BABA JAGA
Short Story
By E. C. Traganas
“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
Brooklyn 1965
When the young fall, they bounce, a voice was intoning from high up on a window ledge. But when the old fall, they break. Remember that. This is Doctor Bone wishing you a Saturday filled with positivity—. Agnes straightened herself up, stretched out her arm and shut off the transistor radio. She fumbled in her apron for a scented violet pastille then ambled back into the dense shrubbery to resume her morning pruning.
“Lizzie,” she cooed audibly at a tall and stately Queen Elizabeth grandiflora rose. “You are magnificent today, aren’t you! And Francis, too, as saucy as ever,” she chirruped at the bushy rambler dotted with musky pink and ivory blossoms. Agnes was sure she could hear the delicate plants rally with hidden life and respond to her blandishments with high-pitched, swaying sighs of welcome. She listened captivated as the morning silence melted away and birthed soft, fey murmurings in the surrounding air. The roses seemed to be coming to life; she was sure they were speaking to her in their own spectral language. She heard them in overlapping waves, each bush vibrating and emitting its own pitched frequency, joining in an ethereal totality of symphonic sounds. She knew them all by name, her familiar spirit friends, and could sense their amazing little bodies bursting with an unseen, magical force. She swore she could actually hear them click and squeak—she couldn’t explain it—but saw with pity how they seemed to shrivel and deflate when her neighbour’s teenage son played that new punchy rock and roll music on his stereo set, and when they were left alone with just the birds twittering high up in the trees and the ladybugs lustily munching on aphids in the background, her roses would bolt upright and outwards in lavish, exuberant joy, like her contented house cat stretching his graceful limbs in the dappled sunlight after an enjoyable meal. Agnes strolled about, stroking and petting encouragingly. There is no greater love than the beauty of a thriving garden, she thought.
Here is a plump, juicy bud, she mused as she cupped the sappy globe in her gloved hand. A rose on the verge of unfolding, she thought in wonderment, savouring the pinkish bulging underbelly swelling with promise, framed by its milky, greenish leaf and stem. She brushed it gently and watched as it bobbed up and down with a tensile resilience, springing back and forth as if toying playfully like a sprightly toddler.
Agnes moved on and, pulling out her shears, snipped off a jagged and dried up woody stem upon which was stuck a brownish lumpy rosehip—the remnant of last year’s once luxuriant growth. Just like trimming off an exiguous toenail, she thought, apologizing mutely to the plant. The desiccated stub dropped to the ground with a snap, and as her work boot trampled over it, the clipping crackled underneath like a crisp dead bone.
“Ahoy—hallo there!” a raspy voice called just a few feet away.
Agnes felt a pair of faded, pearly blue eyes fixing their gaze on her with an unnerving intensity. She scanned the wizened form standing over her and could not help noticing a string of plastic poly bags strapped across the old woman’s bosom, crinkling with every movement like lightweight wind chimes. They seemed foreign, these see-through bags, so unlike ordinary brown paper bags, with plastic handles attached with strings around the woman’s neck, and they appeared to have been used repeatedly until they were crumpled and creased. Agnes moved towards the fence, brushed herself off, and stood up straight. “And you are…”
“You love flowers, I see.” There was a faint lilt to the words, as if a smile was waiting to burst through, but remained checked and subdued in the background. “You have kind soul, I tink. Here,” the woman said in a heavily accented voice while rustling a bag towards her. Agnes studied the stranger with a peculiar fascination. The woman was clearly elderly, maybe in her seventies—or, she might even be twenty years older. There was an odd, ageless quality to her. She noted the woman’s hair, a shock of pure and slick silvery white, not a streak of grey, parted down the middle and braided on either side, the flattened plaits arranged crosswise as if in an old-fashioned crown on the top of her head. But it was her skin that startled Agnes: like alabaster and so transparently moist and stretched so tautly across her cheeks that a fine bluish network of veins and capillaries was clearly visible underneath. A few stray black hairs dotted what may have once been full arching eyebrows, and her thin lips were sapless, like two blades of winter grass. Then Agnes’s gaze fell upon the woman’s hands: like the gnarled and curly knobs of ancient rosebush roots, the fingers were clumped and knotted together in arthritic stumps. “My name is Jaga,” the old woman said. “It is short for Jadwiga.”
