The Three Foraging Sisters
The little girl sighed and drummed her wooden spoon in the empty bowl.
“Babushka, we are so hungry.”
The other two sisters nodded.
The old woman hung her head in shame. Her rheumy eyes were pink-edged and moist.
“Please, let us go outside,” one of the three said. “So we can find mushrooms or frogs to eat.”
The old woman pushed her stool from the splintered table that dominated the center of the hut. She rose with difficulty, then shuffled in her bast slippers to the stove in order to light the punched-tin lantern on the cutting board. When she had lit it, she gave it to one of the girls. With her glaucous eyes, she could no longer tell them apart.
The hut stood in the taiga, hundreds of versts from Novgorod. A gibbous moon shone in the sky. The wind skirled through the branches, causing trunks of the trees to groan and crack in the cool night.
The three sister stepped outside the hut and found the path that led into to the woods. The soot and staleness of the hut’s interior had seeped into their clothes and chestnut hair.
The old woman peered from the window cut into the door. She watched the girls clamber over the mossy log that lay aslant the path. Then she could see them no more. In the gathering fog, the light of the lantern dimmed until it vanished from her view altogether.
In another part of the woods, three famished peddlers sat in a circle. When they weren’t chewing on bark, sticks, leaves or the needles of larches, they wept and tore their hair.
The cheeks of one of the men (the middle-aged man who had once been fat) hung slack on either side of his bearded mouth. He knew that he would be eaten next, just as they had eaten their fourth companion two weeks prior. But he was ready to be done with it all.
He knew exactly how it would happen. He would open his collar, fall to his knees, incline his neck and beg his younger colleague, the strongest of the three, to slit his throat.
“If we only had food,” he moaned, repeating a lament he had voiced a hundred times before. “If we had food, we could make it to Novgorod within two weeks.”
“I’m not even certain we’re going the right way at this point,” the eldest observed.
But no sooner had he said this, than all three became alert. They crept behind a bush, because they heard the sound of snapping twigs. Then they saw the three little girls foraging near the edge of the marsh.
The men’s Adam’s apples rose and fell.
“We can’t,” said the man who had once been fat. “It would be murder. It would be a sin.”
But the youngest spoke in an urgent whisper: “What about my children? I have three girls just as innocent as these. They will die without their papa. Maybe God has sent these lambs to succour us. Perhaps they are angels. If we ration their meat, it will sustain us long enough to return to our homes. And if what I am proposing is truly a sin, then we shall devote the remainder of our days to penance and prayer for the evil we do now.”
The eldest of the companions touched the young man’s shoulder, because the ravages of hunger had made this justification seem reasonable and sound to him.
The man who had once been fat nodded his head in mute accord.
The three rose from their hiding place, refusing to look at one another or at their prey.
When the sisters saw the men, they drew close together and stared at the cloaked figures approaching. Then the girl who held the lantern dropped it, as a murder of crows took flight.
The old woman could not see what was happening but knew something was amiss from the croaking of the birds.
She shuffled as quickly as she could to the south wall of the hut and braced her foot. Then she began to expand and grow, chanting and growling like a jackal as she did this. Her brown spotty feet burst from the bast slippers as she extended her other leg and arm to the hut’s north wall.
The hut rose up on two slender scabby columns of brown-white scaly flesh; and the columns were feathered at the point where they touched the bottom of the dwelling.
Baba Yaga’s hut shook off the black mud caked on its taloned toes before dashing into the forest. With its flapping wooden wings, the hut flung the larches of the taiga to the left and the right.
The hoarse laughter of the hag inside the hut attracted the crows, who flew in a circle over its gabled roof. When it reached the marsh, the talons on each leg scratched the ground and the hut wriggled its hind parts, like a hen about to roost, as it settled itself onto the spongy ground.
The three men were dead. One sister sat on the chest of the youngest, chewing his entrails as if she were biting into a string of sausages. The second gnawed the bleeding forearm of the eldest, as the third ripped out the plump juicy heart of the man who had once been fat.
The door of the hut flew open and Baba Yaga emerged, resuming the diminutive form of a frail old woman.
“This, indeed, is the most nourishing meat for growing Yagas: The blood and flesh of righteous men brought to the brink of sin.”
Later that night the three sisters sat side by side at the table. In front of each was the upside-down head of one of the dead men. The lower jaws of each had been hacked off. Three spoons stuck out of the porridge that had been the slain men’s brains. The up-rolled eyes of the peddlers faced Baba Yaga and their souls were still trapped in the eyes’ roving pupils.
When the three sisters had finished their meal, the old lady opened the door and threw the mutilated skulls outside, so that the crows could feast on the uneaten flaps of flesh.
The girls were now as tall as their wicked grandmother. And their faces had grown pale, pinched, waxy, and grotesque. Today was their birthday; and each had received as a gift the burial shroud of a murdered virgin.
“Soon, one of you will grow big-bellied and devour her two siblings, so that she can be made strong enough to litter and bring forth three more lovely Yagas. You will miss me when I am gone.”
Then Baba Yaga pointed to the rafters, where the shriveled heads of twelve former hags swung between the hanging crockery. Then she cackled so hard that blood spurted out of the corners of her pink-edged rheumy eyes.
Wow, those illustrations really make the story pop. Love what you did with the updates. Great work, Daniel!
Oh, that is so dark. I loved it. So good.