John Wick and Baba Yaga Walk Into a Bar

by Chloe N. Clark

Ivan Bilbin

What myths we make of men who fight. How we prize their hands, their fast feet. In stories of Baba Yaga, she’s a witch, the big bad at the end of it all. But there is kindness there to, in how she keeps the tongues of liars, how she cradles the memories of the dead every night, rocks them to sleep. A man who can make himself disappear is just doing what every woman has already learned. How to vanish is not as hard as how to unvanish, to step into the light, to make yourself stand out, a house on chicken legs, a fence made of skulls. Sometimes we need to yell in order for people to hear us whisper.

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Chloe N. Clark is the author of Your Strange Fortune, Under My Tongue, and the forthcoming story collection Collective Gravities. She is co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph and, when not penning a series of poems about Keanu Reeves’ filmography, tweets @PintsNCupcakes.