“Jadwiga—an intriguing name from a far away land...”
“Jaga—Yaga,” the old woman repeated evasively, “but not like old Baba Jaga—you must know her, no? In my country, she like a witch, an ole woman who cooks and eats the little children. Ha, I once lived in a forest, too, like Baba Jaga—but no worry, I won’t eat you!”
Agnes inched away towards the overgrowth of her fairy sprite shrub rose and felt a familiar refuge in the tiny, blush pink feathery blooms. As a child, she would often spread her blanket near the plant’s fan-like canopy and spend hours alone engrossed in her book of Grimm’s fairy tales. “Yes. I am from the Old Country.” Jaga’s mouth stretched into a timorous smile that put Agnes’s initial caution to rest. “I have been to many places, seen things through the years.” Unlike you, Agnes thought she heard the woman imply, so far removed from the real world. “Here,” Jaga said shaking the bag at her again with her crooked hand. “Take some. They are cherries—sour cherries. Not as good as our cherries back home, but still good. They are good for you—for your bones, for your skin, I tink.” Aha, Agnes thought. Her secret, like Baba Jaga, the keeper of the eternal waters of agelessness. “How old you tink I am?” Jaga asked.
There was a tremor in her thin voice, Agnes noticed, like a twig about to split, and every now and then her tone would rise and break as if her vocal chords would unravel like ragged threads. Agnes knew the jarring noise would be distressing to her plants, and suspected they were at this moment recoiling in discomfort. All is well, little ones, she thought, speaking calmly to Francis and Lizzie and the others in her mind’s voice, certain that they would hear her and feel her concern. Agnes stared at the woman for a moment, tongue-tied and disarmed while trying to make sense of the stranger’s unorthodox question. What have I said to inspire this woman’s confidence, she asked herself. I don’t really feel as if I know her from somewhere, not even long ago in my imagination. Why is she approaching me like this? And these cherries—where are they from? The bag looks grubby. No, don’t accept them, an inner voice cautioned. “Thank you, but no, I’ll pass,” Agnes replied. “As for your age—I really can’t tell…”
“Well, I am very old, very ancient,” Jaga replied as her voice sallied higher on the last word as if separating herself from the normal stream of time. Agnes felt herself whirling gradually into the orbit of the woman’s strange persona. “I am not as old as Baba Jaga, but my soul is old, thousands of years old, like the ancient trees that grow in my forest back home.” Agnes said nothing but focused her watchful eyes on the old woman’s ashen veins that seemed to pulse beneath her papery skin with a pale but steady and perceptible tremor. A patch of sunlight rested briefly on Jaga’s forehead, highlighting her diaphanous complexion. What is the mysterious thread that is holding this fragile soul together, Agnes marvelled. The old woman moved closer, tilting her head to the side, just a few inches from Agnes, as if to confess a cherished secret. There was a brief hush as a tenuous breeze nudged the surrounding rosebuds to life, causing them to cluster together in a lissome, affirmative nod. “Do you believe in prophets?” Jaga whispered.
“Yes, of course,” Agnes said.
