turned into one solid ball of sick in my stomach, but the kind that wouldn’t even do me the favor of upchucking itself, that would just sit where it was, a lump of scary bad unhappy in my gut.
We stepped in through the door. It slammed shut behind us, and I heard the bolt in the skull lock slam home. We were locked in. At least, I was. And I wasn’t going anywhere if the witch didn’t want me to.
“Overstuffed” is the word I’d use to describe the decor inside Izbouchka. A plump love seat covered in intricate red and yellow embroidery, with fat matching cushions. Tiny shepherdess figurines on every surface. Punum would have a heart attack if she ever saw this place. Red and yellow rug. Red and yellow quilt on the bed. And I’d swear Izbouchka was bigger on the inside than on the outside.
The old lady let go of the back of my blouse. “Have a seat,” she said. “Take the armchair. It’s so comfortable you could fall asleep in it.”
I boggled at her. She gave me a gentle push in the direction of the armchair. “Nu, go, sit. Don’t worry. I’m not going to eat you this time.”
Her smile was too menacing to be reassuring. But I stumbled over to the armchair. I couldn’t sit down, though. “I’m all dirty,” I said. “Plus I kinda drip.”
She waved my objections away. “Oh, don’t worry about that. When I tell the cushions to get clean, they get clean. If they know what’s good for them.”
“Then why do you need a maid?”
She frowned at me. “Because magic is hard work. It’s just as exhausting as doing the labor with your own two hands. Why would I waste all that energy on cleaning a house? Begging your pardon, Izbouchka.”
I didn’t get her at all. But I sat down. It was comfortable.
“Now,” she said. “What about a nice cup of tea?”
“Uh, okay.”
She went over to the big cast-iron stove thing. It had no door, and there was a fire roaring inside it. I guess that was where Izbouchka had gotten the fire to burn the giant bird with. If I sat close enough, would some of this stuff melt off me? I went and stood near it, held my hands out to the warmth.
The old lady took a kettle out of a cupboard. “Vada,” she said to it.
“Hey, what does ‘Oo blue duck’ mean?”
She chuckled. She put the kettle onto the iron stovetop to boil. “” she said. “It means ‘bastard.’”
“Yeah, that’s what Spot is, all right,” I replied, looking at my destroyed hands. I really wanted to touch my face. It was as though I couldn’t believe what had happened so I kept needing to check. But I could feel my Koosh ball hair bouncing whenever I moved my head, and I could feel the weight of the false skin on me, like a rind covering the pretty fruit inside. I knew that my mouth was still a slit, my face a big ball of sticky. My feet were screaming from being jammed into my boots. I pu
t my hands closer to the fire, to where the heat began to be uncomfortable.
“It won’t help,” said the witch. Her back was still turned to me, but she somehow knew what I was doing. “You would have to stand in the center of the flames. And then once the crust had burned away, well . . .” She shrugged.
Once the crust had burned away, the flames would burn my real body to ashes. I pulled my hands away from the stove.
The witch brought a tray with a funny-looking teapot on it, and two delicate china cups, decorated with a zigzag design in red and black. “Sit, sit,” she said. I went back to the armchair. She put the tray down on a coffee table in front of me, and sat on the couch on the other side. The cups sat in matching saucers. Each saucer held two sugar cubes and a tiny silver teaspoon. She poured tea for both of us. The steam curled upward from the cups. It was the most normal thing in the world.
“Thanks.” I picked up a sugar cube and dropped it into my tea.
“No, no, no. This is how you do it. Look.” She put one of her sugar cubes onto her tongue. Then she picked her cup up and sipped from it. “You see? You drink the tea through the sugar cube until it dissolves. Or you can sweeten the tea with jam.”
“Jam? Euw.” I stared into my cup of tea. My tummy growled. I was starving. “You don’t happen to have any cling wrap, do you?”
“No, dear. This is a green household.”
“Say what now?”
She cackled. “You think I was always like this? I used to be one of those old women you see in the shops trying to buy a week’s worth of food with barely enough money to buy an egg to boil for dinner. Wearing those shapeless black skirts summer or winter and counting out her pennies, looking at the ground in shame.” She sat back with a happy sigh. “But then I found Izbouchka wandering lost without her Baba. And now I have as much egg as I want, year round! And I don’t look down at the ground anymore. I sail through the skies. These past years have been good ones.”
“Wait a minute. The Chaos is only one day old. So how could you have had years of being who you are now?”
She shoved her face into mine. Startled, I jumped back. “BECAUSE, YOU FOOL, THIS HAPPENED TO ME YEARS AND YEARS AGO!”
She was sitting too far away from me to have gotten up in my face like that. Near as I could tell, she hadn’t moved. I couldn’t let myself forget that she was dangerous. But my curiosity was stronger than I was. “Not this weekend?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Long before that.”
“So how come other people can see you now?”
“Perhaps I became real this weekend. Or they did. Either way, now everyone can see the madnesses we all carry around with us and try to hide from the rest of the world.”
“And why are you being nice to me all of a sudden?” I whispered. “Is it because I’m ugly now?”
“You mean why am I not enslaving you?”
I nodded and sobbed. It didn’t make any sense to be sad because some horrid witch didn’t want me to fetch and carry for her, but I still blubbered like a baby.
She slapped her knee and laughed. “Why, what a very odd question to ask, dyevuchka! You are a very entertaining young lady. And no, that’s not why.”
“Why, then?”
“It’s because Izbouchka is broody.”
“You don’t want to make me work for you and then turn me into pot roast because your house is depressed?”
“Boje moi. I should do all that to you, just because it would be so much fun. But ‘broody’ doesn’t mean that Izbouchka’s depressed. It means she’s sitting on her eggs to keep them warm. Thanks to you, Izbouchka has a mate!” The way her face lit up made her not look scary at all.
