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Mavka

By A.D. Sui

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You pray to forget this. You pray to forget the cold. Even under two wool blankets you’re always cold now. Skin and bones, you. A February moon hangs high in the starless sky when Andriy slips on the boots, soaked through from when you wore them earlier that day to gather firewood, and from when Ira goes to relieve herself at the outhouse earlier than that.

“Where are you going, child?” your mother says, barely whispers.

“To get water,” Andriy says and shuts the hut door.

You curl into yourself, clutch your swollen, so sunken that it swells, stomach. Only in sleep does the burn of hunger disappear. Every night, you dream of bread. All you do is dream of bread. The cellar’s been empty for months. What you can, you hide, but the Bolsheviks, they’re good at looking. Others hide food too, canned turnips and rotten potatoes, but the Bolsheviks they find those, and they find the ones that did the hiding, and then both food and people go missing. Now the dog’s gone and then the cat runs off, sensing its own fate looming. Even the domovyki, the watchful spirits of your home, vanished overnight when milk and bread was no longer left out for them. You watched a long line of them march out into the woods at daybreak, short heads bobbing in the snow. Nothing in the village now to spare it from being hollowed out. First, it’s the people that grow hollow. Then, there won’t be a single memory of their death, of their life, of the man-made famine that was their punishment for daring to exist.

Andriy is sixteen, nearly a grown man. His hunger drives him mad some nights. You and mother sip thin tea waiting for him to return, each praying that he doesn’t return at all. There’s some rat-chewed bread you’ve been hiding, and he’ll take it all if it catches his eye. Last week he hit you over some sour milk. You both cried after. He didn’t apologize. Ira has curled up into a ball far too small for a fourteen-year-old and moans softly into the blankets. You’d hug her but that never helps. She’ll grow quiet in the night and won’t live to see the daybreak. You think it a blessing. You can’t bear see the sunken cheeks any longer.

Your mother will go next. She can’t walk far at all, she’s too frail, too thin, too old, too latched on to a place that’s killing her. When she goes, Andriy says you’ll leave the village. Steal what you can in the night, go through the snow when the Bolsheviks sleep. Slit their throats if the fates are merciful. You’ll eat bark, chew snow. Better to die walking than have death to knock on your door as you sleep.

Then a knock does come. Andriy’s muffled voice calls from behind the door.

“Hurry,” he mutters. “Hurry before anyone sees.”

Your vision blackens when you rise from the chair, but you go to let your brother in on buckling knees. Fish smell hits you first. Brine and blood. Andriy slips through the crack in the door and drags the hulking fish-shape inside. It’s nearly as long as him. Water frozen along the scales, magnifying their shimmer. Dark, matted hair falls around its face.

“It’s a girl,” you whisper.

“It’s a mavka,” Andriy snaps back. “Not a girl.”

“Then why does it look like a girl?” you ask. You’ve never seen a mavka in real life, only heard about them in tales. Forest spirits, they are, taking on the look of a half-woman-half-fish. They live in the creeks and the forest ponds and lure young men with their beauty and their song and then tickle them to death. To die laughing, how kind these forest spirits are.

But this mavka isn’t singing. A purple bruise splays across her temple. Her steely, wide-open eyes stare at the ceiling.

“It got washed up ashore,” Andriy says. “They hibernate during the winters. Sometimes their swim bladder doesn’t work properly, and they float up to the shore and freeze to death.”

“That’s fish,” you argue. “Mavkas aren’t fish.”

“What are they, then?”

You shrug, not knowing. You hate that your stomach grumbles loudly at the prospect of food. You want so badly to feel pity or shame, but you feel nothing but the hollowness behind your ribs. The thing is already dead, you think to yourself like a prayer. The thing is already dead, what good will it be if you become dead too?

“Don’t be standing around,” your mother scolds from the table. “You move that fish thing out of here before they come to search the houses again. Last week they found oats in the Potchak’s house and now where are the Potchaks? Nowhere. Who knows? God bless their souls.”

Andriy catches you looking, your eyes tracing his scraped knuckles, the gash on his forearm. He yanks his heavy sweater over the wound. “Stoke the fire,” he says. “We cook it, and we eat it, and what we don’t eat we hide.”

