Babayaga

pasture with a picturesque cardinal red barn standing on a knoll off in the distance. There was a creek, and a few yards beyond that a stand of ash trees. With no real notion except an instinct to keep moving, Will ran toward the grove, but the soil was boggy and his shoes quickly got stuck in the mud. Panicked and fumbling, he tried to correct his footing, but he stumbled and fell, slipping sideways on the ground. He started to right himself, but before he could get up, he felt the hard pressure of steel being pressed against his head. Slowly, he sank back down onto his knees.

“Well, pal,” smirked Jake, “you can’t say we didn’t give you a nice last meal.”

“Okay. But give me one minute more, just one minute, please.” Will shut his eyes and tried to prepare himself for what was coming next. He quickly thought of all the beautiful things he had known in his life: his parents, his mother’s two cats sleeping in the sun, Doris Day singing “Shanghai,” a glass of whiskey on a winter’s night, and the taste of the warm crepe he had eaten the first day he was in France. Then, finally, Zoya, her eyes, her cheekbones, the nape of her neck, and the way her breasts and bare torso looked as she lay half uncovered on the bed, breathing heavily, exhausted from his kisses.

Will heard the click of the pistol. He opened his eyes and noticed that one of the Paris metro’s Art Nouveau entrances had risen out of the meadow. “At least I get to see some of Paris before I go.”

“What?”

Will pointed at the metro entrance.

“Oh damn—” Jake started to speak but his words were interrupted by a big, strange crashing and small yelping sound, as if an oak tree had fallen over a dog. Then there was silence. Will stayed on his knees, uncertain of what he should do next. Finally he looked up over his shoulder and found a stranger standing above him, awkwardly wielding a heavy branch in his hands. At the man’s feet lay Jake, crumpled up on the wet field, his suit splattered with mud, his skull neatly caved in.

“Is he dead?”

The man nodded, with a shrug.

“Gee, thanks,” said Will, slowly picking himself up off the ground. He put out his hand. “My name’s Will. Are you French or American? Francais ou americain?”

The man shook his hand and seemed about to answer when an enormous blinding white light flashed out and exploded across the landscape, engulfing all their surroundings. The man, the broad field, the distant trees, the whole world, completely vanished. Will tried shutting his eyes to block out the blinding, burning glare, but he had no way to stop the fierce light; his nerves felt scalded and raw as his panicked consciousness was shocked to a bright expansion point from which he was sure he would never return. The only bleak reassurance he had was that he absolutely knew what this was, the moment he had feared for years now, the great A-bomb annihilation. Someone had done it, the button had been pushed, an arrogant prime minister, a prideful president, a crazed stupid admiral or a lethally offended premier, it did not matter, some arrogant son of a bitch had launched the ballistic missiles, from Washington, Moscow, 10 Downing, or out from the bowels of one of the new nuclear submarines, it did not matter; the preemptive solution to every global conflict had landed, and all the wars being waged on the planet, every battle, every argument over justice or injustice, from the greatest of moral struggles to the most petty kitchen debates, conflagrations over the borders of oil nations to ornery grandmothers haggling over the price of thimbles, none of it mattered now, like the sun-scorched scorpions on the shores of some distant Bikini atoll, which had all been irradiated into an iridescent nothingness, it was over. Talk about the meek inheriting the earth, this once proud species, who had risen out of the jungle mud to overcome the mythical dragons of fire, serpent, fang, and talon, who had built spired cities, cleared continents, and were poised to conquer space itself, had been defeated, ultimately, by the fractional split of the tiny atom. All this flashed across Will’s tumbling mind as he spun deep into the shrill, screaming abyss. An inexorable vacuum pulled at him, swallowing and sucking him down toward a nodal nothingness. And then it was over.

VII

Lyda and I, we had a lover,
the naked professor, who, wrapped up in our blankets,
drew his hieroglyph riddles
across the whitewashed walls
and out onto the broad planked floors,
his nervous enthusiasm cracking his chalk,
and we would stare, wondering,
Where is this going?

Yes, yes, truth is vitality,
knowledge is power,
and we have our own lexicon, seared to mind,
of root and sinew, berry and boil.
Our cause is clear and yet our impact slight,
but you, well, where are you going?

Your scientists dig for answers.
The way pigtails play with matryoshka dolls,
one riddle tucked inside the last,
following it down, winding deeper
into endless, spiraling mysteries
while behind you, the hot winds blow
and the desert sands slip in
under sunny doorsills.

Enough of this, it makes me anxious,
let us instead set our eyes back
to the city of the fool and the crone.
Now there is a pair too, so very like you,
who never doubt their path.