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House With Bird Feet

Once upon a time there was a girl named Sarah, whose mother loved her very very very much.


Occasionally, when Sarah expressed a desire to do some of these very dangerous things, her mother would get quite upset. She would grab Sarah’s chin and stare deep into her eyes, as if she could see straight down to Sarah’s heart, and say “I’m only saying this because I love you. You’re all I’ve got, and I can’t let anything happen to you. You understand that, right?”

And Sarah would nod and say that she understood, because what else could she do?

It is hardly surprising, given this sort of treatment, that Sarah was very timid (at least at home) and soon learned to stop asking to ride the Ferris Wheel or go on sleepovers. But it is also not very surprising that in the secret depths of her heart, where her mother could not go, she had vowed to make her escape.

She didn’t want to hurt her mother. Her mother baked cookies and sang songs and showed her how to tie her shoes and helped her with her homework when it was hard (and sometimes when it wasn’t, which was a little bit annoying.) She just wanted her mother to love her a little bit less, like a normal person, so that she could go to camp and not have to leave the carnival early.

Sometimes when her mother grabbed her chin and stared into her eyes, Sarah wondered if she could see these traitorous feelings lurking down in the depth. It seemed as if she ought to be able to, because the feelings were so strong, as if they were big rebellious slogans wallpapered around the walls of her heart, saying I THINK I COULD PROBABLY RIDE A HORSE IF IT WAS NICE and I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE FERRIS WHEEL.

But her mother never said anything about it, and so Sarah went on thinking these thoughts, and over time she thought them more and more.

One day in spring, when she was playing in the back garden, a house walked into the alley.

The house was very clearly walking, because the roof would go up when it took a step and then sink back down at the bottom of the step, then bob up again. Sarah couldn’t see its feet because there was a high wall around her back garden, but she could not think of any other explanation.

The roof of the house was small and sharply peaked, with a jutting gable over the front door. Sarah stared at it, open-mouthed, then ran to the gate in the wall that led to the alley.

It was a wooden gate, higher than Sarah’s head, and it had a big metal latch with a padlock through it. Sarah’s mother would have bricked up the gate entirely if she could have, so that criminals couldn’t come through it, but she had to leave another exit in case the house burned down and they couldn’t get out of the front door. She had compromised with the padlock, and had also told Sarah seventeen times that she was never, ever to open the door, particularly not if anyone knocked and asked to be let in. Since Sarah had no idea where the key was, she couldn’t have done so anyway, and so was spared being told an eighteenth time.

But even if the gate didn’t open, there was a large crack between the hinges and the wall, and Sarah put her shoulder against the bricks and peered out through it at the house.

The house had gigantic scaly legs like a bird. They went up past Sarah’s shoulders and they ended in clawed feet as big as bathtubs. The round scales on the front of each leg were the size of automobile tires.

As she watched, the house took another step forward. The roof went up and came bobbing down. The house’s foot came down on an old soda can in the alley and it went crink! and was crushed flat.

“Whoa,” said Sarah.

The house heard her. It stopped, and instead of taking another step forward it put its other foot down beside the first one and hunkered down on its heels.

The underside of the house was now about three feet from the ground. The bird legs didn’t seem to attach to the house in any way that Sarah could see. They vanished instead into a tangle of pipes, which were probably plumbing, but which looked suspiciously scaly, as if they had also been made out of chicken feet.

A little faucet, the sort you would attach a hose to, stuck out from the side of the house nearest Sarah. Instead of a knob with spokes, it had a little skull on it, no bigger than Sarah’s palm. The skull’s jaws were open in a huge grin, and it was turned sideways so that it looked rather silly as well as alarming.

It wasn’t a very large house. It couldn’t have more than two rooms in it, one upstairs and one down, and even those wouldn’t be any larger than Sarah’s own bedroom. Even so, the sides of the house came very close to the walls on either side of the alley. If it walked by the gate, Sarah would be been able to fit her hand through the gap at the hinges and touch the faucet as it went past.

She twisted around so that she could look down the alley the other direction. Surely someone was going to come along any moment—a delivery driver or one of the people who parked in the alley sometimes—and get out and complain about the house blocking the road?

But nobody did. Sarah took a quick look behind her at the back porch to make sure that her mother hadn’t come out.

One of the windows of the house flew open and the shutters banged open. “Not here!” said a woman’s voice from inside the house. “The next yard over, fool house!”

The house stamped its feet and settled even lower to the ground.

“Gah!” The woman reached through the window and slapped the house’s outer wall. She was wearing long black gloves with the fingers cut out of them. “The next one! I’ll have you breaded and fried and made into colossal drumsticks!”

