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

sitting at the bus stop by the wide empty square in the tight breeze beneath the warm stars of a summertime night. The whitewashed walls in the stop-shed, as well as the planks of the benches, were stamped with inscriptions and cuts of all kinds of Deep Purples, Dynamos, Svetas, Blitzes, Vovas, and lots of dates… All of a sudden, Twoic spoke of Eera, "She said she had never had a better sex than with you."

That compliment, sort of, scalped me. They do not come up with such confessions at a café table. For such a subject, you should lie together in one bed after having a sex. Did she count on Twoic someday would deliver these words to me and I recreate the whole picture? No, a combination of too many moves… she’s not a Bobby Fisher… Sooner, the feline female custom of branding their fuckers by marks of scratching talons… That's why he reached then out for a cigarette of Belomor-Canal…

…don't succumb to complexes, Twoic, I've never been a sex prodigy… and now I know why he found me in Konotop… and I am sorry for the helpless babble about blessing drops… he came then with much more trivial agenda – to urinate over the ashes of his dear friend, Hooey-Pricker, and stop feeling envious even post mortem…

He somehow felt that he had blurted out a bit too much and, to efface it, started swearing that he had never in his life had anything with Eera… As if I asked him whether it was so.

(…if you pretend to be a stupid ass for too long then, at times, you become it…)

"Have you ever beat her?" he asked a little later.

Oops, so she shared about that slap too.

"I hit just once, at the final date," reported I, "but it was a light spank, solely to comply with the protocol."

Twoic laughed his endemic laughter…

The next morning, we went for a swim in kopanka. I did not feel like entering the water, so I just walked around the pond and lay on the beach.

Twoic swam it from end to end. His blue eyes radiated a melting glow of satisfaction when he came ashore nearby me with water trickles dripping from his trunks.

"This look was in his eyes when getting off her," thought I. The thought brought pain and even though not so acute as I expected, yet more replete than I would like…

~ ~ ~

She approached me on the beach and started a talk about the Morning Star dropped on the sand next to the pink coverlet on which I was sitting. If I really read or it was it just a trick to lure girls. What that big article was about, for example.

So, I had to retell for the examiner what happened to a 19-year-old youth, a member of the family of smugglers. They regularly flew from Pakistan to England, swallowing a heap of small tight packages before the flight. Stomach served an ideal repository, the specially trained controller dogs at airports couldn’t sniff out any drugs. Upon arrival, at a safe house in London, the whole family underwent the stomach lavage and—rah-rah-rah!—congrats on the successful shipping.

The fizzle happened on the flight when one of the small packages burst in the stomach of the young man. They used to tamp too much into one package and, on the arrival, the guy was taken from the aircraft straight to the hospital with a severe overdose. They washed the drugs out of his stomach and saved his life. And that was the end to the family business. Some sad, in general, story…

She sympathized and shared that she was also a nurse… Basically, a good profession for a girl about 30, who did not look a movie star, yet everything else was in place. My trunks could witness to the fact because, when finishing the story, I had to pull my knees up to my chin to look like a civilized gentleman and not a heated gorilla in the zoo.

Then everything went on like in a fairy tale, she told me her address in At-Seven-Winds, and we arranged my coming to her place on Tuesday with a visit of friendship and reciprocal understanding. She strolled away along the sandy beach, and I had to stretch out on my stomach, so as not to attract the public attention by my swimming trunks stuck out in anticipation of the day after tomorrow…

That day came at last and, after work, I rode from the station square to City. In The Flowers shop there happened nothing to my liking and I had to buy a kinda crossbred of daisies and sunflower. There still remained a hell of a lot of time before the appointed hour, so I took a walk back to the station and then along Club Street to At-Seven-Winds.

In Zelenchuk Area, Vladimir Gavkalov, the truck crane operator from SMP-615, who looked like Eera's brother Igor, crossed my path.

"Sehryoga!" yelled he on the run, "You've lost your way! The bathhouse’s in the counter direction!"

I did not like that whisker of a bouquet myself but valiantly carried it on.

And all the same, up to At-Seven-Winds I got half-hour ahead of time and decided to keep my long-standing promise to myself that one of those days I’d come on a visit to that family of tall Birch trees in the vast area of construction sites… Following the trail trod in the tall grass, I approached the group of the white-trunk beauties.

Stupid bitches! The tenants from the nearest street who made a garbage dump under the trees… Scrunched between the closing in cloud layers, the sun went down like a bulb, without a sunset. Clenching my teeth at the ugly discovery, I took my stupid bouquet to the address, for the principle's sake.

"Oh!" she said. "Even with flowers!"

And I, both immediately and too late, got it that it should have been vodka… Then we chattered about nothing in the kitchen of her one-room flat. After tea, there happened an