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

start-ups within the lower leagues. Besides, some of the normal (or else exceptionally gifted pretenders) could still harbor hope for a return of the departed ones out of the rough."Shine! Shine on!You, crazy diamond!"

Don't panic, partner! They'll never catch up! They cannot climb the shining peaks of your absolute freedom…

What category am I, personally, from? By the method of excluding the superfluous, I irrefutably place myself at the not all there. After all, no normal one would allow themselves the luxury of a hearty laugh when all alone and there is no "Comedy Club" on the TV.

My belonging to the departed is excluded because of my aversion to impurities; both physical and mental… Well, and I do not have the IQ to count myself one from among the geniuses. I have not been tested but I know for sure it won't be enough for the category.

In the course of life, you have to naturally zip in any of the categories because each of us is just a drop in the streams and tides of the current formation. Sometimes, the current gives me over to a stream to drag along the rapids, at other times I happen to be kicking back in the languid backwaters.

That's what my letter is, actually, about, which I am now due to proceed with…)

~ ~ ~

Everything returns to normal, and in forty-five days I returned to our team. A couple or so of months later, the buttocks also returned to their normal shape. The body is fluid. It's only that walking along the Settlement streets, whose dusty potholes for the future puddle-pools, had already been filled with scattered piles of fallen apples fetched out from under the trees in the gardens and dumped in the road, I felt saddened that everything rolled on somehow without me.

"So the summer has passed,As if it was not there…”

At 13 Decemberists appeared Guena, the husband of my sister Natasha. He was a representative of a well-to-do layer in the population. His mother, Natalya Savelyevna, with her face and blue eyes was like a movie star from the Mosfilm, but she worked at the station restaurant and every night returned from there loaded with food-filled bags.

Her husband, Anatoly Phillipovich, had already retired, kept shouting at everyone and swallowing his medications – an unmistakable specimen of the managing stratum. The newlyweds still did not get along with the husband's parents, but there's a time for everything…

Yes, I missed the wedding, but every cloud has a silver lining and Lenochka had gone all the way to "Artek". It turned out feasible, despite the pessimistic forecast of "boss" Slaushevsky. Besides, all came off so cheap, I did not pay a kopeck for her seaside summer, the expenditures for recreational facilities in our land were traditionally met by trade-unions.

Did Lenochka meet her mother Olga? After all, Theodosia was also in the Crimea. I do not know. I never learned to ask the most elementary, simple, questions…

The newlyweds returned to live with the Guena's parents and, as the wedding present, I built in their khutta yard the walls for garage and summer kitchen combined into one shed. The roof and plastering were not of my concern though. Well, there were also partitions in the bathroom inside the khutta. Just so trifles…

The mail brought for me to 13 Decemberists was placed on the handmade shelves, next to the photograph of Eera during her pioneer practice near the town of Kozelsk, in the north of Chernigov region, where she stood midst the summer stream in black sports pants rolled up above her knees, and smiled from under the plastic visor in the cap-kerchief… My mail was invariably the thick monthly Vsesvit in Ukrainian. I opened it and, with my eyes closed, sniffed somewhere from the middle – I always liked the smell of fresh print ink…

However, this time there was nothing to smell, it was an envelope which I disliked at first sight. It looked like having been ripped open with a kitchen knife and then, in a fit of funk, they daubed the rent with glue spread, just in case, in thrice more quantities than needed. Here, at once and all too clearly, the hand of layman was felt, the maiden flight of younger generation.

I opened the envelope from its side, but I still had to tear off a strand of paper stuck with glue, sacrificing pieces of typewritten text.

"What is it, Sehryozha?" my mother asked anxiously.

"Did Lenochka not tell you?"

"No."

"She will then."

It was a summons to the local People's Court over the lawsuit by a resident of Nezhyn, Citizen Eera, to dissolve the marriage since the family, in fact, never existed, and I was regularly taken to psychiatric hospitals diagnosed with schizophrenia…

In the queue for the soon-to-be divorcees on the second floor of the People's Court, I was the second, after a couple of ample-bodied local people disappointed in the institution of marriage. They looked like a pair of fluffed-up dove-pigeons, absolutely not talking to each other, and taking pains to gaze the opposite ways.

A girl, a little over the age of 20, invited them to enter for the procedure.

For several minutes from behind the door, there was heard a dialogue of varying loudness but of the same illegibility.

Then the couple went out of the door, still not looking at each other, blushed in their complexion, as if leaving the steam room in a bathhouse. One after another—the man first—they left…

In the room looking like a corridor, two tables formed the letter "T". The judge was sitting in the center of the crossbar table equipped with 2 lay judges, one for his either side. They were a thirty-year-old fair-haired man of military uprightness and a woman well over her forties who had already let all of it go at all. The girl-clerk got seated at the second table where it adjoined the upper one.

I liked the judge at once – a handsome man about 35 who looked like judges in Western movies. His jacket was off