How to Stay Married to Baba Yaga

1. Don’t ask if the pot roast is made from human meat.
2. Human meat is an acquired taste. Acquire it.
3. Collect the eggs the house lays.
4. Crack one into a pan and cook it the way she likes.
5. Crack another into the mortar and grind it down with the pestle. A yolk is not just a yolk: at the bottom of all that gold is a secret only the witches see. You aren’t a witch. Choke down the battered yolks nonetheless.
6. When your witch-wife asks you to fetch herbs from the forest, don’t delay.
7. In the woods, in the dark, your heart thuds and your breath makes ghosts in the starlight. Nothing here will harm you, but when you stand between white pillars of petrified sycamores, you feel the way you did the night you met her, when you were just another Vasilisa, another Yelena, another Marya, another Ivan Ivanovich: another lost soul in a litany of lost souls whose skulls stake the path to her door. Don’t ever forget how your story started.
8. Don’t lead the girl in the woods back to the hut.
9. Do not lead the lost girl to your wife’s hut.
10. If you wish to remain married, you cannot lead the girl to your wife’s hut to become pot roast. You married your wife knowingly, and you have eaten the roasts and the shanks and the bellies and the thighs, but this is different. This is the girl you used to be. If your wife doesn’t spare her, it’ll be like watching yourself get torn apart.
11. When the girl cries after you in the dark—“Wait!”—disappear into the shadows and take the long way home.
12. Your wife harrumphs that it took you long enough, and you kiss the snow white hair at her temple. She will use the herbs for spells you won’t ask about, and she won’t know about the girl like you in the woods. In the morning, wake to the crow of the cockerel house, still in love with your wife.
13. When you stumble into the kitchen and find the girl seated beside Baba Yaga, don’t panic. “I saw you in the woods last night,” says the girl. “You didn’t tell me you saw a girl,” your wife says, a smile slicing open her mouth. Whatever you say next, understand that a life and a marriage depend upon it.
14. When the girl says “My stepmother told me not to come home unless it was with light from Baba Yaga’s hut,” and Baba Yaga asks you “What shall we do with her?” she is offering you a choice. Choose wisely.
15. Assign the girl tasks and chores, the more impossible the better. This is how you proved yourself to Baba Yaga and made yourself worth loving. Order the girl to separate poppyseeds from soil, fish a shuttle from the bottom of a well, gaze upon the skulls of all who came before her and choose where to stake her own. When she completes all of it, without flinching, make her hunt the firebird and bring back a golden feather. Tell her to trap death itself in a treasure chest inside the belly of a rusalka. Look into her reflection and describe who she sees: the girl she was or the witch she could be.
16. Think of the egg yolk that is not just a yolk. When you look at your wife, sometimes you want to put the yolk back in the shell. She catches you looking and smacks your wrist with her pestle. “It isn’t time yet,” she says. “Stop mourning.”
17. Tell the girl she has passed every test, and she may leave with the light of Baba Yaga’s hut.
18. Don’t cry when she takes the light and leaves.
19. Sweep the house.
20. Wash the laundry.
21. Gather eggs.
22. Crack one egg.
23. Cook it.
24. Feed your wife.
25. Crack another egg.
26. Grind its yolk with the mortar and pestle.
27. Swallow it.
28. Realize what the girl did to you was a spell: she entered your life and changed it so thoroughly you can never go back to before.
29. Let your wife hold you. Let her feed you. Tell her you cannot believe the girl returned to the family that sent her away to die. Let her pet your hair as you weep, thinking of your own childhood, of your own life as a placeholder in someone else’s story, until you found her, until you made yourself worthy of being chosen by her, until you chose her in return. Tell her you cannot imagine choosing differently. Tell her you would never choose differently, no matter how many times the story is told, no matter who does the telling.
30. Listen: “The light was enchanted,” says Baba Yaga. “When the girl’s stepfamily beholds it, they will all burn to ash. It was her idea.” Reflect: the girl didn’t choose people who couldn’t love her; she chose to remake the cartography of her world, like you did. Take Baba Yaga’s hand. Kiss her fingers. Inhale the scent of spice on her wrist. Wipe your tears with your thumb, and feed them to her.
31. The key to staying married a long time is to know the pattern of the story you’ve married into. You’ve met hundreds of Yelenas and Vasilisas, but there is only one Baba Yaga. And inevitably, Baba Yaga is defeated. Inevitably, Baba Yaga dies.
32. Mourn her, even though this has happened a hundred times. When this all started, the woods were deeper with nightmares and dreams. The world ordered itself around a different set of rules. Mourn your Baba Yaga. Mourn the way it used to be.
33. Go outside. The house has laid an egg.
34. Crack it into the mortar and grind it down with the pestle. A yolk is not just a yolk: at the bottom of all that gold is a secret only the witches see, and you may not be a witch, but choke the battered yolk down nonetheless. The moment it takes root, let yourself cry. Remember how she called you a romantic fool and love her all the more for it. Watch your skin harden to eggshell. Feel your heart become yolk. Your mind, your memory, the golden firebird feathers of your stories, all become yolk as the two of you become one—one body, two people, connected at the hilt, a reflection that ripples into an uncharted future. By the time she breaks out of you, a silver-haired and cackling matryoshka witch, you’re gone. You haven’t happened yet.
35. A Vasilisa or a Yelena or a Marya or an Ivan Ivanovich: these are the roles available to you, each with a story leading you to Baba Yaga’s doorstep. When you come knocking on her door, you are ready to acquire a taste for flesh, to separate poppyseed from ash. You will do whatever she asks you to do, not yet aware that you have already done that and more, that she already loves you, that you make each other possible. That is the trick to a long marriage: you must make each other possible. You poured magic into your marriage bond; did you really think it could end?

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Originally published in Baffling Magazine.

© 2023 S.M. Hallow