Babayaga

black vanity mole above her lip. The two gathered their carnival cases up in their arms and left, turning out the one bare lightbulb as they went, leaving all their captured bugs in the pale shadows nervously tapping against the walls of their slender glass prisons. Vidot did not hop about. Instead, he laid his head against the vial’s cold surface and waited, feeling the hard pressure of time closing in.
    A little after the church clock chimed ten, the two would come home. Each night it was clear that they had been worked to the edges of their endurance. Dottie would immediately lie down on the bed, tired and silent, and proceed to undress while remaining horizontal. Across the room, a slouched Billy emptied his pockets of small bills and coins onto the kitchen table. Then he unpacked his black boxes. As they were dumped on the table, Vidot could see that in each case all the fleas lay still, without the slightest twitch or sign of life. They all had perished, worked to death in the course of a single day’s performance. With a quick, efficient bang, Billy would knock each box’s contents into the dustbin. Then he would strip off his suit and perform his evening toilet before finally coming to bed, where his wife, still in her makeup but now naked, already lay fast asleep. Billy would pull the blanket up over her body and whistle for their little dog, who would leap up onto the foot of the bedspread. Then Billy would curl up beside his wife, kiss her cheek gently, and switch off the light.
    The Paris skyline sparkled through the window, its twinkling illumination bathing the room in a dark cerulean blue. The city’s glow seemed to be taunting him, thought Vidot, like the visions of silver crystal kingdoms that arise in the deliriums of fever-crazed soldiers. Vidot stayed awake, hypersensitive to everything around him, the rhythm of the nervous hopping fleas reminding him of deep African drums beating before a savage blood sacrifice, a percussive prelude to the certain doom that awaited him when the circus master rose again to don his terrible magnifying glasses. For tomorrow was the day; there were only three bottles sitting to Vidot’s right, and Billy used more than a dozen to prepare for every show. Vidot knew that he would have to come up with some sort of a plan if he wanted to survive.
    Regrettably, Vidot’s flea-sized brain was at that point utterly devoid of any ideas. He knew that once Billy set his tweezers on him beneath that white cloth, his life was over. He thought of all the things he would miss: listening to football matches with the chef at Chez Barbe, playing dominoes with Claude Attal, walking through the market in the April spring when the cherry and the pear blossoms colorfully bloomed overhead. He thought of the comfort of a glass of Brouilly and the grace of Satie’s Gymnopédies and, finally, the warmth of Adèle’s kiss, a memory laced with bitterness now, but one that still defined his greatest ideal of happiness.
    The tap-tap-tapping of the fleas on the glass kept distracting him from his thoughts. He wanted this to be a moment of contemplation, his last night on earth, and yet these persistent pests kept breaking his concentration as they leapt about in their little vials. As he gazed down the row, his neighbors’ ceaseless jumping reminded him of Camus’s Sisyphus, forever pushing his boulder up the hill and eternally happy in the futility of his effort. Then he noticed that a few of the fleas next to him, instead of frantically attempting to leap to freedom, merely were crawling about at the bottom of the glass. He watched to see if they would hop at all, but they did not. These fleas simply paced around, circling endlessly, as the condemned often do. Vidot thought at first they were merely depressed or discouraged, but then, looking closely, he observed that, in fact, the rear legs of the creature were shaped slightly differently. Vidot found this very interesting.
    The next day began as the days had before: Dottie put the water on, Billy and the dog went out and returned soon with a single loaf of bread. They ate silently. Then Billy chose a pair of small oil paintings from a stack in the corner. Perhaps he was going to a dealer, Vidot thought. Whatever the errand, it was an unsuccessful one, as Billy returned an hour later with the same canvases tucked under his arm. As he placed them back in the stack, Dottie said nothing—it had clearly been too long since any paintings