TWO

Quickly the fairy tale is told, but slowly the deed is done.

So, there was this villain called Koschei, and he swallowed a needle and couldn’t be killed.

Back in his day, everyone was living within an egg. It wasn’t a regular egg: it was a golden egg laid by an ambitious little duck that belonged to an elderly rural couple. The couple was likely more hungry than curious, so they didn’t try to investigate what it was that made the duck lay golden eggs. All they wanted was to try to get to the delicious yolk and the creamy white.

But no one could break this egg: neither the man nor the woman. So the couple sat and stared vacantly into space, resigned to their fate, apathetic, listless. And when they were least expecting it, the touch of a mouse’s tail caused the egg to fall and the shell to break.

The man and the woman were devastated that they had no say in the egg’s demise and couldn’t even partake of its contents. They started crying and cried so much, and for so long, they didn’t even notice that there was a whole world inside of the egg. As they cried, this world became one with their world, and chaos ensued. Their village burned to the ground, and their granddaughter hanged herself from grief over the surrounding misery. They didn’t notice the whole realm descend into darkness, as poverty and suicides permeated the landscape and indistinctive, quiet men robbed the land until nothing was left. The couple stopped crying only when they realized that there was a way to use the duck to alleviate their hunger. They took her and killed her, put her on a spit, and started roasting her over the charred remains of their village hall.

This was when Koschei, full of villainous thoughts and despicable aspirations, happened to be passing by. He smelled the delicious tang of fatty duck skin roasting, of course, but being a respectful villain, didn’t ask about it.

“Come closer,” a tiny voice suddenly said.

There was no one around the barbecue at that point, so it took Koschei a while until he finally figured out that it was the duck speaking to him from its spit.

“I know that you are of the needle, and I want to help. You must ask the elderly couple for my head and heart and eat them. Then you will be the luckiest of all.”

“But I don’t want to eat you after we’ve had a conversation,” Koschei countered. “I only want to eat the meat of animals I didn’t know personally and never saw killed.”

“If you don’t partake, I’ll burn to a crisp right now, and the elderly couple will starve to death,” the duck threatened.

Koschei knew that denying the duck the agency to be eaten was not nice of him. He asked the couple for the duck’s head and heart, and though secretly they knew those were the best parts, they agreed, because you’re not supposed to mess with villains.

So Koschei ate the heart and the head. He was done with the meat and was now chewing on the beak cartilage. What would happen now? he wondered. Perhaps he’d become a tsar, because that was what always happened around him at a certain point: everyone became a tsar. Perhaps he’d start belching money: he’d seen something of the kind on TV, where a bespectacled duck swam around in coins.

But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, Koschei noticed that he was now becoming drawn to women’s gowns. His patterns of hoarding, a known necessity for the Koschei family, changed too: he’d fall for absolutely useless objects, which somehow seemed beautiful. Nothing of value interested him anymore.

The main purpose of any self-respecting Koschei is to begin to kidnap young female royalty, the tsarevnas. Our Koschei was told how to spy on tsarevnas, how to tell them bad things that would make them doubt themselves, how to make them fall in love with him so he could bring them to his dungeon and stack them for hoarding purposes. This was what every other, older Koschei, already worthy of being called tsar, was doing.

But now that accumulating value was not one of his goals, young Koschei realized that he did not want to say mean things to tsarevnas. Instead, he wanted to be more like them, with their beautiful dresses, ruby lips, and emerald lids.

And that’s when young Koschei knew he was in trouble.