Sending Out An S.O.S.

I don't remember much about Baba Yaga. She was a story that was told to me by a grandmother who I can count the memories on one hand from.

I'd done something wrong, misbehaved, and she was used as a threat.

The Baba Yaga was a myth from the old world, a fairy tale told to naughty children to entreat them to be nice and good. Misbehave and the Baba Yaga will come get you, whisk you away, strip the meat from your bones and all the like along those lines.

Little pieces stand out to me. Something about a house on chicken legs and the general imagery of an old woman that was also simultaneously the imagery of a witch or crone at the same time. I was scared of her, once upon a time, but like all things of myth and legend she had faded into childish superstition when I became 'too old to believe that anymore.'

And yet here she was, or at least here was the words of someone who had walked down this path before me and they claimed her to be Baba Yaga and for my part...

It is easy to cast something off into myth and legend and superstition and dismiss it entirelỹ. It's easy because magic isn't real and we all know that.

Except when you're sent back in time and switched into a body that you didn't have... well then it becomes a little more difficult to dismiss magic entirely.

Baba Yaga then. I guess.

I'd always kind of pictured her as a malevolent spirit. Evil. Most of the stories that I'd been told seemed to cast her in that light, as some kind of boogeyman.

Except maybe she wasn't. Maybe there was more to it than that. I mean what I did remember was only half-remembered at most and so maybe I was just misremembering or misunderstanding it or maybe I'd just been fed a lie and a story and the truth was far more complicated than that.

Maybe she wasn't what she seemed to be, which made sense to me. Most people were.

And maybe I was just ill-informed.

Lucky for me, then, that I happened to be in a place designed to rectify just that. I smiled as I moved from tab to tab copying the same text into a dozen different messages sent to Sw1tch3d-1 on every single platform that I found them.

It was a simple message, undeniably direct:

It happened to me too. I need to talk to someone. Please. Help me.

Dropping that and an email address that I'd set up specifically to reach out to them into those messages and closing out afterwards. Shutting down my laptop and jamming it back into my bag and getting my feet under me before I headed out of the stacks and over to a reference computer.

A quick check in the library system showed dozens of different options for books about Slavic myths and a few about Baba Yaga directly. There were actual kids fairy tale books and reference books that academics would use for research. Even a few PhD thesis papers that I figured might have some information and I scribbled down each one of them on a slip of paper before putting stars in front of a few of the most likely candidates and heading back out into the stacks to snag them.

It would take weeks to get through these books if I had an abundance of free time, and of course I didn't. Between orientation week and then school afterwards my search would be naturally delayed but it would happen. I would find out what I needed to find out.

I would find out everything I could about Baba Yaga and then I'd find her.

And I would ask her, in the waking world, if everything she'd told me in dreams was true.

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