The bottom of the house hit the concrete of the alley with a thud.

“Saint Sunday’s bones!” cried the woman, pulling her hand back, and then she said a great many other things, some of which were extremely rude. Sarah paid careful attention to these and committed many of them to memory.

After a moment, the front door opened, and the woman came out.

She was very old and very stout. Her black gloves went up to the elbow and the ends were frayed and unraveling. Her dress was gray and shapeless and she wore a tall purple hat like a top hat, with a live salamander on top of it. Sarah could tell that the salamander was alive because its throat pulsed as its breathed, and it blinked its eyes very slowly in the sunlight.

She was leaning on a cane but could stand without it, because as soon as she stepped out of the door she turned around and whacked the house across the gutters with the cane.

The house rattled its pipes and slammed all its windows shut with a hmmmph! sound.

“Glorified chicken coop! I’ll take you apart and sell you for scrap!” cried the old woman. “You’re not my first house, you know! I had a marvelous cottage that padded about on leopard feet, and I had it shot and stuffed and turned into a storage shed for a much more minor infraction than this!”

Sarah could not help but feel sorry for the leopard-footed house and made a small noise of dismay.

The old woman whipped around, scowling, and Sarah did not pull back nearly quickly enough.

“Aha!” she cried, stomping toward the gate. Sarah backed away hurriedly, but although she could not see the old woman, she could hear the click of her shoes and the tap of her cane. “I see you there! Spying on me, were you?”

“I was not!” said Sarah, indignant. “I was just looking! I’ve never seen a house like that before!”

There was a long pause, during which Sarah remembered that she was never ever ever in ten million years on pain of death supposed to talk to strangers, and the old woman went hmmmph! rather like the house.

“Well,” said the old woman grudgingly, “I suppose that’s true enough. There aren’t any other houses like mine. What’s your name?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” said Sarah, and because that felt horribly rude, she added “I’m sorry.” She looked back over her shoulder, but her mother had not come out to demand to know who she was talking to.

“If you’re waiting for someone to come and make introductions, you’ll be waiting a long time,” snapped the old woman. “Besides, it’s not strangers you need to worry about—it’s the ones you know that get you.” She peered through the crack in the gate. Sarah could see one bright black eye and the side of her nose. “I’m Baba Yaga.”

“I’m Sarah,” said Sarah.

“Hmm. Suits you. What do you think of my house?”

“It’s a very interesting house,” said Sarah, “but I don’t think you should hit it. It’s not very nice.”

The house rattled its pipes in a loud, satisfied manner, and Baba Yaga cackled. “Fair enough!” She turned away from the gate to say, over her shoulder, “I see why you stopped.”

The house preened a little.

Baba Yaga put her eye back to the gap in the hinge. “Open the gate, will you?” she said. “Whispering through cracks is all very good for foolish lovers and eloping brides, but you’re too young and I’m too old and have had far too many husbands besides.”

“I can’t,” said Sarah. “I mean, there’s a padlock. And my mother would never let me. And how many husbands have you had?”

“Plenty,” said Baba Yaga. “Good and bad and most points in between, starting when I wasn’t much older than you and had less sense than the gods gave geese. But never mind that. A padlock, eh?”

Sarah heard the crack of her cane against the wooden gate, and Baba Yaga chanted “Open, lock! Open, bar!”

The padlock twisted neatly open and fell off the latch. The gate swung silently open.

Sarah took another step back. Baba Yaga was rather alarming (if quite interesting) and if her mother saw her talking to a strange old woman in the back garden, with the gate open, Sarah was going to be in more trouble than anyone had ever been in in the history of the world.

Baba Yaga stood framed between the walls with her house squatting behind her. The salamander on her hat fixed Sarah with eyes like wet pebbles.

“Are you frightened?” asked the old woman. “You should be, you know. I am as old as sinning and twice as dangerous. I drink my beer from the skulls of heroes.”

Sarah did not know that women drank beer. Her mother never drank beer. She called it nasty, low stuff and said that she’d never allow it in the house.

Sarah said as much to Baba Yaga.

The old woman’s eyes narrowed. “You’re dangerously ignorant, girl,” she said. “It is not your fault at the moment, though if you grow much older it will be.”

Sarah looked back toward the house.

“Hmmm,” said Baba Yaga. “Stand, girl, and let me know you.”

Baba Yaga took two steps forward, digging her cane into the ground. Sarah knew that she should run away, run back to the house and get her mother and call the police immediately, but her feet seemed to be stuck to the ground. She tried to lift one up and it stayed stuck, as if the soles of her sneakers had turned to glue.