“And do you believe that a prophet can be a woman, also?” Jaga’s deformed fingers began to rifle through one of her plastic bags. “Well, I tell you, I am a prophet,” she proclaimed as if baring her soul and revealing her life’s most hidden mystery. “God has spoken to me—to me, Jaga!” She pulled out a folded sheet printed in purplish mimeographed letters and waved it meaningfully in the air. Agnes breathed in a faint mesmerizing fragrance of methanol, the same scent that would send her students into transports of euphoria whenever she passed around a batch of freshly inked test papers in her classroom. She took the crinkled sheet in her gloved hand, opened it and scanned it briskly. The border was adorned with what seemed like clumsily etched chicken bones and disembodied flowers. Stand Upright And Never Fall, the text began. To find salvation, you must pray, ‘Dear God, Turn Your Back To The Forest And Your Front To Me!’ Repeat this three times and only then will God enter your garden. Agnes shook her head in disbelief.
“I can save this world…from earthquakes, from fires—from Satan. You do believe the devil exists, no?” Agnes was quietly attentive and said nothing. “I write what God reveal to me. You must read,” Jaga enjoined waving her hand with disturbing urgency. “You must believe!” Here, the old woman’s voice suddenly scraped and broke into shrill splinters, sounding more and more like the squeaking hinges on her rusty garden gate.
Agnes felt her plants drooping in distress at this outburst. There was a long spell of silence and she knew Jaga’s appeal was begging for some kind of response. But Agnes was now asking herself, what does this word mean? Is she saying that she hears voices—that she communes with God? I wonder if she can hear my roses prattling. Can she hear my Lizzie laughing and whispering to the sunshine? “So, what is a prophet, Jaga?” she said, hoping to bring a swift clarity to the encounter. “Someone who receives inspiration from God?”
“Yes!” Jaga declared.
“And God is a divine being, right?”
“Yes.”
“Speaking to us through the spirit, the holy, unknowable spirit?”
“Yes, exactly!”
Agnes looked up earnestly as Jaga’s milky eyes focused on her in approval. “Then, you must believe that plants, too, speak to us through God…”
Jaga burst into a toothy triumphant grin. “Yes, yes—I do!” Impulsively, she ran a bony hand through the thicket of bushes, twisting, pinching, nipping here and there, then plucked off a clutch of yellow floribunda roses.
“Arthur Bell—oh, no!” Agnes cried. She was sure she could hear a piercing shriek punctuating the stillness. The prized old-world rose bush she had paid the grower a premium for just last year was screaming in pain, howling in indignation, she was sure of it, and she felt her eyes brimming with unshed tears. “Hush now, it will pass. All will be well,” she whispered as if in deep prayer while stroking the butchered plant. Suddenly, she felt scandalized and offended by the old woman’s brutish ways. No prophet would maim and torture a living creature so heartlessly, she fumed inwardly. Only a godless ogre would massacre an innocent thing of beauty. Move away, her inner voice counselled and get back to work. She folded the grimy tract and pressed it back into the old woman’s hand. Oh, God—no, no, no! she soughed, clicking her tongue three times. “I’m sorry, but you can see—I’m very busy.”
Be positive, Agnes thought. Keep your face to the sunshine, Doctor Bone always says. She picked up her pruning knife and burrowed herself back into the thick protective shade of her tall multicoloured climber. “Oh, Joseph,” she sighed, admiring the plant’s magnificent thorny armour. “You never fail me.” She fastened a loose cane onto an upright trellis and broke off a predatory root sucker.
Jaga shrugged her knurly shoulders in defeat and slipped the printed tract back into her pocket. Rearranging the tangle of plastic bags securely around her neck, she tossed a handful of cherry pips in the bushes and moved on.
E.C.Traganas - Author of the debut novel Twelfth House and Shaded Pergola, a collection of short poetry and haiku with original illustrations, E.C. Traganas has published in over a hundred literary magazines including The Society of Classical Poets, The San Antonio Review, The Brussels Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Kosmeo Magazine, Amethyst Review, and countless others. She enjoys a professional career as a Juilliard-trained concert pianist & composer, has held over 40 nationally-curated exhibitions of her artwork and is the founder/director of Woodside Writers, a literary forum based in New York City.
Shaded Pergola: Haiku & Other Short Poems With Illustrations https://a.co/d/dt81bEh
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