Julia Coursey | 17
Julia Coursey
How to Make Friends in Your Late Twenties
The house was alive so it had to eat, which meant that Baba Yaga was constantly pouring chicken feed down the garbage disposal. This led to problems with the pipes, but all the plumbers in the forest thought she was trying to eat them, so she had to learn how to make minor repairs by watching grainy episodes of This Old House on YouTube.
When she first bought the house on chicken legs, Baba Yaga had no idea how difficult the upkeep would be. She only thought about how she would finally be able to travel, imagining walking the house through the Italian countryside, setting up by the sea, and learning how to make gnocchi from scratch.
But by the time she’d gotten things secure enough to set out on the road, the house’s emotional problems had begun to manifest. Anytime she fixed something (greased a squeaky hinge or changed the air conditioner’s filter), the house would get scared and start running around in circles. Then it would try to fly away (the house didn’t have wings, but was pretty stupid) and she’d have to leave it until it finished its panic attack.
On these occasions, Baba Yaga would usually visit her sisters, also named Baba Yaga. One sister was an exact mirror image of Baba Yaga and only spoke backward; the other was a shadow and did not speak at all. It was, however, easy enough to tell them apart from Baba Yaga’s actual reflection and shadow, because she did not have a reflection and her shadow was pretty chatty (though only in an arcane language that she didn’t entirely understand). They would catch a few children together and figure out the plan for next Christmas while sucking the marrow from their bones, but the Babas Yaga didn’t have much in common beyond their names.