My sister was only fifteen then. What sort of mistakes could she have already made? 

“We have no idea why, dochka,” my mother said.

I knew that Baba Yaga was a witch who ate wicked girls. She cooked them in her oven before eating them with her iron teeth. But if you came to her with a pure heart, she would instead give you the thing you desired most. My baba had been the one to tell me these things. 

I had a habit of sticking out my tongue when I cracked eggs, and while helping her make bread dough one afternoon, she pinched the tip of my tongue between her fingers and told me, “If you don’t learn to keep it in your mouth, I’ll call Baba Yaga to come and cut it out.”

 My baba had only one eye. Over the empty socket she wore a lacy black patch that she’d made herself. 

“I used to like to eat cake batter when I was a girl,” she told me. “I’d lick it off spoons and spatulas when my mother wasn’t looking. One day, when I was doing this, the witch appeared and plucked out my eye.” 

I was careful after that, biting down on my tongue when it tried to snake its way out of my mouth, turning it into a swollen thing between my sharp little teeth. 

My parents were Ukrainian immigrants. And how awful it must’ve been for them to come to Canada, their accents still thick and nearly impenetrable, only to have their eldest daughter snatched away a handful of years after they’d arrived. I suppose it made sense to them to blame the things in the woods for Anne’s disappearance. It was a way to keep me close to home. Twisting my hands in our yard as the neighbourhood kids flocked to the trees on their bicycles. 

When I returned home from school each day, my mother would tell me stories about the black-hearted girls who visited Baba Yaga and went straight into the fires of the witch’s oven. My mother would sit across from me, her newly hennaed hair vibrant and autumnal, bright orange in the sunlight of the kitchen. She would let me reach over and tuck it behind her ears as we said the words that had become a mantra within our home: only good girls get to go home again.

In the stories, Baba Yaga was many things: a cloud, death, winter, a snake, a bird, a mermaid, or even a goddess. I was afraid of most things, but above all I feared the sky, that a flock of birds would snatch me from where I stood and take me to the witch. 

I grew up petrified of the things under the bed, that they could cross over into our world and take me back into a realm where the daylight never came. On the rare occasions that I slept at friends’ places, I always had nightmares: the glow of moon pouring through the open window to wrap me in a light that was the witch, her laughter coursing through my body as I twisted myself awake, screaming. I was told that these were just dreams, but I believed I knew the truth. 

My friend Angelica was the only one who could coax me away from home. In the heat of the Saskatchewan summer—when the grasses had forgotten that they could move because there had been no wind in such a long time—she could convince me to walk to the nearby pond. We’d dip our feet in and later peel off the fat, black leeches that had fed on us. 

Angelica and I liked to trade stories. She would tell me about seals that shed their skins and became beautiful women, about giants who stole little boys for seven years, and of witches that could transport themselves into cellars with a few magic words and drink the finest wines in all existence. 

On one such afternoon, my feet kicking gently into the tepid pond water, I finally told Angelica about how Baba Yaga had stolen my sister from me. “Part of me believes that she’s still alive, hidden in the cellars of the witch’s little house in the woods,” I admitted, “that someday she’ll come back to us.” 

Angelica had looked at me strangely, her pants rolled up not quite enough to keep them from getting wet. She spoke very slowly and carefully. “You know what really happened, don’t you? A neighbour saw your sister get into a car with a stranger.” 

I looked at her in disbelief. We were fourteen then, and perhaps too old for fairy tales. Both of us were still on the cusp of becoming the sort of teenagers our classmates were, kids who smoked and followed each other into the trees for something other than games. 

Angelica continued, her voice soft, “They found her body on the banks of the river just outside town a week after she was reported missing. They think she was killed the same night she was taken.” 

“I don’t believe you,” I said. 

“I’ll show you,” she promised. 

She took my hand and pulled me from the bank. We went to the library, and in the newspaper archives we found story after story about the man hunt. There were write-ups of suspects who were questioned, and about the discovery of my sister’s body. A woman had come across Anne’s remains while out walking her dog. I asked Angelica to leave, and I sat there alone until close, pouring over the articles until the type swam past my eyes like fish made of disjointed bone. 

Soon, my fifteenth birthday came and went. I was as old as Anne had ever gotten to be. I didn’t tell my parents that I knew what had happened to my sister, but I began to avoid my mother. I danced around her story times at the table, floating through the room like my own sort of ghost, taking the glass of milk she offered me and claiming to have too much homework to sit with her in the kitchen. 

One afternoon not long after my day at the library, I called to say I was with Angelica and that I’d be home late. I walked to the town police station where a man in a too-vivid blue shirt brought me into a little room and let me read Anne’s case file. It was a hot September day, and the room a closet of heat. The man opened a couple of windows for me, but they didn’t help much. 

The man came in to check on me a few times, bringing me a can of ginger ale once, staring at me as I let the papers become strewn around me. I saved her autopsy report for last and when I did read it, I was sorry to have ever come. 

I went home and said nothing to my mother about where I’d been. 

Soon the trees were bare again and the snows came in great hulking blasts that left my parents and I shut up in our little house for days at a time. By then, I had all but stopped speaking to them. I could tell that this hurt my mother, and when she passed the door of my bedroom she always stood for a little while, staring in at me as if I were a stranger. She’d let her hair go black again and it was so dark against her white skin that it drew out the green of the veins along her temples, making her look sick. 

That January the town was lost in a whiteout for three days. Two people froze to death trying to walk home from where their cars had careened into the ditch. I was trapped inside with my parents, half-crazed as my mother chased me about the house peppering me with questions about school, about my teachers, about anything she could think of. 

“Everything’s fine,” I told her. “Just fine.”

But I hadn’t been to most of my classes in weeks. I’d taken up with an older boy and we spent the afternoons driving around or parked on roadsides, finding our way into the backseat of his Pontiac. My period hadn’t come since November, and though I knew otherwise, I wanted to believe that maybe I was still too young to count on its regular appearance. I was afraid to tell my mother that I’d become the kind of girl that witches ate without a thought. 

Angelica was the only person I could have told, and we hadn’t spoken much since the afternoon she’d told me about my sister. I saw her in the hallways at school sometimes, her face blurred by the pills that my boyfriend shared with me. I missed my friend and her stories, but I didn’t know how to go back to that place in time.  

  I waited a few days after the storm, until most of the roads had been plowed and the sidewalks were trodden down with the footprints of snow boots before I wandered into the woods. 

I didn’t believe in the witch anymore. Not really. But all the same I found the house that sat atop chicken feet, its chimney pouring black smoke. The fence was made of bones, just as the stories had said, its posts topped with human skulls. Their eye sockets glowed bright as I made my way up the path. And with my breath held I knocked on the door and waited to see if the witch would answer and grant my wish.