Babayaga

corpse for the crows.
    She was not sure if he’d been babbling fable or fact, but curiosity was enough to pull her out of her woods. Wrapped in the hunter’s old coat, she journeyed alone across the countryside, catching rides on serfs’ barrel carts and bartering mules until she finally reached the booming port city. As she arrived and her nose sniffed excitedly at the heavily scented harbor air, her heart beat hard, it was nothing like she had ever experienced. Amid the brine, fish, and sewage stench, fresh new fragrances filled her nose, raw and potent aromas she had never encountered before, pungent with possibility. Eyeing the tall-masted carracks parked between their herring buss and dogger sisters—all laden low against the waterline—Elga nodded to herself and set to her business.
    Stevedores, merchant runners, shipping clerks, and wharf rats swarmed about the busy docks as the ships’ heavy cargoes were unloaded. Shaded in the darkness of their barnacled bows, Elga went to work, bargaining charms to the superstitious in exchange for samples of untested seedpods, wild grains, and dried root, whatever the sailors could bring her, all the while noting other sharp-eyed harridans working their own trades at the edges of the market. She sensed these ladies weren’t whoring, peddling, or working the scrimshander trade, these were her own sisters, all answering the same call, sniffing the curious wind back to the source, and it was not long before she fell in with their lot. They each earned their keep by hustling in the taverns, pickpocketing crew, and tricking coins from mates first and second with their lush harlot lures, then regrouping later down the dark dead ends of broken oyster-paved lanes to swap their cribbed kitchen notes and pool their collected bundles of new mystery. Bunches of weeds and clumps of chopped stalks went into their dark variations of stewing slumgullion and red goulash as they rubbed their hands bug-eyed and busy with a simmering excitement. Buckbean, swallowwort, thimbleweed, and sweet gum proved powerful, while hobblebush, coolwort, and black tupelo offered more subtle possibilities. Elga remembered being especially proud of the secrets she coaxed and pried, over weeks, from the sly black persimmon. She stayed there by the sea for more than threescore years, working with her hoyden sisters as they labored over their exotic cargoes like bees in a honey hive: moving from candlelit garret rooms to low-ceilinged brick cellars, slaving over clay ovens, mixing, sizzling, blanching, stirring, reducing, then boiling and basting some more, all the while shouting, whispering, coaxing, chanting, and hissing out roughly hewn phrases and untried incantations, marrying the brews to their tongues, finding the consonants that harmonized and the vowels that stuck wet to the tumescent seeds, stalks, and spoils from the new land.
    Finally, Elga left the others and returned to her forest, loading three fresh and healthy mules with the bundles of her hard-wrought bounty. Now that she was done, she gave little more thought to the New World, she had what she needed. Over the years she would hear tales of European exiles fleeing persecution, vanishing beyond the sea’s horizon to build their newborn cities of God. Eventually, some returned to the Old World brandishing wordy manifestos proclaiming their right to liberty, along with the finespun white cotton and cane sugar to trade, all handpicked by their land’s ebony slaves. To her, this New World seemed like a rough stew of notions that even now, centuries later, seemed unmixed and unblended, too many of the ingredients far too strong in their righteousness and certainty while also much too bitter with contradiction. Elga doubted if she would ever like the taste.
    Sitting in the car with the American, she felt it was maybe time for someone to go find another New World, for having built their great cities all the way out to the Pacific, these Americans now seemed to stay busy by constantly running about, bumping into one another like a passel of fattened hogs who had long outgrown their shit-laden sty.
    The car pulled up in front of a building that had two men standing out in front. As the car stopped, one of the men knocked on the building’s front door and a little bald man with round glasses came out. To Elga, the bald man did not look quite human, he looked more like a white shrewmouse.
    As the little man came over to the car, Brandon rolled