Hotel Baba Yaga

For a thousand years story-tellers have told stories of my wickedness and magical powers, the ugliness of my face, my warts and crooked nose, my stringy hair.

It is true that my house on chicken’s legs shrieks like a thousand nails scratched across a blackboard if someone approaches. Human skulls decorate the fence posts; their eye sockets glow red at night. I own a black cat who can shape-shift into the form of a beautiful woman, a wolf, a nag; a black cat who will scratch your eyes out if I order it to do so.

It is true that I am able to transform a single hair into a raging river. That I travel via a mortar with supersonic flight. That three horses and riders of the day, sunset, and black night are always at my command. But I am not one hundred per cent wickedness. I have a heart and my heart is not black like coal, or hard as diamonds. It beats red in my chest like your heart and once I saved a wife from the claws of Kostshei the Deathless.

Yet no one asks after my well-being. The truth is, I am not good. They are felling my birch forests. Every day the sound of their chainsaws whines like a distant pack of dogs. I smell the workmen’s blood and the sweat that drips down their weather-beaten faces, coming closer, hour by hour. Next week the property-developer will be at my front door demanding I move out so that he can knock down this hut and build a hotel in its place. Hotel Baba Yaga - all mod cons. Come and see the famous chicken’s legs, the skulls. Imagine it!

Why, you ask, can you not put a stop to this? You have magical and great powers.

The truth is, I weaken and grow old. I was born ancient but now I am geriatric. I forget the words of spells. My powers are disappearing as fast as summer snow. But the developer has no idea how fast the permafrost is thawing. The hotel will sink into the marsh and take him with it. This will be my last hurrah. Afterwards I too will disappear, along with the dragons, the elves, the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger and the one-striped opossum. However, I will remain in your stories, as long as you, the human race, continues to survive. 

By Bronwen Griffiths