Fairy Tale Fuss. Sergey Pyatenok

monster instantly disappeared, the six pairs of eyes rounded, and the jaws shut like mousetraps. Gorynych, who was, probably, not expecting such a reaction from the boy, was taken aback a little. His heads gazed at each other and started to argue, which one was going to respond.

      At last, the Left Head obeyed the two others, moved slowly closer to the boy and muttered something indistinctly floundering: "I… We just… We were told… We flew, but…"

      "Stop!" the boy flapped his hands and scared Gorynych even more. "Can you be more clear?"

      "Fuuuh," the Left Head breathed out and gathered itself up. "Koschei told us to take you to the place, from which no one gets back, to the desert. So, we are flying there!"

      "An why you just not eat me?" the boy asked as if out of the blue. Gorynych made faces.

      "We? Eat? Yuck!" the Middle Head suddenly said. "We've been vegetarians for a long time, since we got poisoned with one sailor, who smoked and drank alcohol so much that became poisonous. We felt sick for three weeks then and decided never to deal with humans any more. Our own life is more precious."

      "So, you don't eat even animals?"

      "No!" the Right Head nipped in. "Surely, we started to hunt for forest animals but then got poisoned again. We ate an ordinary squirrel, and it turned out to be rabid. It was chasing hares across the whole wood thinking that it was a fox. After that, we stopped eating animals either!"

      "Gee whizz!" Vanya even felt a little sorry for the flying loser, who talked to him like to a best friend. "Listen, an why is the smell so nasty?"

      "It's coming from us!" the Left Head told being a little awkward.

      "Haven't you had a bath for a year?"

      "We, Zmey Gorynyches, never take a bath!" the Middle Head started but stopped at once and confessed: "To be honest, we're afraid of water. We can… I mean, we cannot catch a cold. No fire then and nobody will fear us then. Peasants already sometimes beat us at night. They come silently, when we are asleep and beat us with a shovel at our back, and sometimes even stab us with a pitchfork in our booty. It is unfair! We even have to sleep on trees."

      Gorynych was either complaining, or just voicing his thoughts: "We've told them a lot of times that we've changed, but they do not believe."