Your mother spits loudly. “You don’t say those cursed things under my roof. You put that thing back where you found it, or the forest will curse your mind, curse whatever dirt you walk on.”

But Andriy doesn’t move a muscle. “And what will Ira do? Suck her thumb to satiation?”

“It isn’t worth it. It will take not only your life but your soul. Boy, you don’t understand. You took from the lisovyk and maybe it slept through your theft, but now you’ve kept what you’ve stolen. It will come to take its due.” Your mother spits again, three times over her shoulder for good measure. If warding off the devil worked, then the men with their rifles would have long gone. The Potchaks are gone but even if they hadn’t been yanked from their homes in the quiet of the night, they’d be dead come morning. At least there is bread in the camps. In the village, there is only hunger.

You go and stoke the fire, muttering to Ira that there’d be food soon. She says nothing back, doesn’t stir, all of her wrapped in a blanket, dark hair spilled over red thread. It’s been so long you’ve seen her lucid you’ve forgotten the colour of her eyes. Numbness starts in the pit of your stomach and spreads outwards. Numb is better than hurt. If Ira doesn’t move, more food for you.

Hunger turns you cruel, but cruel keeps you alive.

Kindness is left for the living.

You stoke the fire anyway. Muttering curses and useless prayer, your mother no longer speaks of throwing the mavka back into the woods. She watches the mavka with a hungry glare. What curse are you willing to bear to survive? What will you swallow to see the morning break? Your mother purses her thin, cracked lips and sips her now-cold tea and watches Andriy start on his ugly work.

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Faded morning rays play on the mavka’s glassy eyes. Blanket wrapped around your sharp shoulders you stare at the head, severed and pale, staring at the ceiling. Fish scales scatter along the floor. Behind you, mother and Andriy sleep by the dying embers of the fireplace. Ira never woke. Ira isn’t there. They must have moved her while you slept to the final resting place, frozen behind the hut. You don’t check. You don’t pray. There’s no magic in this home to rouse the dead.

The mavka’s ribs are splayed open and picked clean. All that’s left is bone and cartilage. Tendon glistens. Your hands are still slick with fish fat. Your throat thick with it. When she wakes up, your mother will take the bones and the scales and throw them all into a boiling pot and there will be fish broth, no, mavka broth, to drink for days. You pick at a raw gap between your teeth. Pick. Pick. Pick. Burned by the steaming meat you picked out from the fire, gorged yourself on it until your stomach strained painfully against your ribs and you were dizzy with satiation. When your tongue proves useless, you take your bony, your fat-stained bony fingers and you put them in your mouth. A long dark hair comes loose from between your teeth. Dark like your mothers before she went grey from famine, dark like your own.

“Get cleaning,” Andriy says, rising on his elbow. Your mother stays prone. “You don’t want this mess here when the men come around.”

And they always come around sooner or later. If you’re lucky they’ll forget your house this time, they’ll check the neighbours for contraband, and their neighbors, and theirs, and leave you be, and you’ll get to keep the fish bones and the head, and you’ll maybe survive the week. You climb on to your knees. “Ma?”

Your mother doesn’t stir. “Ma?”

Andriy shoves her roughly, then shakes her shoulder, once, twice, three times, her limp form sways with every shake.

“Ma?” you whisper. It should hurt something vicious, but all you can think is that there’s only two ways for the broth to be split. Andriy says he’ll rest your mother by Ira, behind the hut. She weighs nothing when he throws her over his shoulder. You’ll take the tulup, still smelling of her and wear it while the fire’s dead. You’ll wait till nighttime, staring in the mavka’s eyes. You’ll pick at your raw gums. When the stars come out and the sky is dyed a deathly black, you’ll make the broth.

---

Two boots appear in the crack between the door and the snow soon as you start up the fire again. You grow ice-still, holding the mavka’s ribcage in your child hands. Andriy is asleep again, he sleeps so much now, muttering softly under his breath. The boots pause, but no knock comes.

