Babayaga

clean now, and all the horses are gone, so there is nothing in the air but the soot of your burning engines.” She went back to her scrubbing. “That’s why I like to sleep in a barn, to be close to real smells. Horseshit and horse farts. Those are the smells of life.”
    That made Noelle giggle. A little smile crossed the old woman’s lips. Then she returned to her work and did not speak again.
    IV

    Witches’ Song Three

    Ah, ugh, agh, we pull at our skulls
    and gnash our wasted teeth watching.
    Why always the cracked cups, Elga, why never the whole ones?
    The old woman’s no better than a corrupt conscription officer out rousting feeble drunks.
    With bum dumb warriors such as these it is no wonder
    we are only a few fingers’ count from lost.
    Our odds always long,
    now here we are sinking low into polder bog,
    desperately reaching and clutching at this single bare stalk
    that looks far too weak to offer safety.
    So many enemies, countless routs,
    even our most sacred rites and pious celebrations of renewal
    snatched up by that insatiable and foul pope beast.
    See him sit proud and poised,
    branded with the crusader’s crucifix,
    braying on about his mewling manger,
    promising eternal life
    and bottomless vessels of wine for all anointed.
    Now there’s a pandering peddler.
    He forever extols the virtues of love and compassion
    while his crusading Knights Templar
    slice at the bare babes’ throats.
    He can bear no other tale, take no rival myth,
    and in his absolute hunger to rule he tore down and cooked up
    every sharp-tongued woman in his path,
    even turning on his own, his blessed, his consecrated,
    the poor, fevered nuns, no more than sick or delirious,
    only mad with loneliness,
    brokenhearted in their sunbaked convents,
    suffering amid the spiraling vertigo
    of eternal ennui.
    There, standing stone-faced amid their magpie cries for grace,
    the priest raised his hand for silence and said simply
    and solemnly, burn
    sisters burn.
    Ghosts, they say, stay for three simple reasons:
    they love life too wholly to leave,
    they love some other too deeply to part,
    or they need to linger on for a bit,
    to coax a distant knife
    toward its fated throat.
    V

    Vidot the flea was exhausted. He rested, hanging upside down beneath the couch of his rival’s apartment. Over the past two days he had learned all that he could possibly want to know about the man. He had been certain that his investigations would unearth evidence of a great villain, but what he discovered was a decent enough individual with a perfectly ordinary life.
    The man’s name, which Vidot had painstakingly traced out on letterheads and various envelopes lying throughout the apartment, was Alberto Perruci. He was Italian, a philosophy professor working at the University of Paris. He had a wife named Mimi. She worked as an assistant photo editor at Festival magazine. She was a very attractive woman; in fact, Vidot had to admit that even she was more beautiful than his Adèle. Mimi clearly adored her husband and would wrap her arms around him when he came through the door, kissing his neck with warm affection before resting her head against his chest.
    Why would such a man need another lover? How insatiable was his greed? Many Europeans—Italians, Spanish, and French—all kept lovers; Vidot did not understand it, but he accepted it as a fact. Still, this woman cooked, she cleaned, and she waited on her husband with a complete unwavering devotion that impressed Vidot. His Adèle was certainly, by all appearances, a good wife, but she never knelt to remove his shoes at the end of the day, she never poured him an aperitif and brought it to his side while he read his evening paper, she never sat in his lap and tickled his ears when they listened to the radio. His respect and instinctive affection for the beautiful Mimi made his heart ache in overwhelming empathy for all the betrayals in the world.
    The first day, Vidot had gone to work with Alberto, riding high on his head, tucked safely beneath his hat. He had sat on the tip of the man’s skull, looking out at the bored and listless students yawning as Alberto lectured them on Hegel and Marx. Later in the office as the professor graded papers, Vidot watched from above, mildly impressed at how thoroughly Alberto went through the students’ work, marking it up in a diligent, thoughtful manner. Then, after a little more than an hour, the descending hat returned Vidot to a state of darkness, and when