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

to the board-bench and go on with his swinging. On the way, he kicks off a philosopher of the same well-burned, ceramic hue, who was squatting close to the ground and drawing with his finger on the dust underneath his dangling balls.

"Noli turbare circulos meos!”

Next time, the leader with a single blow will knock another naked neighbor clear away from the bench, who'd never notice that, engulfed in spinning in his fingers a sixteen-centimeter piece of a broken twig and keeping on his own counsel, already on the ground, as serenely as before the passing thunderclap.

The paramedics never intervened into the internal affairs on the benches of the deeply introvert as long as the howl-squeal-screaming in their free territories did not bypass the notch of a permissible level. When it was transgressed, the paramedics, assisted by the volunteers from halfnuts or fully nuts, would pull the stark naked nuts raging at the board-benches and fix him onto the second usable bed by the scrap-metal heap under the canopy…

When the heat drove me away from the Area, I got seated on one of the plywood benches ignored by the crazy public because of their merciless backrests. To spend the whole day on a firm horizontal plane was not an easy task, in the evening you did not know which of your buttocks to use for sitting.

The Area itself was in the state of seething motion: back and forth, to and fro, circles, jerky tags… Where to? Where from? After what?

Along the board fence behind the board benches on which I lay in the morning, there lined a row of backs of replacing each other bozos stuck to the gaps between the nailed boards. Someone giggled into the gap, another one beckoned a fellow-patient, someone else beat off within his not removed pants because the fourth unit kept shut-ins of the opposite sex entertaining similar sorts of mental inclinations, up to the state of stark naked gymnosophists.

These are just my assumptions though because I never approached the gaps in the fence and had seen only one of our neighborixes. Black-haired and skinny, about 30 years old, she emerged topless over the fence, and with a ballet sway of her arm threw a large creamy flower into the dust under our feet. The nuts kicked up a skirmish over her flower, and she was sharply pulled away from the other side of the fence, yet and all, the breasts were beautifully shaped…

3 times a day, so as to stretch my buttocks, hardened by the shots, I left the shade of the canopy and walked around the Area in wide circles. While promenading, I memorized by rote the lines of The Novel- Cartoon, conceived by me still in the wild, but having taken its final shape already at the funny farm.

The content did not exceed one page of text, and it was important for me not to lose a single coma, and prevent substitution of words for their synonyms, because I was arrested without a pencil and paper on me.

The Novel- Cartoon

Maybe, the energy applied for the action was somewhat too much, yet a failure and another try at turning the handle down would cost a dent to the self-respect and bringing nearer to the end.

The warm dense dusk wrapped him behind the door. He doffed the cloak onto a horizontal rod and made between black silhouettes of solid tables and mighty seats for a blurred spot of light in the distance. The spot enclosed the face and hands of a woman at knitting.

– Hello,– said he,– a glass of juice and a sandwich.

The woman shuffled the snack and collected the payment.

He landed at a nearby table, cast a glance around, and started chewing.

– So, what’s the latest news in your beautiful town?

– Aren’t you local?

– Me? I’m omni-local.

– What’s that?

– Means a local any place you get to.

– Well, not much by us. Nothing new…

…over the town stadium hangs the stench of raw shit from the intestines of Christian martyrs torn apart on that day by the talons of beasts to entertain the public…

– Just never happens a thing…

…in the central square whiffs of a breeze play with the ashes of heretics burned by the good Christians…

– Each day all’s the same…

…in the greens a bunch of aristocratic youth whip by their canes the body of a peasant lass they presently cluster-raped, gaze at welts and bursting slits in bleeding skin…

– Same yesterday, same today…

…a dozen of peasant lads, swaying bayonets on their rifles, drive a freaked out herd of aristocrats to the nearest gully after the town limit…

– Every day alike the other…

…in the sidewalk a blonde with black briefcase catches on a pair in unisex jeans, in a sec her black cape wile brush under the right one’s knee…

– What news can be here at all…

…above the sandbox in the kindergarten playgrounds a flying pan of Cassiopeans and a fight-pod of Anti-Worldies rush at each other in the front attack…

– An enviable lot, as befits people you live,– concluded he downing the glass.– In good and peace.

One time, too deeply immersed in the punctuation of unwritten lines, I inadvertently crossed the invisible borderline alongside the benches of the absolutely free till 2 or 3 rapid punches on the body and into my head brought me back to the surrounding reality…

I could not allow that reality to break my system of survival in the void and therefore, on Sundays, I went to the beach. For that purpose I dragged two plywood benches out from under the tin-roofed canopy to the mesh fence—away from those cooped-up yet still too free—and all day long I was sunbathing there, with breaks for the midday meal and when they called me to share the bed with sleeping Sasha, and get my syringe in the butt.

Uncompromisingly, I lay there all Sunday, with my eyes closed under the hot sun, and the surrounding soundtrack noise accurately reproduced the shriek-and-squeals on a crowded summer beach…

On admission to the fifth unit, instead of underpants, they gave me long johns with strips for tying