“I am a monster. You won’t love me, when you see how much of a monster I am.”
“I love. I could never love you more. I am made for love and only you can love me.” The man’s voice crackled in desperation. “I want you to love all of me. All of the hurricane.”
“I will... love, love, love.”
“Then escape with me.”
“How? She has those red shoes on, which keep you prisoner. She never takes them off and even if we escape, she will find me. I am like her. I am hers. There will be no escape.”
“Then what will we do?”
“I will sleep and think of a solution.”
***
In the days to come Tatyana did her best to play the penitent granddaughter. She cleaned and tidied and cooked and smiled with glee. Glee stolen from the future, from the freedom that Tatyana would steal for herself. She smiled at Grandmother and talked with chirps and flutter, while she inhaled the curses that bred in her mind at night, but she’d learned from Grandmother—no, Baba Yaga—that patience was the winner’s counselor, so she waited.
Baba Yaga thawed her displeasure and grew Tatyana’s hair back, so that she could braid it. All the while Tatyana looked at Grandmother’s face, waiting to see if the hideous crone would show herself underneath.
It was at that time that Tatyana noticed that mirrors did not like Grandmother. Silver ones became wick with blemishes, the metal corroded when Grandmother’s reflection crawled over. Glass ones splintered. Hair-thin cracks raced along the glass, cutting Baba Yaga’s face. Maybe the mirrors didn’t want to see the image.
Tatyana sympathized with the mirrors, but she wanted to see what they were hiding. What was Grandmother’s biggest secret?
“I will show you, when she takes to her broom to fly outside,” the hurricane said, and true to his words, when Grandmother grabbed her broom and exited through the house, the hurricane tapped.
“Look, this is how Baba Yaga really is.”
The wind whined once again as the layers of the hurricane split. It was as if an eye opened and there was Baba Yaga, on her broom, her figure of birch now swollen to that of a rock, hair of cobwebs and her grin a fissure.
A monster that deserved an end unlike any other. Tatyana wanted to carve her, strangle her, hollow her skull with a hammer, but she stopped at something more sinister.
In Baba Yaga’s cabinet she gathered vials, and with a grin she cooked borsch. In a second cauldron she boiled a fresh pot of the brew that allowed people to stay inside this hut. In a third she boiled water and kept it bubbling.
When grandmother returned, Tatyana welcomed her with borsch. She watched as Baba Yaga ate and commented how delicious it was. Then she fell into sleep so deep it rose like a wall that could smother pain. Tatyana grinned a sickle grin as she dragged Baba Yaga to the third cauldron with boiling water and toppled her inside. Baba Yaga did not scream or wake. It was only her breathing that speared the air in pain.
“Sleep well, Grandmother,” Tatyana whispered and stripped naked.
Her skin stuck to the hot metal as she climbed into the second cauldron with the brew. Tatyana screamed as her skin turned cherry red. She took a breath, dunked beneath the liquid surface, and then she drank as much of the scalding liquid as possible. Pain as electrifying as an eel snaked around her. When she emerged, her first breath was a gasp of pain. She should have been dead, but vengeance kept her moving. She saw through slits, her eye lids had swelled into blisters.
She was red, boiled, her hair shedding, but it was the only way her beloved would not harm her. Tatyana took Baba Yaga’s broom and then put on Baba Yaga’s red shoes, made of human skin and boiled in blood. Now she had command over the hut, and it shuddered in acknowledgment.
“I will not be Baba Yaga,” her voice barely left her throat, so badly scalded was she, but Tatyana continued, “witch of the hut with four chicken legs in the hurricane, I will be witch of the hurricane. I will be wife of the hurricane. I will be the hurricane!”
With those words, all the windows shattered, and the hurricane’s thousand arms stormed into her waiting arms, into her waiting lungs.
Lakeshore Drive
Joanna Parypinski
The roads were treacherous, slicked with black ice and peppered with the snowy graves of roadkill. As the evening darkness settled over the horizon like frost, Susannah drove through the falling snow that swept against the windshield.
