Pears out of Pores

It took about half an hour to reach where the chase ended. I saw the barn, or what was left of it, in the middle of a bridge over a creek on Skyline Drive. I had just followed the tracks, and tire skid marks, all the way up from Canal Park.

I arrived to hear Ronia complaining about birds, more specifically, a flock of birds that had just been startled enough to spontaneously defecate in her bright, golden hair while picking at it to add the requisite golden flair to their nests. She was screeching, even louder than the tires had been an hour ago.

I noticed they were gray partridges, but didn’t think more beyond that.

I figured whatever happened to Baba Yaga, she was now gone. I saw Melinda standing in the middle of the creek, Ronia bowled over next to her with arms fending off the partridges, and Steve staggering up from the barn wreckage not noticing he was buck naked. The remains of Melinda’s car peeked from underneath what remained of the barn.

Where I had been gasping before, I suddenly had my wind back when I saw Melinda. I ran up to her and gave her a diving hug, almost knocking her off her feet.

I felt fatigue wash over me as I absorbed the warmth of Melinda’s smile. My legs gave way underneath me and I looked back to see just how far I ran. I staggered forward and Melinda caught me, holding me upright with no effort at all.

“You ran all the way up here?” she asked, helping me upright, sounding incredulous as she studied my face.

I nodded, “I had to know that you were okay.”

She nodded back and wrapped me in a hug that made me feel tingly and warm.

“I’m better than that now,” she whispered in my ear.

“Now that Baba Yaga’s gone?” I pulled myself back from the hug to look at her.

There was something different about her face. She had certainly been pretty before, but now she had a glow that hadn’t been there. It wasn’t a glow of beauty, but more of confidence in herself. It was almost defiant, and a bit fierce. It looked the way she looked when I had first seen her break Baba Yaga’s spell at the diner, but without the easy familiarity she tried to convey to the patrons.

It was real, this confidence, and it in itself was beautiful. I felt like she could tell me to do anything and I would be overjoyed to do it.

“Hey Melinda!” Steve shouted, still not aware of his nakedness. “Why are we in Duluth? Don’t your parents live just over the next hill?”

He preened himself in the morning sun, feeling the warmth of the sun’s rays on his body. He then noticed Ronia was naked.

“Hey Ronia!” he strutted over to her. “You’re looking fine, even with the bird poop in your hair.”

Ronia answered with a shriek that could dissolve bladder stones. At that point, Steve finally noticed Melinda and I staring at him. He finally noticed his natural state, grabbed a piece of worn shingle off the ground, and held it up over his genitals.

“I’ll give you a thousand bucks for your pants, dude,” Steve walked up and said to me.

“Pass,” I replied, sidestepping his approach and ushering Melinda away from him.

Melinda added, looking over her shoulder, “You owe me several thousand dollars as it is, Steve.”

“Do you think your dad would lend me a pair of pants?” he asked, walking up to her, unfazed by her comment.

Melinda fixed him with a single glance and the temperature around the immediate area dropped about 20 degrees. Within ten seconds, his leg hair grew out as his feet shrunk until he had become a satyr: a man above the waist, except for the horns sprouting out of his head, and a goat below the waist.

“No,” she replied, turning her attention back to me.

“So that’s what happened to Baba Yaga,” I pondered, noticing the temperature returning back to normal.

“The difference is, I’m still me,” Melinda said, placing a hand on my shoulder.

I pointed at Steve.

“But…a satyr?”

Melinda grimaced, moving her hand from my shoulder to her forehead, “Okay, so that was Baba Yaga. But you have to admit it’s kind of appropriate. Right?”

“If you look back a few thousand years, maybe.”

Steve felt his midsection, “I now have two…three…four stomachs! Cool!”

“Hey Steve?” she cocked her eyebrows at Steve. “Do you like this transformation better than being a vole?”

“Uh…” he appeared lost in thought, carefully feeling his horns. “Yes?”

“Wrong answer,” she snarled, as lightning sparked from her fingertips, transforming Steve into a vole.

Steve scampered off to dig a burrow as Ronia approached.

“He did say he liked being a vole,” Ronia said, her arms raised in surrender.

“Hello Ronia,” Melinda said, her words ending with icicles.

“I know…” Ronia stuttered, lowering her arms as she shivered. “…that you don’t like me.”

Melinda arched her eyebrows once again into mini Matterhorns, crossing her arms in front of her.

“But we have something in common now, don’t we?” Ronia continued. “We’ve both been Baba Yaga.”

Melinda looked away from her as Ronia continued to approach on tiptoes.

“We’ve both experienced her power, felt her fury,” she paused her approach. “At them.”

