Chapter 7: A Baby Arrives

The nechist family sat round the kitchen table next morning.  A bright storm-born dawn painted frosting on the snow outside the large bay window. 

Iosif gazed into his bowl of salted kasha, stirring it with a furred hand.  He looked into the cereal as if divining portents from entrails.  Witches used organs to tell the future, domovois used cereal.  Beside him Dmitri read a newspaper, chuckling occasionally.  Elizaveta rocked Anya, singing a song about drowned kisses and sailors lost in Siberian fjords. 

“Do not coddle her, Liza,” Morozko said.  “She was the devil last night, keeping me up with her wailing.  I had to change her not once but twice."  He indicated the improvised cloth diaper torn from Morozko’s shirts that Anya wore beneath her blankets.

Elizaveta's fish-snout flared.  She smoothed her sarafan.  “Anya is an angel, and you are too stupid to realize it