Day of the Hut on Chicken Legs — R E S U L T S !!!
GOLD FOR ILLUSTRATION
SILVER FOR THE TALE
Vasilisa looked around. Yes, she had been waiting for an apartment for a long time. The queue for receiving a housing order was so enormous that it stretched across a couple of kingdoms, over fields and meadows, seas and lakes. Ride for a month on horseback and you would not reach the end. On a flying carpet, of course, it would be faster, but still long.
The only pleasant thing in this whole housing epic was that as soon as you joined the queue, time stopped leaving its marks. A kind of happy timelessness.
Vasya remembered her first day in the queue very well. Grandmother put on her a white lace apron, tied a lush white bow woven of the finest threads of dew, gave her a basket of pies and pushed her toward the path along which a long human river wound — the queue of those dreaming of their own home.
And so Vasya stood in that queue for several decades. The queue moved very slowly. Fortunately, Grandmother’s pies did not run out.
Life flew by.
The lace apron grew badly crumpled, the bow lost its splendor, the shoes wore out.
From time to time news reached the queue about lucky people who had received an order for new housing: a castle, a palace, white-stone chambers. The lucky ones grabbed the document and rushed with cries of joy to distant cities and countries.
Another twenty years passed. Washing her face in the stream in the mornings, Vasya still saw the same dear young face and calmly waited her turn.
And at last she waited.
There was one last pie left in the basket, and only a couple of backs were visible ahead, when suddenly a low window opened and a creaky voice shouted: “No more people in the queue! Palaces and castles are finished!”
The two figures standing in front of Vasya strangely shriveled and dissolved into the air, while Vasya, stopped before the slammed window, began to weep bitterly. She saw her arms lengthening and the joints of her fingers becoming wide and crooked. She saw her soft hair turning before her eyes
into coarse gray tangles. The magic of timelessness had ended. An old woman, exhausted by long and useless waiting, with no fixed place of residence, stood before the closed window, and her tears flowed and flowed, spreading over the fields, filling the rivers, threatening to flood everything around.
When Vasya’s wept-out tears seeped through the locked window, it suddenly flew open and a hand appeared, with broken nails and half-worn manicure. The hand held a rolled-up sheet with letters rubbed away along the folds.
“Here,” came the scandalous creaky voice. “Take it! The last order, all that is left — only stop bawling.”
With a trembling hand Vasya seized the paper, and at once a mortar stopped before her, a broom sticking invitingly out of it.
“The district is good,” came from the window, “environmentally clean, mushrooms, berries; never mind that it’s resale housing. There will be nothing else, the rest will be left with nothing.”
Vasya sighed and awkwardly tumbled over the side of the mortar. The broom waved of its own accord, and the mortar took off.
Everything else was like a dream: cities and countries flashed by, seas and mountains remained below. The mortar circled over a river, swept across a field and slowly descended onto a clearing overgrown with grass and bushes in a dark, dense forest.
In the middle of the clearing stood a hut, shifting from one leg to the other.
Legs like Grandmother’s chicken, thought Vasya. With difficulty she climbed out of the mortar, went up the creaking steps, sat on the threshold and took out Grandmother’s last pie. She bit into it and realized with surprise that she had only one tooth left. She looked around: good, quiet. Only owls hooted in the distance.
Here it was — her own long-awaited home; at last she had waited it out, beautiful — and Vasya smiled blissfully.
