It’s very quiet in the factory, which makes me think it must be quite late at night. The showers have no doors, just curtains. I go in one of the cubicles and turn the water on, and use a bar of soap I find in there to wash myself. I also wash Yaga, who’s still on my hand. Carefully, I lather soap into her hair. I rub it gently into her face too, and then her dress. I dry us both as best as I can with the hand towel.

At one point, while I’m drying us, I fall onto my knees, and my skin breaks, and a little blood trickles out and mixes with the beads of shower water still on me, and on the tiles on the floor. For a moment, I wonder if I might pass out. It’s a good sign, I think, my head hanging forward on my chest, too heavy to lift; a sign that the demon is struggling, perhaps. I try to enjoy it. Yaga’s little face looks up at me from the floor, her hair close to a stream of my blood. Then, eventually, the feeling passes, and I stand again, put on a fresh shirt and the trousers I bought the other day, and go back downstairs.

Back at the table in my studio, I take the painting I made and look into the strange, scrunched-up, demonic face in the middle. Behind the black, flecks of blue come through, as though there’s blood behind it that has been starved of oxygen. I hang up puppet Yaga on a washing line I make using two nails in the wall and an elastic band I find in the cupboard. I peg her up carefully, upside down so the creases in her dress come out. I apologize and sit back down with the painting.

I don’t look at Yaga as I paint over the dark, ominous shape I’d been happy with not long ago. I start at the hands, which I’d painted as human hands—beautiful and slender, and a golden brown—and just extend the skin up, making two human arms. I give her a human body, and put her in a simple dark dress that isn’t ragged like the real Yaga’s dress. Then I work on her face and her eyes, replacing the red dots she previously had with two brown eyes just like mine, and her shadowy face with something more defined. I stand up occasionally as I work, to check my features in the mirror and compare them to what I’m painting, leaning against the wall as I do, panting, wobbling on my legs, smelling the tiny, microscopic amount of residue from the duck still left in the sink, and trying to ignore it, trying not to salivate. Eventually, when I’m done painting over the entire original Yaga figure, I use the black I’d used to make her angular body a few days ago to create the background. Her new form glows against it, looking candlelit, or lit by sunlight.