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

blurry glassiness in his filmed eyes and the cautious way of his slinking nearer, I realized that I was done. The distance shortened, yet the moment when he already could reach me with his thing, a gray kitten jumped out from the tall grass and rubbed his scruff against my black spetzovka pants. And at once the glassy-eyed stalker lost any interest in me, lowered his weapon and returned to the car. The unknown rescuer-kitten who I never—before or later—saw around, disappeared into the grass…

But more often I had to rely only on my own prudent circumspection. As on that narrow beach under the cliff of Chabanka.

I wanted to take a swim in the sea and had already entered the peaceful slow waves but stopped – two fishermen in swimming trunks with fishing rods in their hands stood ahead. Between them, there was enough space to swim forwards, but I realized that the rods were the barrier blocking the way to the sea. And only seizing the moment when they simultaneously pulled their fishing rods up, I plunged in and swam away from the beach.

I swam for a long time, sometimes laying on the water for rest and wondering why my father told me that seawater supports a swimmer because of the salt dissolved in it. It made no difference to lying on the freshwater… Then I swam on, mostly on my back, facing the warm bright sky, until I felt a dab at my shoulder.

I looked back and saw a jellyfish in the water, semi-transparent and as wide as a basin. I gave it way and went on ahead, but then I began to come across more and more jelly-fish – you bypassed one of them to just run into another. Popping up a bit out from the water, I looked forward and saw a whole shoal of them which had turned the calm sun-driven waves into some jellyfish soup crowded with their translucent bodies. I didn't get the nerve to breast that soup, I turned around and swam back to the already distant shore…

The shingle beach of Chabanka had some sandy stretches in it. On one of those spits, near the water's edge, I wanted to write "Eera" but the waves did not allow. They ran up and leveled the wet sand before I had time to write out all the letters, and I only scratched my finger to bleeding with the tiny shell fragments mixed with the sand, before I gave up…

But my first meeting with the sea was on the beach of New Dophinovka where I went after work, along the shore of the sea inlet that reached the hostel. The water in it was shallow and very transparent. I walked until saw some worn-out tires in the water, dropped there from the shore by some morons. So I took off my pants, went into the shallow water, and dragged the tires onshore, but after one more bend of the inlet, I saw there was an entire trash dump in it – life would not be enough to drag all that debris out, and it was evening already. Then there started a thicket of reeds stretching to the highway and along its opposite roadside there unfolded the wide vista of the sea and sea alone…

But if going to New Dophinovka by the country road, there sometimes were huge ships hovering in the sky. The ships, of course, stood in the sea which merged with the sky at the horizon, that’s why you saw a field with a ship above it and, still higher or next to its bow, the immense red ball of the setting sun. Those ships were so large that they, probably, do not fit in the harbor and had to stay right there in the sea-sky…

~ ~ ~

With Slavic Aksyanov, at first, I had normal relations, even though I saw that in his past life he served as a Nazi officer in a death camp while at present he was too keen on producing baloney sensations by hoopla talks. And I even helped him to saw boards for the family couch…

The distance from Chabanka to the mine was about two kilometers, approximately same as from New Dophinovka, but with no windbreak belt alongside the country road. And in the open fields, some arrogant flies always started to follow me, a whole swarm of them keeping buzzing around and never lagging behind. But I did not want to bring a "tail of a follower" after me and give out the location of the mine, so I found a nice way of putting them off the track.

Nearby the hostel there stood a long structure of a former cattle farm, which I began to use as the disinfection lock in a spaceship visiting unexplored planets. I entered the building from one end, with all the buzzing flies swarming around me, and marched to the exit at the other end. The whiff of the manure from once upon a time allured them; confusedly, they rushed in all directions in active search for fresher dung, while I walked out into the air, with the food bought in Chabanka and without a single buzzing follower behind my back…

Now, Slavic asked the foreman for permission to use some floorboards from the old farm and make a couch for himself and his wife because he was expecting the arrival of his mother-in-law. Then we went and pulled out the boards for the project; a rather decent material they were, only nailed way too deep, but there was a breaker by us.

With the material procured, we started to discuss the measurements of the planned furniture item. By that time, I had already had a certain, fully developed, numerological system in which the meaning of some individual figures was brought to a complete clarity, thus, for instance, 22 corresponded to "death", 24 to "wife", 10 to "sex", and so on, and all that remained there was just to combine their meaning the way called