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

In short, under the current situation in the world, devaluation of information by means of the Internet, there’s no sense in censorship and strict ideology control. Okay, let’s say I’m pouring out the most subversive stuff, so what? (I can’t do that at Facebook or any other popular social net, they purge such things out automatically) About my indie site on the Internet there are millions buzzing Emelyas, each one in their style, I’m buried by evergrowing avalanche of advice on the best practices in fucking, making pizza, enjoying Tick-Tock, buying Perpetuum Mobile for just $49. That’s why I’m not afraid of telling what I know.

And then again, if talking about cowardice, here we all are on the same ground. Let’s take me, for instance, I do know that Algerian Bay has a bump on his nose but keep myself in check and don’t blare about it from the roof-tops. Because you never know when they gonna pop up and fix you with pissed thru pieces of a torn bedsheet…)

~ ~ ~

Yes, life kept rolling along the same rails, where there was the bath, and the beach, and calls from Twoic. And everywhere I acted my rolled-in role, but somehow I got already split from everything, both from the systematically adjusted way of life and from my part in it. I kinda turned that mujik who, leaning against the fenced bounds of the playing grounds, like, watches the kids messing around in the sandbox… Everyone was busily busy with their business in that sand, and Twoic, and bosses, and helpers, and I myself with my streamlined lifestyle, yet I did not really care about all that fuss…

In spring, Twoic proposed to visit Nezhyn for, like, to kick up a party in the old school style at the Hosty. I remember that it was definitely Thursday, my bath day and, apparently, the eve of some holiday, he would not call me in the middle of the week. So I took a towel and underwear for change and went to Nezhyn because even though there was no steam room in the hostel, yet the shower could still be used…

In the hostel lobby, auntie Dina was sitting on duty, she had not changed a single bit and, of course, she didn't let me go any farther. I asked a passer-by student to check the room where, as arranged, Twoic had already been waiting for me to show up, and tell him about the predicament. He went upstairs and I had a discovery.

A young student entered the lobby from the hostel corridor, wearing a crumpled dressing-gown and a sleepy indifferent face. She did not give me the slightest look, ignoring another of casual visitors who pop up in the hostel lobby, and just came over to the window… I waited for Twoic or a message from him about thru which of the back side windows on the first floor I could climb in. So I was not at all prepared that my body, getting no order from me, nor any permission, would unexpectedly throw my right hand up and behind my head, so that my elbow stick out in the air. What a cheeky kink! Was it triggered by the nearness of the common-looking girl with her face of not so well-kneaded dough? Or was it her crumpled dressing gown to turn me on and out of control? In any case, it was outrageous, moreover without any distinct need! That body of mine got really too far! I, for my part, did not intend no gestures… And the cause of the mutiny aboard, a couple of meters off me, was staring at the absolutely void landscape of the two-story canteen behind the gray glass in the window. Some shocking discovery…

The messenger returned and said the door of the indicated room was locked. Apparently, Twoic had already begun a shake-up in the old-days-style of some complaisant chick… I went out of the hostel. To be back in Konotop before the bath closing hour was just unthinkable. But it was a Thursday! Okay, there remained the lake in the Count's Park, I headed there the shortest way.

A group of student lads in their sportswear were coming up along the same shortcut from the park. They reached the pipe from which Fyodor and Yakov once flopped into the water, yet now there was no water anymore, and the moat turned into a wide sod grown ditch. One of them crossed it walking along the shaky pipe. Wow! It seemed to become a student tradition here!

So what? Drumming myself in the chest and shouting "It's me! I'm the legend! It's been started by me!"?. In the sad, elegiac mood I entered the alley of Elms and strolled to the narrower end of the lake by the thicket in the deserted parts of the park. There I undressed and in the altogether entered the water.

Having rubbed the soap all over myself, I threw it ashore and scrubbed the hand-reachable parts of my body. Then, to wash the foam off, I churned along a little, turning around in a screw-wise twirl before diving back towards the shore. White spits of foam scattered the black ripples. The birth of Aphrodite. The f-f..er..frivolous Little Mermaid, thought I rubbing myself with the towel… No, I'm not a pervert. It simply gets so, somehow all by itself, and then just rolls on in a progressive spiral-wise rotation…

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Lenochka entered the sewing college in the Sumy city and went to study there. I did not have any reason to go on living at 13 Decemberists, and found a place on the opposite outskirts of Konotop, closer to the "Motordetail" plant.

It was a summer kitchenette of 2 × 3 meters with a pretty low ceiling, in the yard of a khutta whose owner worked at the wastewater treatment plant, where I once laid individual walls. The kitchenette's