Rusalka

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THE WINTER dwindled in amber evenings and daytime haze: snow melted, puddles multiplied. Icicles dripped and crashed daily into the last snow-banks, with alarming sounds of breakage.

A particularly large one lingered where water ran off The Cockerel’s west porch, but it was not ice that shattered, it was aunt Ilenka’s butter-churn, when Pyetr Kochevikov rode his horse up onto the porch to reach it.

Sasha Misurov, his hands encumbered with buckets, watched in astonishment as the icicle fell, the horse thundered off the boards, skidded onto the split-log walk and off onto the mud, all four legs miraculously whole—and aunt Ilenka came flying out of the kitchen waving her spoon and calling on the Sun, the tsar, and all his magistrates.

“Pyetr Kochevikov! Look at my porch! Look at my walk! Oh, god—” Aunt Ilenka saw the churn with the milk dripping off the porch, and grabbed up her broom from the corner.

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