The bar stood on the outskirts, a gatehouse before things grew really strange, stood on its chicken legs, and then crouched to admit the Writer. A borzoi napped in the corner near the fire. The bartender, who was the proprietor and also a baba yaga, bent, boney, and socketed, emerged from the back room wearing her headscarf tied snuggly around her chin. When Baba Yaga looked at her, the Writer felt that she was suddenly the heroine of a story, however imperiled, however judged.

There were two horsemen in the bar, seated at a low table. One was white: his face was white, he was dressed all in white, his hair was white, and somewhere outside, his horse was white. Another man was red: his face, his horse, and all the rest were red. The horsemen drank wine and sometimes argued, their voices rising and falling like the tides ebbing and flowing. They seemed also to be listening to everything Baba Yaga said to the woman at the bar.

“Well? Are you seeking something or running away from something?”

“Can’t it be both?” The Writer wore a saffron gown; at the top, the thin straps hooked onto her shoulders, digging into the skin. Silk wrapped around her like a sheet over a sleeping body, and her skin was reminded of its existence by the silk and of its exposure by all the untouched places. Her hidden belly had four healing incisions in the long moment when wounds become scars, painful sometimes, one slicing vertically through the bellybutton and caked with remnants of dried blood, three others orbiting the center. These were four entrances, now blocked up, each entrance a path to the same place where a malignant thing was cut out. Now her body sat on a bar stool, a little chilly, saffron silk draping down to her ankles.

Baba Yaga wore her headscarf to detain her hair, and drank home-brewed ale. She drank it constantly, and it was brewed constantly in a hut behind the bar. It was as if Baba Yaga drinking the ale were part of the brewing, some final processing, the end and beginning of a natural cycle. She never became drunk, or at least never drunker. Baba Yaga remained in the same state.

“Where do you think you’re going in a frock like that?” asked Baba Yaga, sensing every stratum of feeling below the dress using some Grandmother Death’s echolocation.

“Here,” said the Writer. “I’ve been ill for a while, and I wanted to be out of the house, and to be seen.”

“Yes, people who don’t know where to go often end up here. Well, I see you,” said Baba Yaga. “Don’t spill this now.” The Writer had not ordered a beer nor was she asked to pay for it.

The bar knelt, and in walked the Tsarevna Who Never Laughed. She was frowning, in fact, and wrapped in a shawl of white goat down, doubled over so that it became darker and greyer in the folds. Some pure maiden, wanting to impress the Tsar, had taken a whole year to knit the shawl, and the corners of the Tsarevna’s mouth had lifted slightly when it first touched her skin. It was like soft spiderwebs, like gentle synapses.

The opposite of laughing is not, as you might suppose, weeping. Both actions are warm with heaving. The opposite of laughter is instead stillness. The Tsarevna who never laughed walked into the bar, but was otherwise unmoving. She wore a white dress of lace and crepe and pearls, and around it she had wrapped her shawl. The horsemen drinking in the corner rose when the Tsarevna entered, but Baba Yaga was not impressed. The Writer was impressed but did not rise, not knowing she should.

The Tsarevna gathered her shawl around her and sat on a bar stool. “I’ll have a cider, grandmother.” Baba Yaga poured her a cider, and so the baba yaga had her ale, the Writer had ale, and the Tsarevna Who Never Laughed had cider. Baba Yaga looked expectantly at the Writer, who raised her glass.

“To all that binds us together.” This had been the correct thing to say. The three drank.

The Writer with the surgical wounds, having spent weeks in bed reading novels, wanted to be interesting to Baba Yaga and to befriend the Tsarevna. She wanted the horsemen to think she was beautiful, and to be the heroine of the story. She also wanted to be in the bar in the most minimal way she could, to haunt it like a ghost, to warm it like a lamp, to read it like a tale. But her woundedness was a bulbous field around her midsection, unusually vulnerable to elbows, like a belly pregnant with a new, healthy version of herself. Baba Yaga seemed to see this false belly. The Writer clutched her drab purse. She had nothing to match her beautiful dress and had brought her everyday bag, stuffed with tissues and makeup, pills and health insurance cards.

The White Horseman stood again with his glass of wine. “To the ladies,” he ejaculated. The horsemen drank, and Baba Yaga’s borzoi signed deeply in her sleep, as though Baba Yaga herself was sighing through her. The Tsarevna looked at the dog in recognition.

All that was the beginning.

*

The bar knelt and another horseman walked in. This one was black. His face was black, he was all dressed in black, and he had left a horse outside that was also black. He took some vodka from Baba Yaga, and joined the other horsemen, who had already been drinking for a long time.

