Ruskalka
by Agata Antonow
Content Warnings: Murder, Raw Meat Consumption
I found the Ruskalka in the river three days after I moved in. I was hanging the laundry on the line behind the house, I turned to admire the water view and noticed black hair at the very edge of the water.
I was furious with the listing agent, of course. She hadn’t mentioned this creature, even though I kept pressing and pressing why the Victorian Queen Anne just outside of Saint John was half the price of other houses in New Brunswick. Maybe it was the cold Canadian winters, I’d tried to reason to myself. The inspector hadn’t said anything, either, and I hadn’t noticed the creature during three separate walk-throughs.
Yet there she was. I figured she had swum across the Atlantic, past icebergs and under stars and then up the Saint John River. She was pretty beat-up. Her skin was gray—greyer than I expected from the folktales my babcia told me growing up. Greyer than Polish skies under which my babcia told those stories.
The Ruskalka’s hair was matted, there was a sluggishly bleeding cut along her left bicep, and her eyes, when she opened them, were milky and pale blue. She didn’t stir, didn’t hiss, just watched me warily as I approached. Was it because I was not a man? Was it some connection to the Old Country, some recognition we sprang from the same earth?
I brought her a side of beef (rare) that first day and left it by her mouth. I brought a blanket, too, an old navy one. When I came back the next day, the blanket was untouched but the beef was gone and the Ruskalka hissed weakly at me, half-humming a few notes before hacking.
“Oh, no,” I told her. “Not me. I won’t be danced to death. I know the stories, thank you, so don’t try any of that. And you better just quit that right now. I’m the one bringing you food.”
I threw down the piglet, still with its head, that I had bought from the butcher. I shuddered to see the pink flesh, but late-night Internet searches had told me this was the closest flesh to human. I turned away and walked back to the house. As I did, I could hear the woman stirring and then the sounds of her teeth clicking together. I walked a little faster.
Of course, I had looked up Rusklaka, too, when researching pig meat. Her movement as a story across Russia, Ukraine, Poland. Always shifting, always described by men as hideous up close. That seemed to be the worst of it. They couldn’t forgive that she looked beautiful far away but not up close. That seemed to cause more offense than the killing that followed. Funny how they always blamed Ruskalkas for killing young men she lured into the forest. If this were a story about young women going missing, the question would be: what were you doing so late at night in the woods? What were you wearing?
The little boy went missing a week after I dropped off the first piglet. I had to drive miles to other butchers to avoid any suspicion and when I dropped the next tiny pig by her head I looked into her eyes. Like an animal’s eyes, with no recognition and no humanity. Flat, they looked at me like a cat’s.
“Did you do it? Did you take him?”
I didn’t show her the news story on my phone. I wasn’t even sure she understood.
She tore off the piglet’s ear and started chewing, humming under her breath, her right hand clutching the loose gravel by the side of the river.
The second child to go missing was from down the road. A teenage boy I had seen lurching his way through driving lessons on my street. A blue SUV, probably his parents’, and a bloom of acne on his face visible from the road and through the SUV windows. The police walked house to house. I looked at the glossy school photo they held up to my face and I didn’t have to fake my sorrow. In school photos missing children look so vulnerable, like the crooked smile and greasy nose were always a precursor for some tragic fate.
“You’re going to have to go home.” The next day I stood closer, more sure of myself. I threw down another piglet and this time watched as she slowly tore off one hoof and then the next, pink meat and blood disappearing. I could see her jaw came unhinged and she only half-chewed, before swallowing like a dog. Her eyes never left me. Hatred? Indifference? Loyalty to the source of her food? She still hadn’t moved from the one spot in my river and though I had now lived in this town long enough to have my favorite stores and to get to know the neighbors, I still hadn’t sat by the water’s edge, as I had planned when I had signed the mortgage.
I put tranquilizer in a piglet two days after the teenage boy went missing. It was easy to buy online, and I had syringes in the fancy first-aid kit I had bought for the house.
I had expected her to sniff and refuse the meat, had steeled myself for it though I had no real plan for what I would do. But she tore in. Now half her body was on the shore and where I had seen the outline of bone under her gray skin I now saw some sinew. Wrinkled and wet-looking, but there. She ate all the way to the haunch of the pig and then slumped half over, hissing. Her eyes looked at me, glowing blue with betrayal, and my stomach curdled like old milk.
I heaved her into my Elantra and made my way down to the docks in the harbor. Driving down one-way streets, the brick buildings empty-socketed in the dark. Salt smell, the soft, insistent clang of ships against the wood deck.
There was no one at the docks when my car chirped open. I pulled my jacket around myself, walked around the back to the trunk and prepared to send her home. As I grabbed her unmoving body and yanked, I pictured myself in my home, alone, sitting by the river and drinking tea, humming to myself.
Agata Antonow (she/her) is a writer living and working in Canada. Her work has been featured in the Mile End Poets' Festival, Our Times, The Gravity of the Thing, Defenestration, Eunoia Review, and the FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity) program, among other places. She has placed first in the 2021 Douglas Kyle Memorial Prize and the 2023 Alfred G. Bailey Prize from the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick.