Extract 6 - The Gingerbread House

Anna Nikolaevna was a witch.

She had to be. Her nose and chin jutted fiercely, under a huge whiskery mole which split her left eyebrow. She kept a cat, and a broomstick behind her kitchen door. And she lived in a gingerbread house.

Fresh paint dripped pastel blue icing down over the treacle-brown walls of her izba, and white piping drew arabesques over the windows. More paint frosted every available surface, from the wooden outside steps to the kitchen floorboards to the outhouse; even the chicken shed. You took your shoes off and dusted your socks before entering Anna Nikolaevna's house. One footprint on her dazzling floor, and you might be turned into a toad. Deservedly.

A few yards away, and down a bank, was a shingle beach. Beyond, Lake Baikal stretched to infinity, its further shore swallowed by distance. Bolshoi Koti crouched like so many other villages on its edge, deriving its life blood from the immense lake, possessor of one-fifth of the world's fresh water, the Blue Eye of Siberia.

Carol and I had reverted to tourists... Anna Nikolaevna was waiting to welcome us, hospitality brimming from a heart of gold. The forbidding exterior couldn't have been more misleading. We immediately recast her as white witch at least; then, on better acquaintance, as the kind grandmother. Not that the wolf would have stood a chance against Anna Nikolaevna.

http://www.scimitarpress.co.uk/

©1998-2012 Scimitar Press

also from Scimitar Press..

Black Sands and
Celestial Horses
Turkmenistan

Jailbreak
Eastern Europe

also by Gill Suttle...

Between the Desert
and the
Deep Blue Sea
Syria

Slideshows & talks