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

incident – the big jar of strawberry jam slipped from her hands and thwacked against the floor. It took her a considerable time to collect the large sticky puddle and wash the floor in the kitchen.

At about eleven she started sending me home. I had to drive a fool that everything there was locked and latched already, and the wolfhounds set free to run around. She, like, took pity and granted me half of her double bed, on the condition that I would behave.

When she put the light out and also lay down, I endeavored to continue the relationship in the most natural way, which move was met with unyielding resistance. I would never learn nothing! Did she call me for to wallow in demonstration of her chastity? I dropped trying and felt I didn't really care, just like about that sealed post package on my bookshelves.

…probably because the loss of jam was too great a shock… the three-liter jar would have seen her for at least thru half the winter… or maybe an ominous sign for the superstitious… and I don't care those morons have made their stupid dump there… when from one or another construction site I watched them waving at me it somehow eased… like a promise of something nice… when they eventually will cut them down and replace with a five-story block the trees will all the same be waving their tops like saying "Hi!" thru the heat haze… it will stay by me while those smarties remain stuck in their garbage heap for life…

In the dead of night, I awoke because light cautious fingers were feeling my cock thru the underpants. The nurse, after the failure to get raped, was checking why so. She'd better ask the sand on the Seim beach… But those frisking fingers of a stranger checking my flesh… It had already been somewhere… Only I couldn't recollect where and when before falling asleep again.

In the morning I left, declining the proposed tea with sugar. What was her name? She should have one anyway… it was some easy name, yes, sure… see? I even snap my fingers… now… well… er… perhaps… something like… mmm… yes…

~ ~ ~

The dance-floor in the Central Park of Recreation was all that still remained there for me. And I visited it not as a belated shooter in search for lame game but simply to get blues. A session of nostalgia priced 50 kopecks.

I was one of the first to enter the round enclosure of the dance-floor and get seated onto the timber bench of beams running along the tall pipe-grates in the peeling-off coat of silver-gray. The large black boxes of the loudspeakers on the stage thundered with trendy records because "live" music became bygones. Between the numbers some, like, DJ switched the mike on and announced what had just been played and what was coming next. At times, he attempted at making a clumsy cockamamie joke, fortunately, not too often.

I sat quietly, the back of my head leaned against the iron pipe in the fencing. The twilight closed in but high in the sky the flocks of swifts still revolved beneath the clouds touched by the parting sun rays. I recollected their carousel on that day when you turned one month old, and we brought you for a checkup in the children's polyclinic, in the hand-me-down carriage under the tulle cover to throw off the evil eye. Only those swifts kept chirping shrilly when circling above the roof of the department store, while these near the fading clouds were not heard because of being so far and high.

Then the sky became dark, the night fell, and I still sat on the bench and never danced because I knew my place which was among the other thirty-and-over-year-olds outside, under the lamp in the nearby alley. You might stop there for a couple of minutes to watch the jumping joy of the next generation before going back to your settled life with a davenport opposite the TV…

I sat quietly as becomes a foreign particle, listened to the music and watched, point-blank, the young stock mass getting gradually denser in front of the bench… that girl's neck is longer than that of Nefertiti… very nice, like a lithe stem of dandelion… And I admired it without getting aroused. Then she did not show up for a couple of weekends before coming back with her neck drooped guiltily and obviously shortened, and I knew that she got cut off at the entrance examinations to an institute…

At eleven, in the general throng, I left the park for the streetcar stop by Peace Square. Those who lived closer diverged from the common flow in pairs and groups. People from far-off neighborhoods discussed: to wait or not to wait? Streetcars at that time of day were an avis rara…

Once the stop was occupied by a glass-eyed mujik of about 40. He eyed the approaching youngsters with a scornful stare, akimbo, his palms on his buttocks, in the attitude of a Nazi officer by the death camp gate bearing the inscription "Forget all hope you who come in here". The scared pairs and small companies got silent and bypassed him to timidly cram in the remaining half of the long stop. Triumphantly stood he, feet planted wide apart into the conquered living space alongside the track rails…

I stopped in front of the victor, barely two meters away.

…so, Sturmbahnfuhrer, dueling of attitudes, eh?.

Mine came all of itself, from the newsreels of the Victory Parade in Moscow, 1945. Besides the dumping fascist banners to the Lenin Mausoleum, there were also footage stretches filming civilians, girls for the most part with their faces so sad. Almost all of those girls from the past assumed the same posture – their left arms hanging alongside the body, the right raised across the stomach to grip the left elbow.

Facing the glass-eyed, I replicated their stance. Only my right hand was clutching higher than by those sad girls, around my left