Baba Yaga, Detroit

Abstract

69 MARY KAISER Baba Yaga, Detroit  Cupping a skull in my hands, candlelight casting a forked beam from its sockets, (because a skeleton can open any lock), I have found my way into the clearing. My granny’s house settles on knobby knees, trembling to receive me. Inside, aprons starched, their earlobes hanging low and soft, grey curls netted, the girls are waiting. They have lived in this house all their lives. Julia’s father was a farmer who fought for Mr. Lincoln. Julia learned to snip savage beads from Indian moccasins, her final gesture a turn of the heel, her work flat and thin until Edma’s hand came after her pulling a thread, hand of the bee. Every lock, no matter how flimsy, protects some treasure, so every Wednesday before the house grew legs, white girls in their fifties would wrap the pelts of vixens around their shoulders, and pulling flocked nets over their eyes, they’d lunch downtown at the city club in the book tower near the courts and the gold fisher dome. 70 In midcentury winter twilight, Eunice would sail homeward down grand river in her sky-blue fairlane, her satin pillbox floating inches above the dashboard, through streets where wild dogs roamed, past houses with no heat, no water, dark streets white people pretended not to see. In those days she was always lucky at cards, returning to her mother’s house brandishing a better pestle or a smoother spinning lazy susan, the false stones on her lobes sparkling when she laughed. Before the house grew legs, Mary Sylvia dyed her eggs with onionskins and laid them among crocuses in the warm loam of their magical clearing. Tiger-stripe, tortoise shell, she carried her work wherever she went. And as any key, no matter how unwieldy, promises release, so, in July a drawl floated out of the kitchen window before the house grew legs, cool as a breeze from Mackinaw, chanting a pop fly past the lefty in right field standing stock-still as a house by the side of the road, the seventh stretching, never calling a perfect game until the last pitch crossed the plate. But candles gutter and hollow bones give no light. I step away and turn to watch 71 as my granny’s house, rising on scaly legs, lifts then plops one huge webbed sole after the other across the grass, lurching pigeon-toed into the shadows, listing gently, top-heavy. The lot is empty. All the spells are broken, and the city has lost all its keys. Hard rains soak the soil and open the pods of impenetrable greens. Finally, they can breathe. ...