Baba Yaga came up right next to her, close enough that Sarah could smell her. She didn’t smell like an old woman, like cold cream and antiseptic, the way Sarah’s grandmother smelled in the home. She smelled like an animal, like a cat’s fur, like sharp herbs and old books.

The salamander on her hat twitched its tail restlessly back and forth.

The old woman stared into Sarah’s eyes, down deep, deeper than her mother ever saw. Sarah could feel Baba Yaga looking all the way down into her, into the chamber with her thoughts written on the walls.

“Well,” said Baba Yaga, taking a step back, and Sarah could move again.

She could have run, but she didn’t. She felt dizzy. She blinked several times and rubbed her forehead. She could hear crows cawing behind her eyes.

“All right!” Baba Yaga called over her shoulder to the house. “You were right, you overgrown lump of yesterday’s architecture!”

She turned back to Sarah and poked her in the chest with the tip of her cane. “Tomorrow. You come to the house tomorrow, and I’ll grant you your heart’s desire, unless I’m in a bad mood, in which case I’ll probably suck the marrow out of your bones. Either way. Tomorrow, you hear?”

And she turned and stumped out of the garden, leaning on her cane. The gate slammed shut behind her and the padlock clambered up the wooden crosspiece on the gate and swung itself out to the latch.

The bird-footed house stood up. It paced down the alley, two yards down, to the house with a FOR SALE sign out front. Then it rose up high on one leg and stepped daintily over the wall.

For a moment it stood there, very tall in the empty yard. An upstairs window sash rose an inch or two, and the house winked at Sarah.

Then the house settled down on its heels, and that was that, at least until tomorrow.



If you’ve ever wondered how I write a thing (and lord, why would you?) the answer is that I sit down and write something like this one afternoon, and then I shove it into a metaphorical drawer and see if it ever bothers me again.

Actually, that’s simplistic. I wrote the first dozen paragraphs, muttered a bit to myself, thought that I probably tackled the whole theme much better in that one other project I was working on and maybe I should just go write a thousand words on that, and so I did so. (I may be overthinking that one, though, but it’s got some great bits.) Then this half page of nothing much nagged at me, and I went back and changed a few things so  it wasn’t quite like the other thing, and then I tried to take a nap and laid there wondering how to drop the Call To Adventure on the poor girl’s head and toyed with a few ideas involving doors opening to mysterious places and then I went “Oh, duh, Baba Yaga!” because that was obviously what happened next and the chicken-footed house came walking down the alley and once you put Baba Yaga in, she more or less handles her own lines, thank you very much, because you are not cool enough to write dialog for Baba Yaga, pathetic mortal with a shamefully low husband count.

No, at this time I have absolutely no idea what happens next. I won’t until I write it, if I ever write it. Once I write it, I will probably know better, but possibly not because sometimes I am very wrong. And you note that that could, at its most generous, be called a “working title.” Things don’t get good titles until much later, if at all.

This is pretty much how it reads when it comes out of the hose. I changed maybe three sentences in what could be called “editing” and took out a paragraph that wasn’t going anywhere. Most of the editing occurs as I am writing, when I stare at a paragraph and go “I am using her name way too many times in succession,” or “I need to mention this sooner so I can mention it again here.” (I assume that’s probably how most people do it, but having only ever been me, I don’t know for sure.)

Things like ‘plot’ do not emerge until much later, unless I am writing a Dragonbreath book, where they rather like to have a plot in advance so that I don’t hand in a manuscript so utterly problematic that they cannot possibly publish it (Danny vs. the Mecha-Pope or Dragonbreath, Reanimator or any of the other ideas I will not bother pitching.)  and which I’ve gotten sufficiently skilled at writing that I can actually plot them in advance and not have my brain seize up like wet chocolate.

My hard drive is littered with dozens of these things and sometimes they suddenly spawn fifteen or twenty thousand words and sometimes they don’t and sometimes I drag them out and finish them in a white-hot burning fury and send them off to my agent (the Beauty & the Beast thing did that, after sitting 1/3rd done for over a year) and sometimes they sit there forever and when I pull them up again, I wonder what the hell I was thinking, and sometimes I go through them and cannibalize them for parts, which is why it doesn’t bother me spending hours  writing things that may be deeply flawed because even if most of it’s useless, I can probably grind it up and use it for mulch.



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I love the imagery of Baba Yaga yelling at her house like it's a recalcitrant horse.

Ha! I still find you in interesting corners of LJ. :D


...who are you, again?

I used to read the stories you wrote, we went back in forth in comments a few times, and we're in some of the Transformers comms together. Then I ran into you at the Girl Genius comic and then somewhere else (don't remember where the other one was) and now here! (Although it has been a while [years] since that happened.) :)

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