Jerrick

“Hold tight to my hand, my boy,” Baba Yaga hissed beneath her breath.

I looked up, reaching out for her hand with my own. My skin on Kingdom was usually a pale green, but on Earth, I looked more like her.

Kingdom was the name of my world, where I’d been born. Mama said it was the land where all fairy tales lived. It was a magical world full of mythical creatures and characters like me. I’d been known to humans as The Goblin King in their stories. A hateful, terrible creation who was ugly and liked to steal the souls of unsuspecting humans. But that wasn’t me at all. I was just a kid with green skin. Still, the legend remained, and that’s why I wasn’t very well liked by my peers. Mama had it even worse. She was the bogeyman of Russian folklore.

She smiled down at me, and I felt the warmth of it move all the way through me. To me, mama was just mama.

Children in Kingdom didn’t like to play with me. Mostly because of Mama. They thought her a bad witch because we lived in a house with chicken legs, and my dog was made of bones. None of which had ever felt strange to me growing up. I’d thought my childhood a normal one until I started school, and the other kids began to whisper about me and my family.

It made me sad, which was why I thought Mama liked to take me along with her whenever she got the chance to leave Kingdom and go to a world that I found much more magical than my own: Earth.

She said a quick chant. The sound was lilting. Like a song. I smiled. I always liked it when Mama sang. It made all the fine hairs on my arms lift and my flesh tingle. There was magic in her voice. It was nice.

A doorway suddenly appeared before us, made of twigs and leaves. A yawning chasm of darkness beckoned us.

“Where are we going today, mama?” I asked curiously.

“A young one has asked for my help.”

I knew from my years of tagging along that that usually meant a female supplicant had prayed for Mother’s intercession in some way. I couldn’t understand why Mother had such a bad reputation when her actions were so different from what she was often accused of. Like making pies out of children or dancing naked by the light of the moon… well, she and Papa did actually do the last one, but Mama hated sweets. I don’t think she’d ever made me a pie in her life.

“Maybe after we’ve finished, we can find some ice cream for you. What do you say?”

I grinned, following her into the black void of the doorway. Maybe it would be scary for others to follow a witch into a strange and twisted doorway, but I liked my adventures with my mother. Every day was always new and interesting.

When we stepped out of the void, we were in a different place, bustling with humans moving quickly from one place to the next. They moved in a strange sort of synchronicity that amazed me. Like a salmon stream, some going straight, others back, and yet others left or right, but the way they were herded together made me think of dumb animals plowing through a field.

I giggled and looked up in time to see Mother smirk.

Her eyes twinkled. Her hair was nut brown and twisted over her shoulder in a thick braid. Her eyes were the harvest gold of blooming wheat. Her skin was a dusky olive. She wasn’t a maiden, but she wasn’t a crone either.

Mother rarely used her crone form anymore. Probably because she worried it would scare me.

No part of Mother scared me, not even when she cackled to herself and spoke to the spirits that hovered around her day and night. Spirits I couldn’t always see but knew were there when she’d start carrying on a one-sided conversation.

“Come, Phlegm.”

Phlegm. It was a name she’d given me long ago after she decided on the spur of the moment to adopt me. An ugly name for an ugly child, she’d said then, but somewhere along the way, that name became something different when she said it to me. It had morphed into a sort of endearment. Though she was the only one who still called me so—to everyone else in Kingdom, I was known as Jerrick. I would hate for anyone else to use that name with me, but I did not hate it when Mother said it with her soft smile.

She gripped my hand tight as we went to cross the street. I saw the hand sign turn white. I’d come to earth enough times to understand that a red hand meant to stop and a white hand to go.

I started walking but was quickly overwhelmed by a crush of bodies pressing in on me from every side.

“Moth—mother!” I cried as I felt her hand and mine separate.

But then I heard, “Pust' tvoya zadnitsa budet pokryta furunkulami.”

Instantly, the man who’d hit me grabbed his hind end and squealed. Mother was by my side two seconds later, wrapping me up in her arms.

“Come, boy,” she said, lifting me up. I wasn’t often held by her. I was a big boy. Already five with a higher-than-average intellect, that’s what Papa said. He said it was because of him, but Mother said that Papa was a silly fool and so that was genetically impossible. I wasn’t really sure what genetically meant. It had something to do with science and genes, but it was a little too difficult for me to understand just yet. I was still only five.

She held me tight.

I had to admit, it was nice sometimes. Smelling her hair, wrapping my arms around her neck. She squeezed, holding me tight.

The motion of her walking soothed me, and soon, I forgot all about the honking car horns, the loud music, the constant whirring of machines, and the droning chatter of voices all around me.

Her hand wove a gentle up-and-down rhythm on my back. I closed my eyes, settling into the sensations around me. Feeling small but in a good way. A great way. On Kingdom, I sometimes felt too obvious, too… there.

But here, no matter where I looked, no one looked at us. No one looked at me.

Finally, Mother started to slow her footsteps. I blinked my eyelids open, realizing I must have dozed off at one point.

“We’re here, kapusta.”

She sat me down.

We were in a park. And it was bustling with women and children and even a few men. There were swings, slides, and monkey bars.

“Can I play?”

“Huh? What?” she asked, sounding distracted as she quickly glanced down at me before scanning the concrete benches and tables scattered haphazardly around us. “Oh, yes, sure. But don’t disappear, my boy. We’ll be leaving soon enough.”

I nodded dutifully, watching as her eyes landed on a lone woman swaddled in an overly large brown sweater that looked more like a potato sack than actual clothing.

The woman’s orangey-red hair was frizzy, and her face was covered in freckles. Her skin was pale, very pale, as though she rarely went outside. But even that I envied. I stared at my own arm. It was slightly olive-toned on earth. No trace of green to it whatsoever.

I sighed, running two fingers over my skin, wishing in my little heart that it would always stay that way. But even Mother couldn’t change the color of my skin with magic on Kingdom. I was a goblin, and so therefore, I should be green and mean and a killer.

I frowned.

“Why are you sad?”

The soft voice was young and curious. I looked up at a boy and was instantly transfixed by a pair of warm brown almond-shaped eyes that hid a hint of honey in them when the sun struck them just so. With long dark lashes and a button nose, the boy’s skin was pale, very pale, but not quite white either. His hair was brown and thick. He had on black pants, a button-down white shirt with a black tie, and plain white sneakers. It sorta looked like a private school uniform.

My heart thumped. I smiled. “I’m not sad.”

He cocked his head, still staring intently at me. Squirming and feeling weirdly shy, I shook my head. “Do I have something on my face?”

He laughed. It was loud and rich and honest. “Did you know you have stars in your eyes?”

I touched the top of my cheek, just beneath my right eye. “Stars?”

“Yeah, little silver flecks. It’s pretty cool,” he said.

Badum.

Badum.

I clutched at the bottom of my shirt, feeling at a complete loss for words. My eyes looked weird and creepy. All the other kids said so. But he’d said it was cool.