The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

store in the main square, and sent me to see what was on sale. As usual on such occasions, the store was densely crammed with a heated crowd. The jacket was the last one and exactly Eera's size, yet while I was being happy about so good luck, it was grabbed by some girl and her mother. Sneaky villagers!

The girl tried the jacket on and looked inquiringly at her mother, who was holding the daughter’s raincoat. On that department store visit, Slavic kept me company. So, we stepped aside and started to exchange comments, "Not bad, but the sleeves are way too short."

"Yeah, let's look for something else."

The mother shook her head, and the girl reluctantly took off the jacket. I snatched it at once and sent Slavic to knock out the check.

Eera even liked that it was a three-quarter jacket… All that was before you…

And for your birth, following the elegant, time-honored, Slavonic tradition, I had to treat my friends to magarich. In the restaurant Seagull by the same-named hotel in the main square, Slavic, Twoic and I shared a couple of decanters with vodka. The waitress had a skirt of white and black stripes on, and Twoic liked it when I defined her outfit as a stringy piece of cloth. He demanded a toast.

"It's not just birth," announced I, "but the start of new life, and since life is nothing but a transition from one form to another let's drink to that the newborn, as well as we, will fill our lives up with beautiful forms."

Twoic started to croak that the idea of form transitions was ripped by me off Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers he also happened to read, which was my fault, I had put him on the trail to the book at the institute library.

My next toast was to a girl with beautiful blue eyes, I meant you.

Yet, Twoic pulled a clever look on his rustic mug and started a lecture about some causal genes—a smart ass from the Biology Department—and that the color would change in a month to brown, possibly dark-brown. Some Bio-Fac bastard with his causal genes!.

Before getting their diplomas and workplace appointments, all the institute graduates were summoned to the assembly hall in the New Building. We had to sit thru a usual blah-blah about keeping high the NGPI honor wherever we get distributed by our appointments.

Than a black-haired stranger took the floor and said that each of us was given, on entering the hall, a sheet of paper and a pencil, right? Now, it should be admitted that not everything's straight as it should be in our schools. So, let us write about what we, the graduates, did not like in the schools we had practices at, or even earlier, or even when we ourselves were still school students. Just any occasion when some teacher behaved incorrectly, in our opinion, or allowed themselves incorrect statements. To make it easier to start, let's use the phrase, "And I still remember how…" after which it would go on by itself, okay?

His educative speech left me stunned with awe and realization of how deeply backward I stayed. The KGB had obviously upgraded to the conveyor-system technologies in the production of secret collaborators. Hundreds of rats hatched in just one sitting! And no need to use the bait of spy school individually.

(…in each of us, there lurks a small frightened animal hidden deep inside and thinking logically: "If I don't write they can cancel my diploma or fork out the appointment to the worst of stinking holes. It's better to write – one time does not count."

But that time of no account is, actually, just the start. Later, in the hole you were appointed to, they will come up and show you your essay, and dictate the next…)

Okay, bitches, you'll get it written!. In the back of each seat in the assembly hall, there was installed a rectangular hinged piece of plastic, a kinda mini-desktop. I brought down the one in the back of the seat before me, placed the crisp sheet of paper on the smooth plastic surface, and wrote:

"And I still remember how in the fourth grade my Class Mistress, Seraphima Sergeevna, stated:

'Well done, Sehrguey! You collected most of the waste paper.'

And I was filled with pride and joy."

I signed my final report to the KGB with my real name and I am proud of it till now…

~ ~ ~

(…The great discovery of Karl Marx about the emergence of surplus-value, remained, as it, unfortunately, is, not pushed to all of its potential limits. He quite correctly noted that some part of his working time a laborer toils for himself, and the remaining part for the factory owner. Good fellow, Karl, hit the bulls-eye!. However, that's not all there is there to it.

The main (yet unnoticed) trick lurks in the fact, that it is impossible to determine who exactly the laborer toils for at this or that part of a split second. And this, not yet perceived (although indisputable) truth is applicable not only to the methods of production but to any other sphere of human activities as well.

(Hopefully, I'm not advancing too fast, and you are in time to stick down your notes? Okay, proceed to the full-stop, while I'm opening the second bottle…)

Hence, we can safely state, that there are no bad guys in the world, but there are no good guys either. An elusive, uncatchable, fraction of a second separates good from evil.

Well, so you think that guy is a good man? I love your innocence! Stay assured, you're still alive only because of meeting him in the right part of the second. Some tiny pinch of time earlier or later, and that vampire would have dropped aside your lifeless corpse already, with your blood system sucked-up dry and lymph nodes gnawed to tatters!.

Or let's take those same witches queuing to be burned at the stake and illuminate the darkness of the Middle Ages. The gloomy blockheads of