Her cell phone buzzed on the dashboard, glowing neon blue and skipping a few centimeters to the left. She ignored it, hands clawed around the steering wheel, staring through the glass into the sea of black bombarded with spots of white. The wipers intermittently swished across the surface, and finally the phone went dormant once more.
She had to get home.
Suddenly the back end of the car in front of her appeared in her headlights, and she gasped as her foot crushed down on the brake. The car fishtailed, the tires spinning for purchase in the building snow—Susannah shouted as the front end swerved, the phone slid off the dash, and her seatbelt cut into her neck like a noose. Everything jerked to a stop, Susannah’s car sitting slantways in the middle of the expressway.
Horns blared in the silence. All the cars were stopped.
“What the hell...?” she murmured, slamming her palms down on the wheel. “Move, assholes!”
The snow fell quietly on the windshield. The wipers swiped it away. She ran a shaky hand through frazzled hair. Somewhere at the foot of the empty passenger’s seat, the phone buzzed again.
“Stop it,” she snapped, checking her composure in the rearview mirror, pulling off a clump of mascara and taking a few eyelashes with it. She tilted the mirror so she could see out the back windshield, but it was already a sheet of white. Snowpocalypse, she thought, the term floating up from the recesses of her mind—something she’d heard as coworkers had speculated about the impending storm that was sure to close down schools and businesses. The blizzard had rolled into Chicago just as she’d gotten onto the highway, but she’d hoped she could beat it home. Too bad, too late. Now she was stuck on the inexplicably immobilized Lakeshore Drive.
Amid the swish of the wipers and the whoosh of the wind, the phone stopped buzzing.
***
Virginia’s body was found a crumpled mess on the street, having parachuted from the roof of a 36-story building. A nameless driver had been unable to swerve around the fallen object and spun her corpse over like a cycle of laundry. She no longer resembled Susannah’s sister; now she was just a twisted collage of blood and broken bones.
The police found the suicide note in the printer tray nearest her cubicle, the document still sitting on the sleeping screen of her work computer. When Susannah got the call, she sat in the parking lot behind the building for fifteen minutes before pulling around the block to the front, where she stood, shell-shocked, in front of the caution tape and told them she’d been at their apartment already and that Virginia was working late.
They asked how long Virginia had been working at the insurance company.
“Five years,” said Susannah. “She got the job right out of college.”
They asked if Virginia had been depressed.
“Yes,” Susannah lied.
***
Through the snow piling thick and fast outside the window, Susannah could see shapes moving around, so she stepped out of the car into the icy sting of night. Snow licked her bare hands like cold cat tongues. “Hey!” she shouted. “What’s going on?”
Two people emerged from the car to her right and trudged closer. They were wrapped entirely in winter coats and scarves; only a strip of flesh showed where their eyes were squinting against the violent wind.
“No idea!” called a woman’s voice.
The masculine figure beside her said, “Must have been an accident! Just an accident!”
The wind blew a hollow, tuneless note in Susannah’s ears, sucking the air from her lungs and pushing her away from the couple. “I have to ge
t home!” she shouted.
“What?” called the woman.
Horns blared in the distance. The man yelled something that Susannah couldn’t make out, and the couple retreated to their car. Susannah followed suit. Once the door slammed shut and the wind muted, Susannah warmed her reddened hands against the heating vent.
She switched on the radio, hoping to catch a traffic report. Most stations were only static. As she turned the dial, she caught only snippets of voices. “Severe... power... the... ” said the radio through the crackling static.
The phone buzzed. Susannah fumbled with her purse, pulling out the pack of cigarettes and lighting one. Smoke plumed from between her shaking lips. “Get a hold of yourself,” she snapped, wishing frantically that the cars would start moving soon and she could get home. She had to tell her mother. She hadn’t slept at all last night or the night before, and she knew she would never sleep again until she did.
The cigarette kept the panic at bay.
The radio crackled. “Know... what... you... did...”
