“When I looked up again, I could see only that my father was stuffing the doll, leg first, into the stove, after the rags. You could see how these caught fire amid the orange glow of the embers, the doll taking only seconds to shrivel up into something unrecognisable, though the rags flopped about as their edges disintegrated into separate strands and glowed until my father slammed the stove’s iron door on them.“
From “The Witch Has Three, Three Kids Has She (The Line’s Busy)” by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood.
The story is from Tóth’s short story collection Barcode, newly published by Jantar Press.
Read all of B O D Y’s Spring Issue here
Photo by Iryna Pustynnikova
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