“Hunger,” said Mother Baba, “is what makes you Baba Yaga. Know it; for you haven’t eaten in six years.”
It was true, achingly true. She felt it in her stomach then, had to hunch over and bite down the cry. It came anyway, moan of need, of desire. So much pain, not having — so much pain the emptiness of nothing, the craving of everything. Six years and she hadn’t eaten. Her hands went to her stomach, touched it, clawed it, telling it to be quiet. But it screamed. And she screamed too, her mouth ripped open going wide, wider until it stretched… from earth to hell? From hell to…heaven? Such a small space, after all, not a space at all. An infant could swallow the difference, the difference between pain and pleasure, empty and full. There was no difference. Was there? She didn’t know; she didn’t know anything. She wept hungering, wept wanting, shut her mouth and howled between caged teeth. Trying to push up the pit of emptiness from her stomach, tried to empty emptiness. Tried to vomit, but she hadn’t eaten anything in six years. Vomited stinking air in hot, panting breaths.
They gusted against Mother Baba’s wrinkled cheeks. She had knelt in front of her, taking her young hands in her own, small and light as a bird’s would be if a bird had hands. Kissed her again with the squirming lips, on the knuckles this time.
“Hush, dear heart,” she crooned.“Hush, loved one. My child. See what I have made you.”
Starling felt something soft daub the tears away from her wide, hungry eyes. Seeing was eating too. She saw what Baba Yaga had knitted on her rocking chair, with her fingerbone needles. It was a scarf, like the one she wore wound around her little, knobbed head. And not like it at all. This one was fresh and pink, smooth as a baby’s flesh. Maybe it was a baby’s flesh. A gift, kind and beautiful, and part of her hunger was sated with it. Only part, though.
She wept, could do nothing else, as her Mother wound the gift around her brow, brushed back her black hair with so much tenderness. So much love. How could she not cry? She bowed her head and felt it tilted upwards with one finger, very sharp, almost like the bone needles that had made her scarf, so little flesh left. She looked into rheumy, cruel eyes, and felt love strike suddenly, like the pain of hunger.
“Start with these, love, start with this.” The finger moved up her chin, brushed over her lower lip and stopped there to rest, at the line of her mouth. Starling kissed it, couldn’t stop crying.
“Eat it,” came Baba Yaga’s voice, harsh as it ever was, but soft, trying to reassure. “Do not be afraid, Starling, I am here. I will be with you. I am with you. But I want to be closer to you, closer even than this. Take me in, my little gosling; take me into you. Let me fill what is so empty. Eat. Start with this.”
Mother Baba’s needle-sharp finger moved against Starling lips, asking to be allowed, a worm on the mouth of the earth. Wanting to burrow. And she was so hungry. She parted her lips, felt the worm enter the darkness of her mouth, sit on her tongue. Taste exploded there as if she had never known it in her life. She never had. So vivid and brilliant it nearly made her gag, frightened her it was so intense. Tasted like the finger of a woman immeasurably old, a woman who put her hands into mothers’ wombs, pulled out the babies and ate them, not licking her fingers after, not washing them. Never washing them. Tasted like fetal fluids, demon urine and perfect rot — mangled carrion among a mushroom grove, stripped bare of flesh, clothed again with maggots. Tasted like shit from an angel’s bowels, wine from a devil’s cup. Like night that never goes away.
It tasted sweet. Starling shuddered and couldn’t stop, wept and couldn’t stop. It tasted so sweet.
“Bite, my sweet.” So sweet. “Start with this.”
Starling’s teeth felt throbbing and weak — they had never bitten anything but each other, never crushed something down her throat but wind and water. She bit, meeting bone almost instantly — grabbed Baba Yaga’s wrist to steady herself and peeled back. Strips of flesh curled back from bone, came away in her mouth, she chewed. And swallowed. And swallowed.
Heaven. Hell. She was in both, in agony as the tiny morsel slid into her cavernous belly, soothing nothing — in bliss as the first part of her Mother entered to stay. It made her ravenous for more. She opened her mouth around all the other fingers at once, chewing, twisting, ripping. Moved to the hand, shredded the trembling palm away, half transparent as it glinted in the firelight before she tossed her head and swallowed it down, like a bird. If a bird ate hands. If a bird was a little Starling, a little girl with a scarf of flesh wrapped around her head, kneeling before the hearth, before her Mother, who was feeding her.
Baba Yaga said nothing as her daughter ate, watched as her other fingers were disrobed of their scabbed, puckered clothes, her other hand. Watched as her darling Starling slowly moved into her arms, as she ate them wrist to shoulder, into the embrace waiting there.
Pressed against her Mother’s chest, Starling nuzzled at her brown, crinkled neck, eating her throat. Feeling the white bristle tickling her cheek as she tore away the wizened chin, felt something deeper tickle and rustle as she ate the lips that had kissed her. She left red, dripping blood where she passed, for her hands and face and mouth were still drenched in the liquid of what once had been her mother. What once had been her blood.
Baba Yaga did not bleed as her skin was taken from her, had no blood left to give after so many years. Bit by bit, piece by piece, her skeleton was exposed to the light, yellowed as parchment, as bones in a grave many centuries without the body to house them. Starling remembered thinking curiously as she ate — so brief and small a thought among so wide a universe of sensation — that she had been wrong. Her Mother was not dying. She was already dead.
A final voice whispered into her mind as she peeled the last of the old woman’s brow away, swallowed the last patch of neglected, forlorn flesh. Rustled like a wind while Starling stared at empty sockets deep with shadow in Baba Yaga’s skull.
Be well, my love, my Starling, my little girl. You are Baba Yaga now.
Baba Yaga stood then, before the angry fire, and lifted the bleached bones of an old woman into her arms. It weighed nothing, the skeleton of everything empty, everything that fed and never filled. She turned and walked out of the cottage that stood on chicken legs, down the steps to a withered garden and an unfinished fence made of bones.
A light rain had begun to fall, though there weren’t any clouds above, falling across her face from the cold, unloving stars. It washed the blood away that slicked her skin, which emerged white as her hair underneath the skin-knit scarf, no longer black, white as a crone’s.
The shadows in the trees of the forest watched quietly as she walked down the path and paused by the fence, looking out. They bowed to her and turned their black faces respectfully from her hooded, golden eyes, fierce as any eagle’s, as any sun. This was the queen of the dark woods.
Gradually they faded deeper into the forest, sensing her dismissal, leaving the greater darkness that comes when there are no shadows. When there is nothing to throw them and no sun to cast them.
Baba Yaga knelt by the fence, paused, looked up to the sky where there would never be a sun, and began laying bones. Building a fence. To keep out the dark, evil things that crept in the long, long night.
