EXCERPT: "Baba Yaga" by Irina Reyn

Lately, after making love to her married ex-boyfriend, Sveta had been showing him pictures of babies. Not the pink roly-poly ones clutching soft toilet paper, or the ones gurgling from beneath a blanket, but the ones who were a little ugly, whose faces were scrunched up, on the verge of a tantrum. She would turn the pages of her makeshift photo album slowly, propping it on top of the curly black hairs on his chest.

“For God’s sake, Sveta, get yourself pregnant already,” Jeff said one Saturday afternoon as he rose from bed on the way to the bathroom. He was supposed to have gone to Chelsea Piers to bowl, and his bowling bag lay at the foot of the bed. “You think I want to look at this? You think I don’t see this at home all the time?”

He turned on the shower, and from where she was lying, she could see him sticking his hand into the stream of the water, testing it. He wouldn’t go in until it was just the right temperature, she knew, and she wanted to believe herself less cautious that way. “It’s not as great as you imagine it,” he called from behind the shower curtain. “Babies will eat you alive.”

Sveta wondered if she should have married Jeff when he wanted to marry her. But she’d thought someone better would come along, someone who kissed softly, concentrating on one lip at a time, someone who did not feel quite as passionately as Jeff did about Billy Joel. Many more had come along, but she didn’t marry them, either.

Sveta had a cyst on her nose. It was white and hard, restricted on the right side, almost at the end of her nose. She could have had it removed, she knew that, of course she knew that, she’d gotten as far as the office of a dermatologist, who’d scheduled a surgical appointment before she’d even opened her mouth. But she’d never gone through with it. She was afraid of what would happen once the cyst was no longer there.

“We have some more time today,” Jeff said, one foot feeling around the bathroom floor for the towel that served as a mat, sopping up the water. “I told her I wouldn’t be home before four o’clock.”

“Good!” Sveta said, putting down the album. The last baby in the book was the grandchild of Misha and Lena, her parents’ best friends. The little girl sat among her ignored toys, rabbits, and squeezable books, her tiny hand reaching out possessively for whoever was taking the picture. Sveta thought—believed—the baby wanted her. And why not?

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