She pointed at me.

I pointed at myself, looking lost.

“It’s always been her against them, hasn’t it?” Ronia pleaded. “Against all men. Men who have betrayed us, raped us, burned us at the stake.”

“Men who took you to Paris and then proceeded to buy you half a million dollars worth of…stuff?” Melinda interrupted Ronia’s rant.

“Oh, but that was different. That was just fun. I never asked him to…” Ronia’s apology sounded half-baked.

“Ruin his relationship with me?” Melinda finished the sentence, her face becoming black.

Ronia trembled, just for an instant. She then gathered herself, brushing off the ruined relationship as casually as she flipped her hair.

“But isn’t that what we all do? Isn’t that all we can do, against them?”

“You’re not making sense, Ronia,” Melinda glared as a crack echoed over the valley.

Ronia stopped her approach. She noticed she was unable to move one of her legs.

“What are you doing?” she asked Melinda, trying to move the leg.

“I’m going to give you time to think about what you did to our relationship,” as another crack fixed Ronia’s mobile leg next to the immobile one.

“While Baba Yaga hated the men who betrayed her,” Melinda snapped her fingers and Ronia’s back bent at what looked like anything but a comfortable angle. “It’s safe to say that she hated the women who betrayed her even more, women she was trying to help.”

Ronia’s arms cracked into impossible positions next, followed by her neck and her face.

Melinda approached her, breathing over her.

“You know I started a women’s shelter in Hibbing?” Melinda asked, “I was prepared to stay there for a while, build a reputation for myself while I helped other women, offering them pro-bono legal representation and helping them fill out the proper paperwork they needed to help them get back on their feet.

“I figured it was the least I could do. I got financial help from the state to build that organization, money that I was responsible for. Do you know what happened to that financial help?”

Ronia shifted her eyes toward Melinda. It was the only part of her face still mobile.

“Steve spent it on your Paris trip,” Melinda explained. “Funny how he didn’t think I would notice. In the process, he made me look like I had embezzled the money from the state, especially since the state auditors came by the day after you both left. They came to see how I was doing and all but closed me down, contingent on whether I could raise $50,000 within 30 days to pay back the money. I sold most of my possessions, asked my parents, asked friends, friends of friends, to raise the money. I had just done that, gathering up the $50,000 when you both came waltzing into the diner.

“I’m clawing back from a world of financial hurt, but my reputation is solid. As to your reputation, on the other hand…let’s just say you’re not exactly known for your charity in Hibbing.”

Ronia’s skin went from being smooth to mottled with eczema and shingles boiling up from every pore, ultimately ending in a thick, tree bark texture covering her entire body. Her hair became a canopy of branches and leaves, with additional branches protruding from her face, breasts, backside, hips, and arms. Tiny teardrop fruits began to form on the ends of the upper branches.

“For every teardrop you cry in your suffering, another pear will form,” Melinda said quietly, closing Ronia’s terrified eyes with a wave of her hand. “Every time someone, or something, plucks a pear, it will hurt enough to make you cry more, creating more pears.”

Melinda stepped back as a partridge flew over, perching in the tree while munching on a pear. A flock of other partridges flew over as well, all of them pecking at the pears. A few squirrels came over and they started licking their paws in anticipation.

“And a partridge in a pear tree,” I sang, backing away from Melinda’s immediate glare.

“You know that’s actually a reference to Christ?” she asked me.

“I do now,” I replied. “So what happens now, Ms. Yaga?”

“I’m still Melinda, first and foremost.”

“Does it, I mean the process of assimilation, work that way?”

“It works this way, with me,” she started to shrug and then her confidence, the same self-assuredness, washed over her and she gave me a smile to rival the sunrise below. “While the others were all to eager to let Baba Yaga take over them, kind of like a cell phone, or social media, takes over our lives, I’m using her as a tool to help me. I’ll pass the bar, and rebuild my organization.”

“Baba Yaga can help you raise funds,” I said, telling her how the experience with her purse and the purchase of the barn.

“I’d rather do it the honest way,” she said after I finished. “It will have more meaning.”

I plucked a pear from the tree and took a bite out of it.

“How is it?” she asked.

“Initially it’s quite sweet,” I said, spitting out the pear after chewing a bit. “Then it turns sour.”

I coughed the rest of the pear out of range of my taste buds.

“Sounds like they still needs to ripen, then,” she grinned. “My parents live just about a mile from here. I’m pretty sure they’ll give us breakfast. I’m sure they’d love to meet you.”

I kicked a piece of the barn out of the road, watching it float down the creek for a few feet before sinking.

“Do you think they’ll have cake?” I asked.