Babayaga

bed, looking out her hospital window and wondering if she would ever trust herself again, out there in the wilds of the world. Every thought that came into her mind tortured and oppressed her. Recalling her mother’s eyes, or remembering the swarms of small children playing wild in the schoolyard, or even the memory of the sea of shiny black umbrellas that filled the rainy boulevards, all these random recollections made her chest ache.
    “So, tell me, what do you see up there in that night sky?” said a voice behind her.
    She looked and found the old woman standing by her bed. Noelle was not frightened, the staff often came through after-hours to check on the patients. “I don’t see anything out there but darkness,” she said.
    “Ah,” said the old woman, sitting down beside her and roughly patting her on the back. “That is good. Very good. I have known Gypsies that will tell you they can read your fortune in the stars. But they only do this to trick you into looking up. They say, ‘Look close! There is the Leo, there is the Aries!’ and while you are squinting up into the blackness, these Gypsies stay plenty busy picking your pockets below.” They were both silent for a moment. “I hate Gypsies,” the old woman said, and then she got up and waddled off, disappearing down the hallway.
    The next day the old woman returned after the lights had been turned off, coming out of the gloomy blue shadows carrying a comb and brush. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a sucette . “Here,” she said.
    The girl happily took the lollipop as Elga sat down on the corner of her bed and began working the knots out of the girl’s black hair. As she worked, the old woman asked questions in her short, blunt way and, knot by knot, with a mouth full of the sweet sucette , Noelle told her the short, sad story of her life.
    Ever since she could remember, she had wanted to be a ballerina. She had trained and practiced, starving herself to be as thin as those beautiful creatures she watched flitting about the spot-lit stage draped in silk ribbons and tulle. Her mother had been more than encouraging, pressuring her to always be top of her class, taking her to the city to see the Opera Ballet and then sitting in on all her lessons. Her father had paid sums far beyond what they could afford for the best schools and most highly regarded teachers. They lived outside Paris in a small country village, but there was a bus, and Noelle and her mother rode in for classes three times a week, often not returning home until long after her father was asleep. Finally, although her teachers intimated that she might not yet be ready, Noelle’s mother insisted it was time to try out for a spot in the Academy.
    The audition had been even more rigorous than she could have imagined. She felt tense and nervous and it all went wrong, her battement frappé was too weak, her déboulés awkward, and every arabesque painfully unsteady. As she finished her final routine she did not even need to see the distracted and bored expressions on the judges’ faces. In fact, she knew she had failed before the music even finished. Stopping there on the empty stage and listening as the piano’s last small high note echoed out into the air, she felt the ancient theater creak, crack, and begin to collapse around her, breaking apart into a hundred thousand splinters that fell at her feet. The walls caved in and the ceiling came down as her entire world tumbled and crashed in around her—her little village, the rolling countryside, waves of sea and ocean, and every atomic element she had ever learned about in her science classes were bursting into smithereens, exploding around her on the stage. When the thunder finally subsided, the judges were still there, staring blankly as they waited for her to exit the stage, while her father and mother, seated near the back, sat grinning, entirely blind to her failure, their eyes aglow with the hollowness of hope.
    Her first attempt to kill herself had been a botched and desperate affair: in a hysterical fit, she had gulped down a well of dark pen ink, and immediately vomited it up again like a squid, retching the blackness out all over her father’s well-organized desk.
    Next she had slashed her wrists, but they had found her in time, flailing and weeping in the blushed, warm water of her rose-tinted bath. That was what had brought her to the institution. And now here she was, scarred, ugly, and