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Vasilisa the Beautiful

A colloquial retelling

By Jenny MottPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Once upon a time, there was a girl named Vasilisa, and her mom was dying. On her deathbed, Vasilisa's mom gave her a haunted doll and said “Give this doll a little bread and a little drink, and my blessing will bring it to life, to comfort you.” This is a Super Normal thing: haunted doll mom.

The mom dies, the father remarries, and the stepmother is a real jerk, and so are her two daughters. Vasilisa’s dad is always out of town, being a merchant, so there’s no one to stand up for her and she has to do all the chores and stuff. BUT! Luckily! She has this haunted doll, who does all the work for her (v convenient; where do I get one — jk I would not trade my alive mom for this).

When the three girls came of age, suitors start to come a-wooing — they’re all super into V, and none of them are into the stepsisters. So, the stepmom decides to kill Vasilisa. Naturally.

The stepmother tells her daughters to hide all of the matches in the house, and then she sends Vasilisa into the woods to borrow some matches from her sister, Baba Yaga (dope). Vasilisa is scared, and so she asks her haunted doll mom what to do.

“Go to Baba Yaga,” says the doll. “I will keep you safe.”

So, Vasilisa goes. After hiking through the woods all night and all day, she gets to a small hut on chicken legs (you know what it is), surrounded by a fence made of human bones (how extra can u get??). Night falls, and the skulls (!) that sit on the tops of the fence posts (!!) start to glow from the inside (!!!).

Vasilisa is super freaked out by this. But, before she can run away, Baba Yaga rolls on up in her mortar (like, a gigantic mortar — that’s how she gets around; she rows herself across dry land using a mortar as a boat and a pestle as a paddle! She has got to be R I P P E D!!).

See those puffy sleeves in the illustration?? ALL MUSCLE!

“Come inside, child,” says Baba Yaga. And Vasilisa goes (which, like, ofc; how could you not?).

Vasilisa explains that her stepmother, Baba Yaga’s sister, had sent her to borrow matches, because they needed light to work by in the evenings.

“I will give you some light,” says Baba Yaga. “But, you must earn it.” OR BE KILLED (implied).

Baba Yaga orders Vasilisa to do all these chores: clean the house and yard, wash Baba Yaga's laundry, cook her a meal; BUT she also has to do some bullshit: separate grains of rotten corn from grains of good corn, and separate poppy seeds from where they had spilled in the dirt. And all must be done by the time Baba Yaga returns in the evening.

So, Baba Yaga heads out in the morning and Vasilisa is like: How do I get chores done at home? Why, I make my haunted doll mom do them, of course! So, she does the same thing now, and spends all day just, like, snooping around Baba Yaga’s hut and also napping.

Baba Yaga comes back, and she sees how well everything’s been done, and she’s all like: “How is it you have managed to do so well today, girl?”

Rather than own up about having a haunted doll mom slave, Vasilisa says that she’s been #blessed by her dead mom.

Baba Yaga is like “Gross! Gross! Get out of my house! I don’t want any BLESSED PEOPLE in MY HOUSE!! What the HECK!!” And then, to keep the plot moving, she says, like “Take one of the lights from the fence post for your stepmother and get! outta! here!”

Her task complete, Vasilisa treks back to her stepmother’s house. And once she gets home her step-family tells her, like, "Thank God you’re back," because for all the time she was gone, they just could not manage to light any candles. Even light that they brought in from outside of the house! It would snuff itself out as soon as it crossed the threshold.

Then, Vasilisa’s stepmother and stepsisters actually stop talking for a minute, because they notice the GLOWING SKULL LIGHT that Vasilisa had brought back with her, and they’re like: What The Actual Fuck?? The hellfire burns through the skull and into the stepfamily, and they get consumed with it from the inside; the three figures crumble into three piles of ash, and Vasilisa lives happily ever after.

THE END

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About the Creator

Jenny Mott

Jenny is just a Silly Nerd with a lot of Feelings about Comic Books and Friendship and also This Capitalist Yoke We All Share; she enjoys Dogs and Sleeping and Cartoons. Her three favorite words are: Breakfast All Day.

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