18 | Psychopomp Magazine
Then the shadow Yaga started bringing her fiancé to these get-togethers, the shadow of a diamond prominent on her dark finger. The fiancé had designed an app that lets you locate any children in the area and assigns them a desirability score based on plumpness, gullibility, and naughtiness. It hadn’t taken off yet, but he was sure there was a market there. All of the Yagas dutifully downloaded the app even though they were able to sniff out any child within a hundred miles without using their iPhones.
After these get-togethers, she’d inevitably text Koshchey the Deathless and he’d come over for green tea and Netflix. She’d given him one of her magical steeds a few years ago and since then they’d had sort of a thing. She wasn’t really looking for anything serious―the whole point of having a house that moved was not having to settle (particularly not for someone who was always absconding with heroes’ wives). It was nice to have someone in the house who wasn’t an ungrateful cat or a terrified child, and she always had such bad luck with Tinder.
Baba Yaga wondered if she should get bangs; she thought about whitening her filed-down iron teeth; she read about her old college friends’ lives on Facebook.
The house eventually found a meadow that kept it relatively calm, and she started a garden. So many of her mysterious herbs could be cultivated at home, like an evil feeling in the heart of a stepmother. Once she had actual work to do, the disembodied hands that act as her helpers flew to her. The weeding went faster with all of them pulling together, and there was a lot of high fiving and general camaraderie. They built a white picket fence with some of the extra bones she kept for odd projects. (She had a fairly large collection of bone china, handed down to her from previous generations of Yagas, and a few new pieces she’d DIY’d herself from the remains of foolish boys). Baba Yaga even added a few tiki torch skulls around the pool in the backyard. Once they were finished, she threw a luau-