The Dead Mother
My gosh, this story is up my alley. It genuinely feels like the setup for a Supernatural episode: a husband and wife are blissfully happy, and things are hunky dory till the wife dies just after the birth of their first child. The grief-stricken dad hires a nanny to take care of the infant boy, but the son refuses to eat and only stops crying for the same window of time every night. During that time window, three nights in a row, the nanny thinks she hears someone enter the baby's room and suckle it. She tells the dad, and they create a plan to figure out what's going on. The next night, they see a woman enter the baby's room: "They looked, and saw the dead mother, in the very same clothes in which she had been buried, on her knees besides the cradle, over which she bent as she suckled the babe at her dead breast." When the dad's candlelight hits the dead mother, she gives one last sad look at her baby, rises, and walks out without saying a word. The dad and the nanny run to the baby, but it's dead.
As I read this, I was initially struck by the idea of a kid raised and nurtured by a dead mom—not just because that's bound to mess the kid up emotionally, but because I wonder what other effect it would have on him. Would he have special death powers? Be a psychic, a medium? Be half-dead himself? Be able to go ghost like Danny Phantom? The possibilities are endless, and I dig all of them.
That said, the twist where the son himself is found dead is pretty great too. I could work with a ghost mom who goes around passing her deadness on to babies by trying to nurture them. I could also work with the idea that the kid was dead all along after his mom died, but that he was able to pass for alive somehow while his mom was taking care of him.
The Treasure
In this story, when the corrupt pope realizes that the old man has suddenly come into a bunch of money, the pope asks, "Where did it come from? Confess, friend, whose breath did you stop?" The phrasing of the question made me think about a story option in which few people have supernatural abilities or connections, and the only way for someone else to get those powers is to take it from someone else (stop their breath), since there's only a limited source of it in the world. But again, that feels more like a novel kind of story.
Of course, the pope's ultimate fate is pretty perfect, too, in a cringe-worthy kind of way. He kills a goat and wears its skin and horns in order to scare the poor man out of the money, having his own wife sew the goat skin closed around his back so it doesn't slide off. After they've scared the man and taken the abandoned money for themselves, he tells his wife to cut the goat skin off from around him—but when she goes to snip the skin off, she ends up cutting the pope, too. As punishment, God has fused the goat skin and horns and everything into the pope's own skin. He's stuck as a monster now, and it's horrifying and perfect.
The Bad Wife
As much as I love the bickering, contrary dynamic between the husband and the wife at the beginning of the story, or the fact that the wife gets trapped with demons and it's the demons who end up begging to be released, I'd probably use the concept of the husband tricking a demon as the inspiration for my story. I'd probably take a more crossroads approach to it, either someone getting out of their bargain or summoning the demon to trap it instead of the other way around, but we'll see.
The Three Copecks
In this story, the protagonist is sent to a few brothers working a field, so he can ask them the answer to a question. When he asks, the brothers say they aren't sure, and for him to ask their eldest brother—but when the protagonist goes to the eldest brother, it's only a little three-year-old. The story doesn't address how or why the oldest brother appears to be the youngest or how he got this way, but I think it could be fun to explore that in a story. I like the idea of a family that rejuvenates itself, reincarnates into itself, starts over again after every life cycle—and a family like that could mean all sorts of trouble.
The Miser
In this story, the titular miser was pretending to be dead, and a group of grave robbers paused over his coffin to split their spoils. A story in which the protagonist and a partner play dead and effectively rib grave robbers could be fun, but I also like the idea of a dead character who comes back to life for a period of time each night—I'm not sure yet what I'd do with that, but designing my own monster seems fun. So that's always an option.
The Water Snake
This time around, a snake basically blocks a girl's path, and says he'll only move if she agrees to marry him. She agrees, because it's a snake, and it's not like he can actually marry her. Then she goes home and forgets about it. But later, a huge group of snakes break into the girl's house and carry her to the lake where the snake lives; they bring her underwater with them, where they all turn into men and women, and she marries the snake-man. Tragically, the story glosses over what's going on with the snake people or their realm under the water or how the girl adjusts to life there, which are the most interesting parts to me. But I love the idea of these snake people, and I think they could make for a fun, darker version of a mermaid story.
Friday
In this story, a woman doesn't respect "Mother Friday" enough, so Friday comes and punishes the woman in her sleep: she takes the dust from the flax the woman was spinning, and stuffs it into her eyes. The woman wakes up blind and panicked. I think the dust-blindness is interesting enough, and I might do something with it someday, but more than that, I like the idea of personifying Friday and building a story around that character.
Wednesday
This story is similar to the Friday one, only Mother Wednesday approaches the woman directly, and has plans for a harsher punishment than Mother Friday did. The story itself didn't do much for me (except for the idea that Mother Wednesday is actually an Unclean Spirit, and can be driven away by signing the cross and drawing symbols in chalk), so again, I'd probably focus on personifying Wednesday as some kind of minor deity or something, then seeing what happens.
The Léshy
In this story, a girl wanders into the woods and disappears for three years. Eventually, she's found by a hunter, who kills a léshy and tracks it back to its house: turns out the missing girl's been there the entire time. The description of the léshy is interesting, and kind of begs for a story itself—the hunter comes across a young man in the forest, but is confused by the fact that the youth has grey hair. The youth basically replies, "Of course I'm grey—I'm the devil's grandfather." Like I said: interesting.
But I also think it could be cool to look at the story of a human girl who's been raised by a léshy or demon or whatever kind of monster—not because she's been kidnapped by it, like the girl in the story, but because it took her in and raised her when she was an abandoned little kid. The dynamic itself could be entertaining to experiment with, and I like the grey area it would let me dabble in.
Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina
Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina in the title are actually the protagonists of this story—a brother and two sisters—who end up choosing to become rivers. That much itself has potential, but it's the setup at the beginning of the story for this development that really gets me: "The Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people. The Dnieper was a boy, and the Volga and Dvina his sisters." As someone who didn't realize these were the names of Russian rivers, I found that opening really compelling, and the questions and possible scenarios it made me think about had plenty of potential for stories of their own.
Bibliography: Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore by W. R. S. Ralston. Source: Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook.
Image Credit: Man Holding Umbrella by Adrianna Calvo. Source: Pexels.
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