Babayaga

knocking her head against the wall, and she tried to pull away but he would not let go. He had a funny look dancing in his eyes, one that she recognized all too well. Deciding that she had made a mistake, she had kicked him hard in the balls and lunged for the door, but he had reached out and grabbed her, pushing her against the wall and banging her head again. “You are a real handful, aren’t you? Some kind of devil’s woman?” he had said. She was dazed. He threw her down on the floor. She began crawling again toward the door, but he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to the foot of the bed. He tried slipping off his belt, but drunk as he was he could barely manage it. Sitting up, he fumbled around, clumsily attempting to unbutton his trousers, muttering, “My wise elders showed me where to stick it in troublemakers. Now I’ll show you.” Zoya went for the door again, but this time he grabbed her by the neck and pulled her back. “I will make it hard to run,” he had said, pressing her to the floor and lying down on top of her. He reached under and squeezed at her breasts roughly with one hand while pulling down his pants with the other. “Yes, now you are going to have a hard time running,” he said. She squirmed and struggled and screamed out for help but he slapped her harder and then she stayed silent. She knew nobody would come. Her head cleared enough so that she could recall what to do. She had been taken against her will before, but that was a different time. She had been weak then.
    Turning and taking his head in her hands, as if she was finally succumbing, she put bloodstained kisses up his cheek and whispered the spell into his ear. He paused in his fumbling action and scratched at his nose as if he had a twitch. Then it began. She rolled free to the side of the room, and watched with relief and exhaustion as his flesh started its snapping and shrinking down.
    The same people who had ignored Zoya’s desperate shout for help now paid no attention to Max’s, though his were far more terrible. He shrieked and clawed, whined and rasped through the whole messy, wet transformation; a high tearing wail screeched like a chorus of screeching kettle whistles as his vocal cords shriveled down and his throat constricted. Bones snapped as they were condensed and the room filled with the smell of the burning marrow and melting flesh as the heat of the boiling blood filled the room. His eyes changed last as he lay there, small weakened, and still pink from the raw, throbbing change. Then the black fur came out and a last shrill-pitched squeal emerged from him, but it was Saturday night in a mining town and everyone was deaf to the cries of a girl being raped and a rat being born.
    Once changed, he had not run away but had lain still on the bare wood floor, looking up at her through terrified eyes. The sickness and dizziness from the spell overcame her and she vomited in the chamber pot. Then she curled up in a ball on the bed and fell asleep. When she awoke, the rat was still there, sitting up as if waiting for her. Perhaps he thought this was a temporary condition, that she would help him now that the lesson had been learned, or perhaps he was simply terrified of the new, unknown wilderness of hungry house cats, birds of prey, and dogs trained to slay vermin that lay beyond the door. She had thought of killing him then and there, she told the women, but that seemed too merciful an end. Still angry, she wanted him to live out his days as the pathetic little rodent he was. So she tucked him into her dress and staggered back to their campsite.
    The rat ended up being useful. Through the unpredictable twist of spells, he had wound up capable of sniffing out any trail across every landscape and in all seasons, no matter how hard the frost or how flooded the roads. They had lost and found Max numerous times over the years, for at the first sign of real trouble he would always run off scared, disappearing for weeks, even months. But then he would pop up again, sniffing his way back to their side. His brother, too, the once innocent Andrei, who had found them at the campsite, proved to be bonded to Max by some tenuous but true sense of loyalty that made him, from time to time, a handy tool. Two bewitched brothers, she thought, each living a very different life from the one they had each intended, all because of a woman whose path they stumbled across, a woman they made the mistake of underestimating. Therein