Susannah nearly choked on the cigarette as she fumbled to turn off the radio, dousing the car back into silence.
Then something tapped on her window and Susannah flinched so hard she dropped her cigarette and had to fish around by the pedals to retrieve it. When she sat up, she saw a man standing outside her door with one hand on the glass, wearing a tattered brown coat, fingerless gloves, and a beanie. He looked homeless: there was dirt crusted in his yellowed fingernails, stubble speckling his weathered face, and a slew of missing teeth amid the crooked, yellow ones jutting from his gums. There was something deranged about his eyes. He tapped again on the window.
Weighing her options, Susannah reluctantly rolled it down. Usually she ignored beggars who stood on the side of the road—but usually she could drive away. The man grinned at her, and when he spoke, she could smell rotten fish on his breath. “Road’s shut down,” he grunted. “Probably ’til mornin’. Ain’t no gettin’ through tonight.”
“Do you know why?” she snapped in frustration.
“Accident,” he said, his leer entirely too close to her. “Just an accident.”
Susannah flinched. That’s what she’d told herself already countless times—It was an accident. Just an accident. She started to roll up the window, but he reached his gnarled hand inside, gripping the top edge of the glass.
“It’s gonna get nine kinds of cold tonight,” he said, his breath fogging up the window, his eyes sliding down to her chest. He slowly licked his chapped lips. “Might need some help... warming up.”
Susannah punched the button to roll up the window, his fingers now in danger of getting crushed. “Pervert!” she shouted, and he quickly pulled his hand away before the window slid up.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the beggar’s muffled voice swam through the glass. He pointed in the direction of Lake Michigan. “Cocytus is already frozen.”
“Are you on drugs?” snapped Susannah, then turned away from the window to finish her cigarette, heart thumping, hoping the hobo would get bored with her and move on. She saw him sidle away out of the corner of her eye and cracked the window to blow her smoke into the bitter air.
She tossed away the butt and settled back in the seat, the snow on the windshield too thick for the wipers to clear. Trapped in a white tomb, Susannah closed her eyes.
Just as she was beginning to drift off, a deep cracking sound rent the air, and she was jarred awake. It had sounded like the grinding of a massive boat against rocky shore, and Susannah had to shake away the image of a skeletal ghost ship with ragged sails floating ominously on Lake Michigan.
Panic burned low and steady like a candle flame, egged on by every burst of wind. She watched the minutes plod slowly by on the dashboard clock, drumming her fingers more and more furiously against the steering wheel. When the deep, unearthly sound came again, she elbowed open the door and stepped into the howling wind. Only darkness and whirling snow greeted her.
She stumbled a few steps through the snow, her socks soaked beneath the thin leather of her boots. “Is there anyone out here?” she shouted, curling her arms around her chest. “Hello!”
There was no answer. The cars slept peacefully around her, blanketed and white. Susannah spotted a cardboard sign sticking out of the snow on the side of the road, something that beggars might use. The man from before had disappeared entirely. She wondered briefly what he’d written on the sign, then went and pried it from the snow.
In black marker was scrawled: ABANDON ALL HOPE.
Susannah dropped the sign.
Shivers ran through her as she lurched back to the car. Who would write such a sign?
Falling into the driver’s seat, Susannah scrambled around for a cigarette, hearing nothing but her pulse in her ears. She flicked open her lighter to an empty click, tried again, and again. Dropping the lighter to the floor, she found a pack of hotel matches in the glove compartment, blindly struck one—nothing. She tried another, and another, and it wasn’t until the ninth match that she realized all the heads were charred black as if someone had used them and put them back in the pack.
The cigarette hung limply from her lips, unlit. Leaning back in the seat, she thought she might call her mother, but she was too afraid to pick up her phone in case it started buzzing again. She knew who was calling. Her mind unraveled.
If only she could sleep, she wouldn’t bother asking for forgiveness, but her conscience had been contaminated by religion in her youth. Try as she might to cleanse her mind of it, she couldn’t help but hear her mother’s fire-and-brimstone lectures.
