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

Advancement to getting it went in trial and error method, checking each hunch I had on the way. Sometimes there happened real insights as it was when after the shift I went to the New Dophinovka village to buy food for the next couple of days. Among the workers in the truck-bed, there was some old woman in a headscarf. The truck was purring past the hostel where the Bessarabian stood in the doorway with the baby in her arms. "Such a nice baby-girl!" pronouncing these words, the old lady released her headscarf and tied it up again, but somehow differently…

I returned home walking thru the fields alongside the trees in the windbreak belt. But I could not get rest in my room – the one-year-old girl of the Bessarabian family was choking with shrieks and cries, and her mother, not knowing how to ease the baby, kept carrying it along the corridor—from end to end—swaying in her arms, chanting "ah-ah!", but nothing helped. I never could bear children crying, but the hostel was not a local train where you might move to another car.

And suddenly I remembered how the woman in the truck-bed had tied her headscarf differently while praising this, so calm at that time, child. Going out into the corridor and silently, but steadily, looking at the baby's mother, I took out my handkerchief from the pocket, stretched it open and folded back again, yet on the other side, after which I went out to the well-hut to fetch some water.

When I returned the woman gave me a happy grateful look; the girl in her arms was perfectly calm, a kerchief had appeared on her head tied in a knot on the forehead. Bingo!.

However, there happened misfires too. The rooster, swaggering around the hostel entrance, did not understand my fair intentions and contemptuously turned away, when I offered him a grain of laundry blue from the pinch scattered over the wide bench next to the entrance. The proposed supplement to the ration of the bird was based on good motives and freshly gained experience. That day it was revealed to me, that the combination of blue and black symbolize strength: the cock with his black plumage would turn a super-cock had he picked up that laundry blue speck…

And the fact that I was both chosen and protected one became obvious when a certain glassy-eyed was sneaking to me with obviously inimical intentions…

There are three distinct varieties of glassy-eyed. Those in whom eye glassiness is combined with pronounced purity of whites in their eyes are harmless. They, beyond doubt, are possessed, but remain just tools for the transmission of information, like, what's up and on and how it goes? – kind of a spyglass, and nothing more. Where does the information flow to? Who's the recipient? The former dwellers of Olympus in their current forms, of course.

The second variety, with blurry luster filming their eyeballs, are self-employed freelancers looking for a chance refreshment with "red-and-hot", or striving to somehow otherwise get recharged on your account.

"There's an underground passage for people, but we may use it as well," one such one told me, apparently taking for one of her likes when, in an unfamiliar and poorly lit area of night Odessa, I asked her how to get to the bus station – their favorite feeding trough. Those it was, waiting for me to get out of the "Bratislava" restaurant with my torn thigh, and they impatiently urged the usher-woman to cut the needless chit-chat (which was not that but a talk loaded with meaning understood by both of us even though not to the same degree of clarity) and set “the rabbit” (me) out for their hunt…

For the pre-employment medical check (two weeks after getting the job), I visited a corresponding unit facilities in the Vapnyarka village to pass the blood sample analysis. On entering the office, I saw, besides the nurse, a lady marked with that particular eye murkiness, who sat on the couch and, from a corner of her mouth, there was hanging a long flexible tube. The nurse explained that the tube was just a probe, and the lady would not be in the way. As if I could not figure out from her looks what kind of lady it was and why she was there…

Then the nurse customarily pierced the pad of my finger and squeezed it and, instead of the usual bead of blood, it gave out a tiny jet of it, no thicker than a needle, like milk sprinkling from the squeezed nipple of a breastfeeding woman. I had never seen such a thing in my life!

And not only I was surprised – the lady's jaw dropped and that, let's say, probe wanted to pop out too. Just like an alky who had outstretched a cup for a fill but they splashed a whole three-liter jar of hooch over it. What a loss of precious stuff!.

As for reaching to the blood with their fangs, that's just a grandma's fair-tale for sillies. To fill their tanks they use some subtle, inconspicuous and, even though not fully understood by me, yet quite efficient, technology…

The glassy-eyed of the blurry type, who attempted at utilizing me, was a Volga driver that brought his boss to the hostel. In the corridor, there also was a rarely opened office of the mining engineer, visited by those coming to arrange the transaction of taking cubics from the pit.

That day, as always, I came from the mine to hostel for the midday meal and was washing my hands at the washstand on stake, not far from the entrance.

The glassy-eyed did not know me because of being an outsider, and he kept sneakily closing in, holding in his hands the weapon – an artifact that looked like a length of aluminum wire twisted in a special way, about 20 centimeters long.

Noting that