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The Snap of Frost

Baba Yaga’s Champion

By Anton CranePublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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I watched Clint get flicked off the leg into Duluth harbor.

He looked tiny enough in my rearview mirror, but even more tiny against the enormous shadow of the barn a few feet above him. The legs of the chicken didn’t wobble or stagger at all under the tremendous weight of the barn when one of the legs purposefully flicked him aside.

The first thought that entered my mind was how insignificant he looked, flailing his arms and legs as he flew against the sunrise, like Icarus struggling to hold onto flight.

Then I saw the barn moving toward me. I slowed down, expecting it turn back and get Clint. I remember looking for ramps, any way I could launch my car as a 2000 pound missile to disable the legs long enough to save him.

The barn continued toward me, speeding up even. I barely processed this realization quickly enough to drive forward.

Baba Yaga was after me, not Clint, and I was almost out of gas. I sped up South Lake Avenue, past Superior Street, frowning, as all people from Duluth do, at the Fond Du-Luth Casino. I wished Baba Yaga would destroy that but no. She had to destroy its most pristine landmark: Grandma’s, or at least mostly destroy it.

I found myself wondering if they would hold the marathon next year, and if I should start training for it again.

It only took both feet stomping Pizza Luce to get my mind back to the chase. I pleaded with the car to make it to the 3rd Street one-way. I made it there just in time to see a red light come up behind me, naively praying that would at least give her some semblance of pause.

I yanked the car left to speed down 3rd Street only to see an explosion of bricks behind me as the Washington Center Recreation Center was kicked out of existence as Baba Yaga’s chicken feet found a footing.

I wanted to go to the place where I felt most at peace: to my parent’s house on Diamond Avenue. I knew if I could make it there, everything would be okay. All would be well. My parents would invite Baba Yaga in for a cup of coffee and she would be initiated into Minnesota-nice as dad drove to his bakery of the week to grab doughnuts for the unexpected visit. Mom would find a way to connect with Baba Yaga, probably through relatives.

As I turned onto 10th Avenue, racing up the bluffs, I remembered something else important.

Baba Yaga hated coffee.

I dismissed it, remembering that my parents always had tea.

The legs were kicking up 100 year old oak trees behind me as I turned left onto Skyline Parkway. I saw Duluth and Lake Superior lit up below me, and I couldn’t help but smile as the car continued to dash forward. I would make it. I would be safe.

Except I didn’t.

The car sputtered to death right on the Buckingham Creek bridge. I only had time enough to open the door before one of the barn’s feet stomped the engine and cracked the bridge. I leapt from the car, rolling onto the crumbling pavement as the other foot crunched through the rest of my car.

I spent most of last year working for that car, I thought to myself as I splashed into the creek. Now it was gone, like everything else. The feet shook the remains of my car from its talons, while the windshield wipers continued to flap defiantly against it.

The barn lowered itself down to a squat, and Baba Yaga’s green-lit face studied me from a few meters away. I also studied her, especially her face.

She wasn’t beautiful, or horribly ugly, she just…was. That’s the best way I can think to describe her. Her face looked like the epitome of rugged femininity, having been through childbirth, changing diapers, force-feeding fussy children, caring for the feeble and feeble-minded, raising fussy children, teaching children and adults, spousal death, and offering basic compassion to an indifferent mankind for thousands of years, only to be burned at the stake when she finally spoke up to express an alternate point of view.

She looked angry, but satisfied in her anger. She represented the abandoned wife, the forgotten mother, the neglected daughter. She represented the reason I had gone to law school, to fight for those all the cool kids left behind.

I knew her story, but I found myself aching to hear the why and how of it. I wanted her to say something, to teach me.

“Menya zovut Baba Yaga,” she said, offering me her hand.

I understood her Russian, even though I had never studied it. She said her name was Baba Yaga.

I reached out to take her hand, and at that point, she released, and rejected, Ronia.

That’s probably the most direct way of expressing what I saw. In another sense, a person could say that she took a step backward from the part of herself that was Ronia, leaving Ronia naked and unadorned with a red glowing mist around her, the same color coming from the box near the diner. The red glowing mist separated itself from Ronia, leaving her shivering in the crisp fall air.

A few leaves fell from maples nearby in the early morning breeze. I then saw the barn collapse on itself and I heard a gasping, coughing noise from inside the wreckage, sounding uncannily like Steve did once after he tried to smoke a cigar. The barn no longer looked like the sturdy powerhouse that had chased us all the way down from Hibbing. It looked like a dilapidated shadow of itself, barely present in the reality of the dawn.

I breathed in the air, noticing the rich smells of fall: roasted apples, sausages, and squash, tasting the fruit of the harvest on my tongue. I smelled campfires, and overwhelmingly the snap of fall frost. My eyes widened as I cracked my knuckles, as I became aware of lightning dancing across my fingers.

I looked around me and watched the frost spread from my fingertips. I reached toward a rose bush planted by the creek, gently swaying in the wind before and covered with roses at different stages, now lit up and frozen in place as the frost from my fingertips enveloped it. While I watched it wither and die, I also marveled at having captured its last bright, boldly-defiant, blast of beauty before death.

I had captured that beauty. It was now mine.

I turned my attention to the smaller of the Twin Ponds, and witnessed the ice forming like a thousand pointed star from the center, sending shards of sparkling ice to every inch of the shoreline as the rising sun continued creeping up the Eastern sky.

That beauty was now mine as well.

The glowing red mist wasn’t around me. It was now inside me. I heard the words, “Tebya zovut Baba Yaga” crashing down from everywhere. I felt the beauty leave Ronia and come to me. I watched as the maple leaves around me, once bright and magnificently red, fade to grayish brown as I looked upon them. I wasn’t alarmed by this change. I accepted it as a part of me.

Baba Yaga had found her champion. I had become Baba Yaga.

Fantasy
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About the Creator

Anton Crane

St. Paul hack trying to find his own F. Scott Fitzgerald moment, but without the booze. Lives with wife, daughter, dog, and an unending passion for the written word.

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