Her hair was set in crisp black curls, her shoulders broad as a linebacker’s but clad in a matronly affair as she bore down on her nine-year-old daughter, saying, “You’re a sinner, Susannah,” and, closing the closet door and leaving her in darkness, “and you’ll stay in there until you realize that and start being a good girl.”
Susannah shook her head to clear away the past. She could imagine her mother now, sitting in the living room in the wooden rocker, staring into the fireplace, crucifixes pinned to the walls like a morbid insect collection.
She had to get home, and when she did, she would kneel before her mother and tell her everything. And her mother would either forgive her or damn her forever. Susannah knew in the back of her mind which it would be, but she felt compelled to go anyway. It was hard work, undoing eighteen years of self-flagellation.
The hours passed wrapped in these unsettling thoughts, and Susannah had to continually press her hands against the vents, wondering how long the car battery would last and if she could afford to turn up the heat any more. The slow creeping of the clock into the early morning kept Susannah’s bleary eyes busy, and she chewed on the end of the unlit cigarette which was now stained blood red with her smeared lipstick, her bones aching with cold.
Anxious over the battery, she turned off the car entirely, and it puttered into silence as an unbearable chill seeped under her clothes. Claustrophobia and restlessness churned through her muscles, her skin crawling the way it did when she was stuck in the middle seat on a ten-hour flight. “What is going on?” she murmured, her breath manifesting in the air like phantom cigarette smoke. “What is going on?”
Half an hour later, she could no longer feel her fingers or toes; Damn the battery, she thought viciously, and turned the key to a stuttering cough. “What...” she breathed, trying again, but it was like the matches, producing nothing, and she gave up with a cry and chucked the keys at the windshield, beating her fists futilely against the steering wheel. Her eyes prickled, and she peeled off her contacts and flicked them from the tips of her fingers, blinking against the burn in her corneas.
“I’m going to die,” she whispered, her voice shivering with her torso, “I’m going to die.”
She thought of the sign, ABANDON ALL HOPE.
She saw Virginia in her mind, shattered on concrete.
“Damn it,” she snapped, punching herself in
the thigh and steadying her breath. Her hand found the phone and flipped it open, fingers ready with her mother’s number, but the screen was dark. Dead.
Susannah was alone.
She closed her eyes.
***
They stood on the roof of a 36-story building, the wind off the lake cutting through Susannah’s coat and tugging her hair into a straggly imitation of Medusa. The clouds hung heavy with snow that had yet to fall.
“You can’t quit,” said Susannah.
Virginia’s arms were crossed. “I know I’m your big sister, but I can’t take care of you forever.”
Susannah scoffed. “When did you ever take care of me? How about when Mom would make me kneel for six hours a day to repent while you were off drunk somewhere, pretending to be at a church youth group?”
Virginia’s eyes went cold; they reminded Susannah of their mother’s. “That’s because you told her you killed the neighbor’s cat. You wanted to be punished.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m quitting,” said Virginia. “And I’m leaving. In nine months, I’ll be married, and we’re moving out of Chicago. It’s poison here. I can’t keep letting you drag me down, Anna. I’ll help you find another roommate if you can’t make the rent on your own—”
“You can’t leave,” snapped Susannah. Dark hair whipped across her eyes. “You can’t leave me here with her.” She paced the roof, staring out over the gleaming, star-like city lights.
Virginia shook her head. “You can leave, too. You just won’t let yourself.”
“Go to hell.”
“According to Mom, that’s where we’ll all end up, anyway,” said Virginia. She started walking towards the propped door to the stairs, but Susannah jumped into her path, stepping close to her sister.
“That’s it, then?” said Susannah. “You’ll get married and have 2.5 kids and a white picket fence and leave me in the dust picking my fingernails. And when Mom gets old and broken down, I’ll have to take care of her, and I’ll have to endure the abuse, just like when we were kids.”
Arcane II Page 9
