Babayaga

stored in the priest’s barn. It will help us find her,” Elga said. “His place is not far out of town. I will show you the way.”
    XIV

    Witches’ Song Eleven

    Oh, right now we’re far away from Elga on another ride,
    the big engine hums like my busy cyclone mind.
    Lyda’s growing weary of our ramble,
    hoping to remain behind at the farm,
    she always had a soft spot
    for that dead rat’s solemn brother.
    But Basha insisted we all stick with this reedy fellow,
    pushing us into his cage of a car just as he was pulling out,
    leaving his friends behind to their fate, and now
    here we go, my one keen eye watching.
    The great city’s body grows,
    we trace its arteries in, watching the beast swell,
    its avenued claws grasping the peripheral villages
    in a tightening grip,
    slowly crushing their hearts dead, feeding its centuries’ hunger.
    Then its tentacle legs and arms thicken with the long lines
    of low stores spanning and radiating out,
    busy with entrepreneurial ambition,
    followed finally by the porcine, urban bloat,
    stuck with spires and antennae;
    these guts of the metropolis, ever tumescent,
    they glow phosphorescent,
    bursting at its buttoned seams as the beast stuffs itself thick daily
    with the farmer’s fats and grains, and the fishmonger gains
    all taken by claw from land and sea,
    the iron and stone raped and ripped from distant horizons.
    Every day, Paris eats its own nation
    as every capital and crown is wont to do.
    Every day we call it civilization,
    Doll it up it with art and pomp, a trumpet’s ta-da.
    So this one driving, Oliver,
    he’s not much of a riddle, is he?
    Dancing with shallow musical steps
    from one iced oyster tray to the next,
    only as constant as a crooning radio signal.
    But he makes for a good, soft bullet
    as we now aim him true, picking up velocity
    as he’s shot toward Basha’s plotted point.
    She is in the front seat and
    she thinks I can’t see her, but I can,
    she is not as invisible as she would like to be.
    Her pale silhouette leans over,
    whispering what into the driver’s ear.
    What? I cannot hear her
    but he does, doesn’t he.
    She will keep wrapping him up,
    enshrouding him in her ghostly whispers,
    until her bidding is done.
    XV

    High in the barn loft, the afternoon light came through siding cracks in long, diagonal shafts that Zoya thought looked like golden swords leaning at rest. She was curled up naked, her arms wrapped around Will, as they both lay beneath the thick red wool blanket, protected from the autumn chill. She liked the way her naked breasts pressed against his chest, she liked the way her bare hip wrapped around his warm thigh, she liked stroking his leg and feeling its strength. She sniffed at his armpit, he had not bathed for two days and now the rank toxins from all his various adventures filled her nostrils and made her smile. This was literally a part of him, these tiny, stinky tumescent atoms that emanated from his pores and, inhaled and ingested through her sinuses, became a part of her. There was magic in that, a slight and playful communion bonding them together; she sniffed again, deeply this time. She loved how rotten he smelled. Then she fell asleep again.
    She awoke to the sound of evening birds, the sun was beginning to fade. She gazed up at the crowded shelves above them, all stuffed with jars and books, sheaves of papers and piles of dried fungus and root. These were all Elga’s, though Zoya knew them by heart. For years the old woman had hauled her odd collection around, fashioning potions, cures, and curses as needed, hawking them, for money or for luck whenever they were running short on good fortune. When events were rushed and times uncertain, they traveled light and Elga would hide the lot of it away in dank sewers, attics, damp catacombs, or old root cellars, hexing and stashing them for years, even decades at a stretch, but always finding them again, digging up and hauling away the cache whenever the coast was clear. Zoya felt uneasy lying there now, she could almost sense the old woman’s presence and imagined the crone muttering to herself as she searched for ointments, balms, powders, or merely those green tins of crispy grasshoppers she liked to snack on. The priest had said Elga was locked up in a jail back in the city, and while Zoya knew they wouldn’t hold her long, she believed they would detain her at least long enough for Zoya and Will to rest some before they ran again.
    Looking at Will, she