The Writer wanted to give something to the Tsarevna to prove she had something a tsarevna needed. She also wanted to imagine that being a tsarevna was a guarantee of happiness, at least some of the time. The Writer had never seen someone drinking cider so unhappily.

“Tsarevna, I have painkillers from my surgery that I don’t need.” She had been too afraid to use them. “Would you like to try them? They might make you laugh.”

Another princess would have smiled at this, but of course this Tsarevna would not, could not. Her face managed some magnanimity for the Writer, some fellow-feeling at least so far as they were both breathing young women sitting on bar stools. The Tsarevna swallowed three pills, leaving the orange bottle on the bar in front of her. She washed the pills down with the cider.

Baba Yaga was feeding bones to her dog, and giving her belly rubs, so she did not see the gifting. She saw the hideous pill bottle when she returned, the bottle with The Writer’s name on it, and the Tsarevna sipping her cider and beginning to look sleepy.

“What idiotic decadence is this?” hissed Baba Yaga. “Haven’t I given you good cider and ale? Isn’t the night vast and mysterious enough for you?”

The Writer, hot now, felt worse than ever, worse than wounds, and wanted to disappear more than ever, even from herself. “I thought it would make her smile.”

“I don’t care about smiling,” slurred the Tsarevna, leaning inelegantly on the bar, her curls dipping into some stickiness. “My father cares about smiling.”

“My father” said by the Tsarevna always had a grand effect of darkening rooms, stiffening joints, craning necks, and dropping whatever one was holding – everywhere except for this bar. The horsemen in the corner drank their wine and vodka. Baba Yaga did not blink, and the borzoi, mother to all the Tsar’s hounds, yawned. The Writer might have flinched, might have trembled, but was frozen by Baba Yaga’s gaze.

“You are ashamed,” said Baba Yaga. “And so you will remain.”

The Writer was naked. The first sensation was of cold, then of missing softness, of her pale whiteness like a dimly shining bulb, then of the four scars like marks on a wall. Never having been naked in a bar, she did not know what to do. Baba Yaga had the gown on now, on top of her other clothes so that it looked like a saffron pinafore. The Writer shrank, shoulders slumping, knees curling up, arms folding in, as if that could hide her nudity, but of course she just looked like a naked, wounded, pale woman, curling inward, holding an ugly purse.

The Writer’s face, which had nothing to do with anything, really, grew hot, perhaps to take her mind off the rest of her body. Her throat closed, maybe so she wouldn’t think of that stupid gift to the Tsarevna and the consequences, but her throat couldn’t stay closed forever. Oh, and her dress. She had wasted it.

Then, the Tsarevna fell off her bar stool and all rose to help her. “Tell your stupid house to stop rotating.”

“It’s not, dear. You’re just dizzy.”

The three horsemen lifted her up and stood back. The Tsarevna scratched at her arms angrily. The borzoi rolled to expose her other side to the fire. Baba Yaga came around the bar. She was now the same height as the Tsarevna, able to unspool herself to fit a moment’s requirements. Muttering, Baba Yaga worked at untying her kerchief’s knot at her chin. Baba Yaga’s scarf was black, with a pattern of large pink roses, small blue roses, and all the roses’ thorns and greenery. Frustrated with the knot, Baba Yaga threw her hands up. “Untie yourself then!” and the scarf did, unfurling into a square above her head. Baba Yaga’s hair also unfurled and re-braided itself down her back. The Tsarevna stumbled back and was caught at the shoulders by the Red Horseman. At a pointed gesture from Baba Yaga, the scarf folded into a triangle and alit on the Tsarevna’s head. Baba Yaga herself tied the knot at her chin, muttering again. The roses all paled and then turned and remained red. The Horseman helped the Tsarevna back onto her stool. She did not scratch, or reel, or smile.

“Thank you,” she said to the bar at large. Saying thanks without even a slight smile is a challenge only for the unwealthy and powerless. It is natural for a tsarevna.

The Writer was crying into her ale. Her four scars searing, lighting up like a lighthouse: first they flashed visible to some elsewhere and then swept back to here.

Baba Yaga furiously took the glass of cider the Tsarevna had barely touched, and drank half the glass in one gulp. She slammed it onto the bar again and looked at the young women. What was she supposed to do with these two?

“Oh, don’t cry,” the Tsarevna said to the crying woman. “Crying doesn’t do anything.”

“Sometimes it does,” cried the Writer. “Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes it changes things. You start crying, and then things are different by the time you’re done.”

The Tsarevna took off her shawl. “You can’t dress yourself in tears. At least wear this.” She gave it to the Writer, who wrapped the large shawl around her shoulders and breasts, cuddling herself in it like a wet child on a windy beach. See? Crying can do a lot.

