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

pallet to dodge his throw, but stood instead holding the hammer in my hand proudly aloft, that turncoat Kyrpa flip-flopped at once and declared to the girls who suddenly turned mum, "See? So are the bricklayers on our team!"

That’s why I do have what to be proud of in my life…

~ ~ ~

In addition to the rubber doll from the village store, I collected a whole set of gifts for your birthday. There were those glossy plastic what-you-call-them, which electricians insert into the junction boxes. They looked like little ninja turtles, although before the production of that cartoon there remained more than 20 years, for which reason you couldn't determine that they were ninjas, yet the similarity of those bits of plastic to turtles was evident at once.

Besides, there were white ceramic checkers as well. Every item in the set had a double, except for the doll.

(…it's, like, a soldier at the front line collecting a present from shot cartridges. However, our team was indeed at the forefront of the world mastered by humans. Birthday presents from the edge of the ecumene…)

It was important for me to get to Nezhyn at a fitting time when no one would intercept and spoil the celebration day. The local train from Konotop, moreover on your birthday, was too easy to ambush with the “it” in a black-and-white tartan and then a slight swishing touch against my jeans would be enough to derail everything. It was wiser to approach from the rear, where I could not be expected from.

The bus Kharkov-Chernigov suited the purpose ideally, but it passed Konotop at five-thirty in the morning. That's why I did not go to bed that night, so as not to oversleep. I was just walking about Konotop in different directions.

When I walked along the concrete wall of the Meat-Packing Plant, there was a crowd of cattle driven thru the roofed gallery up there, to the slaughter work floor. With what human voices they were screaming! Worse than in "The Western Corridor". And they absolutely got it – where they were driving them and why…

About midnight, I was at the Kandeebynno lakes and decided to take a swim. I stripped down and entered the water in the altogether. And who would see? The dark currant bushes on the shore, or the stars and the moon? They had seen more than that. So I plunged ahead. And the darkness around was vibrating with the grunts of mating frogs…

One plasterer, an elderly female, though sporting long taut braids, told me how she was going to commit suicide in her village on the night of this very kind, and the air was filled with the buzz of insisting whisper, "Come on! Here it is, the pond! Go into!" But I did not have any voices, only the frogs.

And then I swam towards the moon. It had just risen over the fish lakes and didn't have time to grow small in the sky. The huge full moon a sliver up from the horizon.

I swam with sidestroke, soundlessly, but still pushed waves ahead of me. Smooth evenly rounded waves, like those lines printed in the handkerchief with the sailboat. Only there they were blue on white and here it was thin silver lines against the black darkness. Besides, these lines were moving, like the waves of ether, until pondweed by the opposite bank began to cling to my feet. It felt scary, all slimy mermaids came on thought, and I returned, swimming on my back so that to watch the moon all the time.

My hair was wet after the swim, and I slowly strolled to the station so that it would dry on the way. At the station, there were huge clocks on the front and back walls of the building, and 2 more inside, in the halls. That's why I went to the station.

I did not have a watch, when I tried to wear one or another on my wrist it would stop in a couple of days, or they started to show the wrong time and should be taken to repair, or replaced with a new one…

Along the way, I remembered that unfortunate guy from the Arab Nights fairy tales, who shed tears all the time and kept tearing the clothes on his chest because he loved a beautiful sorceress, and she loved him too but warned that a certain door in her palace should never be opened, yet he opened it—out of pure curiosity—and got into another dimension with only sand and stones around, and no way back. So, all that remained for him was to cry and beat himself in the chest…

About 2 years before that, I went with Eera to the Desna River. Just 2 of us, she and I. Gaina Mikhailovna was keeping you on that day.

We went there by the morning bus of Chernigov destination. But how would we come back? Come on, something would turn up… When I saw the Desna thru the bus window, I asked the driver to pull up and we got off to the roadside. Then we were going over a field. In another field nearby, women in white kerchiefs were raking hay into mounds, from afar you could not make out what century you were in.

Then I carried Eera on my back over a channel to a long spit of sand overgrown with wide green leaves past which the enchanted Desna flowed calmly. We spread a blanket over the leaves and spent all day there.

When I had to take a leak, I swam to the other bank, the river was not too wide there. Eera strictly warned me not to drench my head. I remembered that and, all the same, I could not help plunging headlong from the bluffy opposite bank. And now all that was left to me was to cry and tear that T-shirt of blue acetate silk on my chest…

The rest of that night I spent sitting in the square between the station and the first