The firelight is dim enough that they might mistake this house dead, and no one wants to barge in on a family of frozen bodies, not even soldiers. In the first months, you’d go, mother sent you in to scour the cabinets and the cellars for anything to eat. All you ever found were rats. In the months to come, you went in looking for the rats to start with. Now, the rats are gone, still, the soldiers remain. In times like these, it’s wonderous what would pass as food.

After the longest minute of your life, the boots pass on without ever knocking.

Andriy rolls over on to his back, still asleep. “What else was there to be done,” he mutters to the ceiling, and you start on the broth.

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Hunger pangs always come on worse after you’ve eaten something. Still, you can’t help yourself to gulp down as much broth as you can. You drift off suckling on the mavka’s radius, prying for the bone marrow like it will save your life.

You wake up with Andriy staring at you in the dark, his eyes bloodshot and wide. “I’ve got scales growing on my arms,” he hisses.

You look at his arms, scratched raw, dripping fresh blood. No scales in sight.

“Go pray,” you say, still in sleep’s haze, but he only shakes his head feverishly.

“No, no, no, no, prayer won’t help, it—”

“Go pray,” you say again, your stomach twisting in impossible knots. You point to the icon hung high over the doorway. “Ask Mary for forgiveness and she shall forgive.”

You drift off to the sound of scratching.

You drift off thinking of warm broth.

---

Your mother is one of the good ones. In the first months, she rations what is left best she can and you, as the youngest, always get a crumb. Others aren’t so lucky. You find Artem face-down in the snow one morning, his thin body frozen like a plank. You ask your mother how’d this happen, and she says that it is mercy he froze and not starved. You ask why she didn’t put you out like that.

“Because I won’t let you starve,” she says.

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There’s little sleeping now that Andriy tosses beneath his blanket. He whines that he’s cold, just as his forehead beads with fever sweat. The floor is too stiff. The fire is too warm. He’s cold. He’s so very cold. He sits up, eyes yellowing and frantic and stares towards the door. “They’ve sent for me.”

You sit up too, wrapped up in your blanket. “Who?”

“The woods.”

“You stop with that cursed speech, mother—”

“Mother’s dead.” Andriy roughly scratches at his neck. Red, angry gashes run up to his cheeks. His nails come back splintered and bloody.

You shuffle back. You’ve seen others grow mad with hunger right before death claims them. The women die softly, the men make it that the injustice is known to the skies.

“Get some sleep,” you tell Andriy. “You’ll feel better come morning.”

Andriy settles down, his wild eyes still poised at the door. “No morning will welcome me,” he mutters.

---

The floorboards creak as Andriy paces. Both his arms are bloody mess, the wool of his sweater drenched in blood. He’s started on his hair now, tugging, pulling whole clumps of it. His eyes race from corner to corner as he mutters to himself, “What could be done? What could be done? I take the sin upon myself, but what could be done?”

You wish there was samogon left so you could drink him into a stupor like the men do. But there is none left. No more samogon, no bread, no Ira, no mother.

Andriy paces.

“Pray to Mary,” you whisper, but your words fall on deaf ears.

The broth is gone, you think bitterly. The last of your food gone. How long before you’re lying frozen with mother and your sister? How long before, buried under February snow, the town dies completely?

A slammed door breaks past your sluggish thoughts. Andriy is gone, boots forgotten. Through the veiled window you see his silhouette bleed into the blackened maw of the forest. Now, you’re alone. Alone and cold. Outside is even colder, but Andriy is there. You slip on your boots, two sizes too big, and run after him before he disappears forever.

---

Even in dead of winter, the forest floor is overgrown with low brush. It tears at your tulup, catches strands of your thinning hair. You do your best to keep distance as you follow, make little noise, fall less. Snow fills your boots before you’re in the thick of it. Yet, Andriy, barefoot, plows forward —possessed. You think, if he doesn’t slow, you’ll fall soon and you won’t be able to get up, and you will freeze here in the woods, and no one will ever find you, not even come spring. And maybe the animals, starving as you are, will eat you instead, and that almost sounds better because that way someone gets to see the grasses of spring.

Andriy stops beneath an ancient oak. Snow lines the cracks running along hundred-year-old bark. The branches reach out into the night, homes for critters and owls alike.