No one had noticed the White Horseman leave. He slipped out after lifting the Tsarevna, leaving an empty wineglass on the bar. Dawn was breaking.

That was the middle.

*

The orange bottle was still on the bar and there were three pills missing. Baba Yaga took the bottle. “I’ll feed them to the dog.”

“No!” gasped the Writer.

“Fit for the Tsarevna but not a dog?” The Writer began to cry again. Baba Yaga walked past the dog and past the remaining horsemen. One by one, she flicked the small white pills into the fire. At each flick there was a single, terrible thud, like the Tsar’s army had all taken a single marching step at once against the pavement, stomp, stomp for twenty-seven thuds of ghostly boots. The fire became jittery, and that was all.

The glass of ale in front of the Writer now had less ale but remained almost full by the magic of tears. Baba Yaga took the glass from the Writer, who stopped crying, like choking suddenly, and placed it in front of the Tsarevna. “Taste the tears of your subject, who only wanted to please you. Taste them, for even if she is a fool, she is your fool. Nothing else in this bar belongs to you, just this Writer and her foolish tears.”

The Tsarevna tried to loosen the knot at her chin but could not, just as she could not refuse Baba Yaga. Perhaps she had come to Baba Yaga for just this relief. She took the glass in both her hands. “To all that binds us together.” She drank in large, unprincesslike gulps, salty like stars fading into the ocean, malty like the beginning of autumn.

The Writer felt cleansed like a boat’s hosed hull, like a blown nose, and began to feel beautiful. The Tsarevna too was altered, her innards mashing and mixing. Her cheeks did not rise in a smile but rosied. She still tugged at the knotted scarf.

Baba Yaga clunked a glass of cider in front of the beautiful Writer now. She didn’t need to enchant it, because its lessons were brewed in already. “What do you think of my cider? What do you taste in it?”

“Apples.”

“Well.”

“Tart.”

“That’s only a little better.”

“Sweet.”

“Maybe you are a dunce.”

“Yeast. Gnarl. Boreal. Windy. Blossom. Graft. Parent. Paganism. Cellar. Honeybee. Folksong. Crisp. Bough. Bruise.”

“There. Keep tasting.”

“There!” gasped the Tsarevna, yanking the kerchief from her head, sneering and sweating in the triumph of a woman whose chess opponents always lost on purpose and much too quickly.

The Red Horseman clattered to his feet, waking the borzoi, who weightlessly followed him. The Tsarevna hopped off her barstool. “Hello, Sir Sunshine. I’d like to come too.” The Horseman smiled brightly.

“You know, Tsarevna, that you will pass over many lands that your father does not rule? And that the people in those lands will not bow or curtsey to you, nor will the animals on the ground or the birds in the sky?”

“Yes.”

“You know that it is hard work to plow the clouds and even harder to harvest the rain and the snow?”

“I understand.”

“Every day we will go beyond the thrice-ninth land, where the sun shines also, and we will visit Baba Yaga every night.”

The Tsarevna smiled, quite by accident.

“Let the dog out as you leave,” said Baba Yaga. “Alright and take my dress.” The saffron dress rolled off Baba Yaga and swam as an eel swims to the Tsarevna. “You will complement the daylight in this.” The dress rolled onto the Tsarevna, as her white crepe fell to the floor.

The Writer flinched when Baba Yaga called the saffron gown hers. Well, now it was the Tsarevna’s, and it did look nice on her. How stupid the Writer had been. But the Tsarevna, aglow, unfurled the rosy kerchief. “This is for you, so take off that shawl.”

The Writer was by now pliant as clay. She bared herself to the icy bar, and the Tsarevna tied the large scarf below her armpits like a bath towel. It covered the scars, it flattened the Writer like a paper doll.

Ripening like an apple now, the Writer drank her cider. The Red Horseman opened the door and the bar knelt to allow them out, into the city, into the woods, wherever they were. First went the borzoi to attend to her important business, then the Tsarevna, and then the Horseman. The sun was rising.

I thought looking time in the eye would mean I was no longer scared of the end of it, no longer scared of the way it drags everything to sagging.

“You thought, you thought. Thinking doesn’t do anything. All it does is produce more thinking.”

“Baba Yaga, grandmother, why don’t you take this shawl since I have your kerchief. It is so warm and soft.”

Baba Yaga took it. She wrapped this last thing around her shoulders, and rather liked the way it snuggled. Baba Yaga poured another cider. “Are you writing this down?”

I know because I was there. I drank ale and cider. They flowed into my mouth but did not spill on my dress.

---

Corina Bardoff is a writer and librarian currently living in New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Exacting Clam, Storm Cellar, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @causeatiger