Babayaga

stuck on Zoya. He was thrown by the coincidence, and, given all that had occurred that weekend, he didn’t quite trust it. But more than that, the girl intrigued him.
    “You stole my eye,” she said, ignoring Oliver.
    “Excuse me?”
    “You have a bruise there, I put cover-up over mine.” She touched her face where the mark had been. “Perhaps I should lend you my makeup?”
    Oliver chuckled. “Yes, I heard you got yourself into a scrape aiding a damsel in distress.”
    She looked at Will with a small, complicit grin. “That’s not really true, is it?”
    “No. It’s not,” said Will. He didn’t know what to add. He wanted to make her laugh, or at least smile. But all he could do was stand there, struck dumb. There was an essence to her gaze—the way her eyes connected with his—that took the simplest words in his mind and effortlessly broke them down into small, useless heaps of letters.
    “Yes, well, dying to hear the real story but haven’t got time, I’m afraid. And now you’ll excuse us, Will, we’re running late,” said Oliver, guiding Zoya to the exit. “Thank you again. I’ll call you later to—” The hotel’s revolving door clipped off the end of his phrase as they spun away into the night.
    Standing in the empty lobby, Will felt cheated. It was as if some captivating salesman had danced a collection of precious jewels in front of his eyes before whisking them away and locking them up in some unseen vault. Will played back the short conversation he had shared with the girl the previous night on the metro and then let his imagination jump to all the things he could have added to that brief exchange: the well-timed phrases he could have impressed her with, the little jokes to make her laugh and the observations to make her wonder, all of which could have culminated in Zoya Polyakov being on his arm tonight, looking up into his eyes.
    There were charmed souls who always seemed to say the right things in the perfect manner, deftly slipping the precise amount of weighted meaning into every nuanced phrase and achieving their goal with a minimum of effort, squeezing every sugary drop of opportunity out of every ripe moment and always getting their way. That simply wasn’t Will. But Oliver did always seem to know what to do, what to say. He was so silver tongued, he could blackmail you and steal your girl and it was still hard to hate him. Probably because, for Oliver, none of it was serious. Like the boys back home on the field at Tiger Stadium, he was simply playing a game while the rest of the world struggled on. He held the world in the palm of his hand, the same way pitchers like Hal Newhouser and Dizzy Trout held a baseball. Will wanted that control, he wanted to possess his share of the graceful victories that came easily to some and never to him. But it was no use, he could improve and try harder, but in the end he knew he was too earnest and straight, he didn’t have the luck, the charisma, or the air of money that opened the secret doors and won the loveliest girls. He had been raised to follow the rules, and for the most part he had, knowing all the while that those rules were invented to keep everyone in their place. He had to live within those limits, he didn’t know what else to do. Besides, sticking to those rules had gotten him this far. Here he was, living in Paris, after all. He had no right to complain. Still, though, he didn’t have that girl, Oliver did. Will stood there for a few minutes, finishing his cigarette while staring down at his plain brown shoes. In the far corner of the room, the hotel’s pianist was playing the final phrases of a Schubert sonata. Will didn’t know the piece, all he knew was that its beauty hurt.
    XVII

    The rising sun sent bright rays of fresh light flooding across Zoya’s room. She was still awake, though out of her party clothes. She sat perched on a stool, leaning over her kitchen sink busily picking apart one of the pellets the owls had left. She separated out the larger bones from the small, tangled ball and rolled the remaining contents together in a paste with marzipan and chicory, spitting on the ball to hold it together. A pair of houseflies buzzed about as she dipped it into a teacup filled with elderberry wine, letting it soak before taking it out to dry on the sill. One of the houseflies landed on the ball and walked nervously along its surface. Go ahead, she thought, taste it, you will be surprised at what you