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

flounder on by the supposed service path alongside the railway track. The concrete pillars holding the contact wire above the rails serve the milestones not to get lost in the desert of floating snow. It's better not to look back – the stream of blinding snow instantly sticks like a chilly mask all over the face. Besides, there's nothing behind to look for – whatever has been there is just gone.

But why do I see her naked body as white as the churning white foam of this frenzied blizzard? And she's not alone – having a sex with someone. Not me…

I turn my face back to the snowy slaps, to wake up, not see. In my brain, I switch on the splashes of the organ from the House of Organ Music, they are tattered, crisp and not precise, yet distract…

… I must be a pervert indeed…no normal one would have a hardon watching his wife fucking somebody else midst this snowstorm…

…what wife? You don't have no wife!.

…okay, not wife then – the love of the lifetime…

…shut up, asshole!.

I shook my head in desperation and, with a groan, wandered on. A hard glancing blow from behind grazed at my left shoulder calling to order. The local train from Nezhyn making thru the blizzard for the station.

…the trains are always right, they don't have deviations…

…look, the blurred lights ahead, above the fourth platform…

…from there in the common throng makes thru the blizzard to the station square, to our Seagull…

…everything is okay, I'm just like everyone else…

~ ~ ~

In a late spring evening on the station square, someone had a breakdown. Maybe, the heart needed a time break or something, but the man collapsed onto the asphalt. However, the ambulance was quick and pulled up by when the females' "ah! oh!" were still floating over the small crowd around the vacationer.

Going to the railway station thru the Loony park, I missed the beginning and only watched the final act – the ambulance departure followed by dispersing of a group of people. However, the pedestal of the Lenin monument in the park was still sending back tiny echoes of "ah!" so reconstructing what had just been there was as easy as summing up 2 zeroes.

Along the alley opening to the square, one of the incident witnesses was nearing me, pensively pacing in the counter direction. When we get close to each other, she suddenly repeated "ah!" rehearsed shortly before, uplifted her arms, a kinda dancer in The Swan Lake ballet, and fell on me.

What else could I do? Naturally, I caught the fainter in her fall, by the armpits. Then I gentlemanly dragged the swoony swan onto the bench of green beams in the low wall of trimmed bushes.

She sat silently, her head bowed, and I gallantly kept shut up, in the same deep shadow under the tree blocking the light from the lamp up the alley. Seated next to her, I fed an inaudible sermon to myself on pointlessness of the slightest advances by a guy of my pitch-black past, especially in the city where everyone knew anyone else. Who’d need a goner’s courting?. Who’d care for a mentally compromised freak let loose till next pinch up for a yearly session to get his head tweaked at the Romny madhouse?

When our reciprocal silence became too monotonous, she put her hand on my shoulder to say in a wearily meek tone of voice, "Thank you" and left the bench.

I dismally looked after the blurred spot of her long light cloak moving away up the alley, and I thought to myself: "Moron! Couldn't you prop the girl by your arm around her waist? And let her decide whether to put her head on your shoulder or say "don't!" and leave? No? You're too smart for that, you made the decision for both! Okay! Now stay with your fucking stream of consciousness, with your libido, and the endlessly long nights, like by that princess on a pea!"

"Had an encounter with Katya in the park, brother?"

"What's the buzz, Natasha?"

"Come on! Katya's from our accounts department. She told me herself how she nearly fainted in Loony and fell on you."

"She took me for someone else, or him for me."

"Stop fibbing to me!"

"I wish I were as lucky as that jackass with Katya-girlies dropping on him in parks!."

~ ~ ~

On the payday, I got off our Seagull at the bus station and turned into the post-office to send 30 & 30 alimony. Then I crossed Club Street back and proceeded alongside the Loony park towards the railway station.

"Hey! You're from The Orpheuses, right? Ogoltsoff?

…a young man of my age, heading to the station with a woman by his side, his wife, probably… "Yes, it's me."

"Do I know you! You studied in Nezhyn and I knew your wife Olga!"

…no, never met him, and he was not alone to know Olga after she became my wife…

He looked around as if seeking some piece of hard and weighty rock to swat against my skull with. Then he pointed his finger at his companion who unswervingly stared aside.

"See? Got her teeth into and having me in all the holes!"

…yea, I see it alright, man, having it in all the holes… some relic from the antediluvian life… you wander around beset with snotty sorrows for the flute of Eera and they still pop up with their news bulletins on Olga…

"Yea, I see. Say 'hello' to my wife Olga."

"Damn! You're some f-f.. fool driver!"

Leaving them to each other, I turned off Club Street into the park along the walk coming up to the Loony Palace of Culture, but I bypassed it on the right and walked on behind the white back of Lenin to the side exit from the park, then past School 11 to the terminal of Streetcar 3 by the Under-Overpass. At Bazaar stop, Skully and Vladya boarded the streetcar.

"Hi!" said I. "How are you?"

Skully nodded warily and they both also said, "Hi!"

The rumbling streetcar was carrying us towards School 13. I gave