“How— Hang on. You mean that she and that giant bird—”
She nodded. “Yes! Isn’t it wonderful? Two eggs she’s laid over on side of the volcano there. And they are fertilized; I can see the shadows of the young ones inside them.” She sighed happily. “I’m going to be a grandmother!”
“Yay. Listen; you’re a witch, right?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me how to get rid of a rolling calf? How to get back to my normal self?”
She looked confused. “But you are your normal self.”
I felt Izbouchka stand. Then everything in the house lurched sideways. The old lady grabbed for the arm of the couch. Her legs flew up with the jolt, exposing about a mile of frilly white petticoat underneath her dowdy black skirt. My teacup landed in my lap and overturned. Hot tea soaked through my jeans, but with the false skin covering me, it barely felt warm.
“’Bouchka!” shouted the witch. “Dacha maya, kak dyela?”
Izbouchka gave an awful squawk. She jerked sideways again, in the opposite direction. Her feet started pounding the ground. Izbouchka was on the run. It was like sitting on top of an earthquake.
“What’s going on?” I asked the old lady.
“I don’t know.” She called out something in her language. She had to do it twice. A window appeared in a wall of the hut. She tottered over to it and looked out. “Oh, now, there’s a fine pickle. You’re in deep trouble, my girl, and you’ve dragged me and ’Bouchka into it with you.”
I didn’t point out that she was the one who’d dragged me into her egg ship. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
She turned back to me. “It’s catching up. You have to go, quickly!” She pointed to the stove. “In there, now!”
I stood up and backed away from her, dodging a plate that had gone airborne. “What are you, nuts? I’ll burn up in there!”
She smiled that terrifying smile. “And wouldn’t you make a fine dinner then? But it doesn’t work like that.”
With a crash of breaking glass and a rattling of chains, Spot leapt through the window, throwing the old lady onto the floor. And still, Izbouchka kept running.
Spot came for me. I fell more than dodged out of her way. The old lady lifted her head. The side of her face was bruised. “You have to trust me! Into the stove, or die!”
Spot snapped at me, got only the hem of my blouse. I pulled away, did a running crawl over to the stove. It was roaring full on. Either way, I was going to die.
I leapt in.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“So after that, Brer Fox was fed up with Brer Rabbit’s prancing and capering, and he figured he’d get him some revenge.”
“After what?” I asked Mom. I was in the bed I’d had as a little girl, with the covers pulled up to my chin, only I wasn’t little. I was my sixteen-year-old self.
“Tell the thing the right way,” muttered Dad. “Where I come from, is Brer Tiger and Brer ’Nansi, not Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit.”
“I’m not from where you’re from,” Mom pointed out. It was true, too. She came from Chicago, from what she jokingly called “Up South” because of all the black people from the American South that had migrated there, looking for work. That’s where her folks had come from.
Dad and Mom were sitting on the bed beside me. They didn’t seem to notice that I was grown and my feet were hanging over the edge of the bed. My feet hurt, and for some reason I didn’t want to know what was hiding behind me, shielded by the pink composition board headboard.
Dad scowled and massaged his knee.
“Does it hurt, Daddy?”
He looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was there. He smiled. “Little bit. The doctors say they will fix me up good as new.” He’d balanced his cane on the wall where the head of my bed was. It had a black rubber tip, and a set of metal things like teeth you could clamp onto the tip, so the cane wouldn’t slip when it was icy. I avoided looking at the toothy black rubber.
Mom brushed some hair back from my forehead. She’d braided my hair into two big plaits to keep it from getting tangled during the night. “Am I telling her this bedtime story or not?” she asked Dad.
“You don’t hear the child asking you how the story begin?” he said irritably.
Mom was watching Dad’s
hand rubbing his knee. She took a breath and calmly replied, “I don’t know that part. Did you take your painkiller?”
Dad pressed his lips together and stared at the ground. I actually did want to know what was behind me. I could sense it looming, getting closer. I needed to turn and look at it. But looking at it would make it real, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
Dad said, “Brer Tiger had a patch where he plant some peas. He tell Anansi to watch over them for him. But all the while Anansi was the watchman, it was him-one stealing the peas and eating them. Fulling up his belly with Brer Tiger’s peas.”
Mom smiled. “Every morning when Brer Fox—”
“Brer Tiger,” said Dad.
“. . . when Brer Fox came to the”—she gave Dad a questioning look—“peas patch?”
Dad nodded.
Mom continued, “Every morning, there were more peas missing. And that wicked old Brer Rabbit, he swore up and down that he’d watched over the peas all night but he hadn’t seen a thing.”
Dad said, “Brer Tiger—that is to say, Brer Fox—make up him mind him was going to catch that peas thief if is the last thing him do ’pon this earth.”
Mom said, “Brer Fox, he sat himself down under a big old sycamore tree, and he thought and he thought. He thought till the sweat ran down his brow. And finally he came up with a plan. He got himself some tar—”
“And a stump.”
Mom looked confused. Dad said, “A stump was sticking up out of the ground in him peas patch.”
Mom nodded. “All right, then. A stump. Brer Fox smeared that tar all over that stump, and he carved it into—”
Together, Mom and Dad said, “. . . a tar baby!” They looked at each other and laughed. Ignoring the thing looming behind me, I snuggled uneasily down beneath the blankets. Looked like it was going to be a story after all, even if a mixed-up kind of story.
Dad took a turn. “So next morning, now—”
“Don’t forget the hat,” Mom told him.
“Hat?”
“Brer Fox put a big straw hat on that tar baby’s head, so it wouldn’t melt away in the sun.”
The Chaos Page 20