“Hear me spirit, hear me repent,” Andriy shouts and falls to his soaked knees. “I have taken something from you, in desperation, no less, but I feel the curse brewing in me. You call for me in all hours of the night to come and pay the price”

You watch from behind the shrubbery, head dusted with fresh snow. The greatest liar. Shrouded in snow, the village sleeps, soothed by its warm light. Anyone passing would never know the bodies resting beneath the heaps of white, the pristine tablecloth hiding a passive slaughter.

“Hear me spirit, hear me repent,” Andriy cries, over and over.

With a thundering crack, the tree parts itself down the middle, bark peeling in ribbons of potato skin. It opens itself up to reveal a not-quite-man, not-quite-goat, curled cozily in a wool cape—a lisovyk. A spirit watching over the forest and its ilk. It lifts its horned head and looks to Andriy. “You dare wake me while there’s snow still?” it says with a voice of old ash. “Are you lost boy?”

But Andriy only falls forward on bloodied arms, smearing red against white. His eyes glow in the night with hunger. How much had he eaten? You can’t remember. Was all of it for you and your mother? Did you gorge yourselves while Andriy sat by the fire, so close the flames licked his fingertips? His burned while yours glistened with fat. He carries the curse and you hide.

“Only in my heart, I am lost” Andriy tells lisovyk. “I have taken something that was not mine, a life not mine to take. I come to you on my knees to beg you rid this curse from my flesh.”

Lisovyk looks on, no malice in its weathered face. It glances to your hiding spot, its yellow eyes seemingly staring through the shrubs. You meet its eyes, your own hunger and madness reflected back at you.

“What did you do with the mavka?” Lisovyk asks, all-knowing. Lisovyk asks as if it’s asking you.

A piece of tailfin churns in your stomach, flutters like its ready to escape.

“I ate it,” Andriy whispers, hands folded in prayer. “I ate the whole thing, tail and eyes, and scales. I ate it because the cellar was empty and the neighbor’s cellar was empty, and the cat had run off, and the men took all the grain, and the—”

It nearly jumps out of your throat, a confession with a piece of fish-meat. You throw both frozen palms across your lips and pray you can keep the mavka flesh, and the broth, and the skin you ate, fried on the fire. You beg, with tears in your eyes to let you keep something, anything. You wish to fight this hunger, this cold death creeping at you, but you need something to fight with.

“Lisovyk, please, free me from the curse,” Andriy says.

You blink and the mavka’s stony eyes greet you in the darkness.

“A flesh for a flesh then,” Lisovyk says. “I am but a messenger of the woods. They ask for what they claim is right. It’s only fair.”

“It’s only fair,” Andriy echoes.

The roots of the oak heave through the snow as they reach for Andriy. He doesn’t flinch, only lowers his head to the snow.

“And if flesh is traded for flesh, willfully, will you yield my one request?” Andriy looks to the shrubs where you hide.

Lisovyk scratches its chin, follows your brother’s gaze towards the shrubs. The roots of the tree break through the snow and wind themselves around Andriy, gently, slowly. They hug along his waist and his shoulders and squeeze, and squeeze, and embrace he will never leave. But they will hold him like no mother will again, like no sister will again. There is no malice in the woods. There is only fairness. Flesh for flesh. Sin and repent.

“What do you ask for, boy?”

Andriy’s bones creak under the force of the roots, as they pull him below snow, as his face drowns in winter’s clutches, he says. “Make safe passage for my sister.”

---

Memory is a stubborn thing.

You have no ownership of which you will keep and which you will forget. The act of remembering is the act of forgetting, of discarding, of trading unimaginable pain for lesser suffering. You look up at the oak, twisted and cracked like your own skin is. It’s spring now, and many decades have passed, and the squirrels are darting madly along the outstretched branches, chasing their young.

Life goes on, no matter how many lives were once lost.

The town behind you calls with rickety carts and bellowing livestock. People, your people, will survive anything.

