Old and Crooked

I have been called old and crooked, though I was young when they started calling me such. Young and fresh-faced, a dew-drop maiden ready for the world to embrace or break. I do not get a say in what other people call me and I learned long ago to never complain to their faces. Rather cackle; rather laugh until my belly hurts and they run away in terror.

I am beaked and bloody; when I was only fifteen, I killed a snake that was slithering into my bedroom and the townsfolk called me brave at first, insane later when I went out to hunt them on my own. There are creepers in the undergrowth, and I keep them in jars for preservation, jars filled with vinegar and oils. My hair is black as a void in the moonlight and the village folk all agree that this makes me a witch, that I absorb all light around me, I need only untuck my long, long braid. What I tried to tell them, what they did not believe, was that I have hurt only a few animals truly, that I find and harvest the snakes and the spiders to test their venom. I have saved a young girl’s life by giving her the antidote. Her eyes were blank and already milky-white, her skin was shining. She reached up and touched my hair and asked for a kiss, and I gave her the kiss of life. I saved her life and for this I am a witch.

My mother’s face I barely remember and my father’s face I wish to forget. The village drove them insane and said it was my doing. A child with the devil born in her, they should have drowned her first chance they had. My eyes squint in the sunlight and I dislike the cold - they say I am too used to the fires of Hell. Always cold, she is always cold, so she must be a witch. That is what they say and I have stopped defending myself with words, because the words run out of my mouth like the snow I hate, melting on my tongue, spittle landing on the ground at my feet.

I was sixteen, with snake’s blood fresh on my hands, when my father tried to strangle the life from me. He had his belt and I had only my hands to fight with, slippery from blood. My hair was so long then, wound around my neck to keep it away from my work, and it eased the pressure, made him have to tighten his grip. I did not see them, but by touch I knew his knuckles were white as snow from the strain, and I scratched at them - my nails had already cracked on the lids of jars, fastened tight, and they cracked against his skin as well, drawing blood. I must have shocked him, he loosened his grip; enough for me to slip free. I recall my nails coming for his face, his eyes. I recall the hate and fear in my veins, pulsing. Like when that snake had gotten into my bedroom, slithering. My father had a forked tongue and slit pupils, and I slit them further, carving out his eyes while he howled in pain. The villagers came running then, and saw the blood on my hands and deemed him already dead. I must have screamed as they dragged me away, but I do not remember the sound, I thought I had gone deaf in that moment. In fact my father was already dead, his eyes infected by the dirt and venom under my nails and those eyes would rot and his face would rot, and the infection would spread to his blood until three days later when he was feverish and dying and he said my name - and he apologized, so he was deemed a holy man, so much forgiveness in his heart even for someone who did not deserve it, someone who had killed him. Then he was finished rotting, and he was dead.

I was released by the deed of the girl I had saved, who said the word of my father meant I could not be killed for his death. I had tried to tell them of his attack, but my hair had protected my throat, and no bruises formed from his strangulation; only a broad line of red that faded after a few hours. I had no proof of what had been done to me. I cut my hair short after that, to the horror of the village, though some said it was only proper that I show my grief after what I had done.

Yes, I was bloodied. I did not have my father to support me anymore, only the chickens I had to tend. I found blood on their beaks too, and poison in their feed, slipped in by someone in the village. I was accused of witchcraft yet again, of attempting to hatch a black rooster that would summon the Devil with it’s crowing and I laughed when they came to my door and slung their insults, because one of them said they had seen me dancing naked in my yard. If it could be called dancing; another snake had made it into my house and I had killed it, springing from my bed, that safe haven of warmth where I shed all my clothes to better let my body heat up the blankets; but a rat had daringly taken the dead snake and run outside and I had chased it, yelling and cursing, because I had seen that the snake was a specimen I needed, a rare breed whose bite I had yet to develop a cure for. I asked the accuser what he had been doing in my yard while I had been asleep in my house and the deep red of his face diminished his words and the charges against me were dropped. I believed he had been the one to slip poison into the feed; my chickens recovered after that, strong and hale. But that was only the beginning.

The village folk said they saw my mother as a ghost wandering the town at night. One villager, a woman who had been a friend of my mother when they were both young, came to me begging to release her. I refused; I could not even had I wanted to. My mother was not dead and I did not keep her soul so her ghost would wander, but I did not bother trying to tell her this. She would not believe me.

My birth had torn at my mother, it is true, though my father’s fist tore at her more. She had wandered from the house one night, waking none of us, not even the chickens, as she went out in only her nightgown to thread on white snow in my father’s heavy boots, which she stole as she left. If only I'd had that idea first, to get away from it all; she was thin and gray, barely able to keep warm, and she wandered back into the village at the dead of night to steal food wherever she could. I found her one night at the chicken feed, when it was still rife with poison so potent the chickens had stopped eating it and were now wasting away from hunger instead. She had her mouth stuffed, hands full of feed, cheeks bulging. Her eyes were so big in her sallow face I thought they might fall out of her head. There was blood under her nose, at the corners of her mouth, beneath her fingernails. I could barely remember her face since I was young, but I remembered enough.

She must have forgotten what house this was. I saw her from the window, woken by the sound, and I wrapped myself in a sheet to go outside, white and spectral in the moonlight. She looked at me and recognised me. Perhaps with my hair now short I looked too much like my father. She opened her mouth and vomited blood, from the poison or from the sight of me I do not know. I tried to calm her down and get her back inside, where it was warm, but she fled. I watched her go, boots worn to threads, her long hair now gray and in tatters down her back.

When I came out of her womb I was being strangled by the umbilical cord, as if her very body was trying to murder me before I could see the light of day. This flight from the chicken-coop was her final rejection and I never tried to seek her out again, as she wandered through town, a ghost in every sense but for the fact that she was still breathing.

When I was eighteen, the girl whose life I had once saved nearly died again. It was no snakebite this time, but a deadly illness that had spread through the village and already taken the lives of a few young and a few elderly. I went to her, not a girl any longer, truly, she was of an age with me, when I overheard that she might take her last breath any moment now.

The room they had put her in was stuffy, filled with the scent of sweat and sick and the odor of heavy wax. Candles were stacked in the dozens around the room and their flames had sucked all the air out of the room. Her parents had gone from the place, lest they be infected too, her mother coming by once a day to wipe the sweat from her brow, light the candles and sing to her gently. I could not sing, but I blew out the candles she had left and opened the windows, letting in light and air. She moaned at the burst of cold, and I had to grit my teeth against it too. I changed her bedding and her clothes, soaked with sweat, and piled blankets on top of her while the room chilled. I closed the shutters only as it became night and more snow fell. I changed her drenched sheets and clothes again and wiped her brow and made her drink some broth. When midnight had ticked by she opened her eyes and looked at me, and said my name.

I was surprised she remembered, and I said so. She promised me she would never forget. By morning her fever had broken. Her mother stayed away from the house and the village outside was so silent that all of them might have been dead. I did not care. I made her more broth, I changed the sheets again. I explained to her everything that I was doing as I did it, so that she might have the sound of someone’s voice to lull her into that eternal slumber, should it come. When I ran out of things to say, I started to come up with stories instead: of a giant house in the forest, free from the woes and hate of the village. It would be on stilts, perhaps, far up in the sky where no one else could reach it. Like a part of the canopy of the trees; and should anyone ever come knocking, to hurt me or my chickens again, I would disassemble the whole thing and move it, take it deeper into the forest and then deeper still, until only those who really wished to find me could; and then I might grant them an audience, if they were brave enough.

I grew warm as I talked, and in my sleep-deprived state I imagined it truly happening, a house that could move and where I would always be warm; always I told my girl, as warm as if I was in a cauldron set to high heat. I kept talking until my voice was hoarse like an old woman, and still I kept going; I was so worried she would slip away, that the fever might come back. I had seen others seemingly recover only moments before death claimed them.

It was a novel sensation. I could not recall the last time I had cared so much whether someone lived or died.

She started talking back to me, and by the next evening I was so exhausted that I slipped into bed next to her when she coaxed me to. Beneath the sheets I felt her pressed up against me and I wondered if this was love. She slept and eventually I did too. When I woke I knew she would be well by the color in her cheeks. She was still fast asleep, her body needing to recover from her ordeal. I kissed her cheek and her brow and her lips, briefly, and walked away.

My chickens had all been killed while I was away. I still do not know who did it; an angry villager, perhaps the one who had tried to poison them before, or perhaps my mother, wandering through the city and seeing the house uninhabited. Perhaps she had thought to eat them, raw if the rumors about her were true. It did not matter, because I knew I could not stay here. There was blood on my hands when I had finished hauling the chicken corpses inside, salvaging what I could. I packed my most important tinctures and specimens and whatever tools my father had opted to not throw out. I took his belt too. My hands were cold, and they were stained with the rust on it, rust that were specks of blood from when I had grabbed it last. It had lain on the corner of the floor since that day.

I have been called old and crooked, grandmother, baba yaga, though I was only eighteen when I walked out of the village: the heavy pack on my back gave me a hunched over appearance, and my hands were cracked and red from the cold and from the work I had been doing for years. My mother had taken my father’s boots, and I had to make my own that would carry me through the heavy snow and into the forest. Unlike her I did not intend to return, not to scavenge for food nor to see my revenge on the village unfold. The cure for the strange illness is with the girl and will come to no one else, now that I am gone.