After Andriy is pulled beneath the snow, you start running. At first you run back to the village, but then there is nothing back at the village but death, so you turn and run deeper and deeper into the woods. Your feet freeze. Your hands freeze. Your cheeks first turn red, and then blue. It’s then when your feet can longer be placed one after another, an invisible hand grabs your shoulder and turns you around, and you stumble, best you can towards anything else but the frozen graveyard of your past. You only stop when voices reach you.

And those voices take you, and they give you warm milk to drink, and then bread to eat, and you drift off to sleep in faceless strangers’ arms. They say the famine has ended, and that they brought you food. They brought enough food for anyone remaining. You want to say that there are only bones remaining, but you already begin to forget.

And they say, these strangers say, that things will be different now and no famines will come again, and the grain will flow, and that you are trust them because they have come to protect you. And you make the choice to forget and as you forget you grow happy. One day you meet a man, you build a home, you make a family. You bake bread and there is always enough for everyone. There is sugar in your tea and honey in your milk. And then as these things go, before you know it, you are ancient, standing before the oak, and after countless years you let your mind lift the veil of the past.

The strangers’ voices said, “A girl’s hands couldn’t cut through bone like this.”

You told them there was a mavka, and that Andriy did what he could, and what he needed to, and that your mother and your sister were frozen out back.

And the strangers said, “There is only an old woman there. There is no sister.”

And you wondered, only a child then, why anyone would take Ira, but you don’t wonder for long because you are offered milk, and bread, and it’s better to forget to survive.

But now you’ve done decades of living, and you run your knotted fingers along the ridges of the oak. You find the thickest branch, thick enough to hold a person’s weight easily, especially when there is so little left of them, especially when they are only a child, and at sixteen they are only children. You find the remnants of a rope, and remnants of a memory.

The strangers asked you, when they brought down Andriy, “Where are his boots?”

And you said, looking down at your feet in the soaked boots. “We only have the one pair.”

There’s a tailfin lodged in your throat for seventy years now, and every night, you throw your hands over your mouth, so it doesn’t spill from you along with every shameful memory you hold.

Some days your grandchildren ask you about that winter. They ask what you ate to survive.

“My tongue,” you say.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 963 for February 21, 2025.

Mavka, by A.D. Sui

Narrated by Yelena Crane; hosted by Scott Campbell audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Scott, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have Mavka, by A.D. Sui. This story is a PseudoPod original.

Author bio:
A.D.Sui is a Ukrainian-born, queer, disabled science fiction writer, and the author of THE DRAGONFLY GAMBIT. She is a failed academic, retired fencer, and coffee enthusiast. Her short fiction has appeared in Augur, Fusion Fragment, HavenSpec, and other venues. When not wrangling her two dogs you can find her on every social media platform as @thesuiway.

Narrator bio:
Yelena Crane is a Ukrainian/Soviet born and USA based writer, incorporating influences from borscht to burgers into her work.

With an advanced degree in the sciences, she has followed her passions from mad scientist to science fiction* writer. Her stories often explore the boundaries of technology, the complexities of human nature, and the consequences of our choices.

Yelena’s published in DSF, Nature Futures, Third Flatiron, Dark Matter Ink, elsewhere.

She is an assistant editor at Flash Fiction Online.

 

And now we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true.

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ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of Mavka by A.D. Sui? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

While I have the title of editor, we are all editors of our life story. The problem is, most of the time, we don’t realize it’s being edited. I’m sure you have a memory of an event or a person you were certain about and then later on you find that version in your head is completely different from reality. You were so sure but then again there are plenty of people who were sure Nelson Mandela died in the 80s instead of 2013.

That red pencil in your mind is crossing out lines, suggesting new adjectives, even rewriting or cutting whole scenes. Its intentions vary: to make you feel better, to make you feel worse, to make you feel nothing. Unless you happen to find a previous copy of the script, you probably just accept the edits and read it as written. But you can also read between the lines. Sense where sentences were rewritten to be more palpable to children, but you sense the truth of the piece. You sense the true horror, the real horror. The red pencil suggests a folk creature of the forest instead, a terrible but noble sacrifice instead, that you deserve a happy ending instead. The blood red pencil cant cut everything, you still have a story to tell and you have to decide if you are in control of it.

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PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

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