There is no orientation class after you die. No, “How to For Ghosts”. You are just there all of the sudden, outside your body, looking at it, and probably with a lot of confusion. There is not a concierge to greet you with a smile and a brochure listing the many adventures and activities that haunting has to offer. You don’t get inducted by a circle of mysterious hooded figures ready to initiate you into the secrets of the dead. You just are, all by yourself, existing somehow, outside yourself.

Alarik knelt next to my body studying the wound that marked my head, his face intense as he studied it, like a puzzle to be solved. He looked up at another stern faced man who stood a bit apart observing the scene.

“This looks intentional.”

The other man scowled, facing the tree lined bluff above, and he gestured vaguely with one hand. “There is a clear line of fall.”

“Actually the line of fall indicates a body drop more than a fall,” Alarik studied the bluff as he explained, pointing along the line of smashed ferns. “When a conscious person falls they grasp at anything they can grab hold of. There would be much more disturbance to the underbrush if she had been alive when she fell. We would most likely see plants pulled out to the roots.”

Rivera studied the bluff, looking at the line of dirt exposed as I had tumbled down the face of the steep slope. It was true that some plants were flattened, but none looked pulled out. I couldn’t remember dying, but I did know that I would have fought.

Rivera shook his head, and turned to face Alarik and my body on the moss covered ground. “You’re seeing what you want to see. We all know you’re some big shot FBI investigator, but this is just a small town. There aren’t murders just wandering our forests. What we do have is idiot hikers, and idiot hikers mean hiking accidents. That’s all this is. ”

“You may not want to see it Rivera, but she was killed, someone bashed in her head and then threw her off the cliff. So they could trick someone like you, not paying attention, into thinking it was an accident.” As he spoke, Alarik stood up. He squared his shoulders with Rivera, bringing them to approximately the same height. They postured like animals ready to duel over a potential mate, only instead of a mate, it was my body they fought over.

Bristling at the insult Rivera narrowed he eyes, and leaned in inches away from Alarik’s face and whispered. “I guess that’s why you’re not in the FBI anymore, huh? That family curse coming back to haunt you? Seeing monsters in the shadows like your uncle did? Careful, better get control of yourself before you kill some innocent man like he did.”

Well that was interesting. What kind of monsters was he seeing? Suddenly I was losing faith in my shining white knight, but then who was I to say his monsters weren’t real?

“Sometimes there really are monsters, they just wear human faces. Give me seventy two hours and I’ll prove it.”

I had the distinct impression this fight wasn’t really about me. I was merely the latest rope they had to pull in opposite directions. These divisions ran deeper. Stupid men and their egos.

Indignation flooded Rivera’s face his tan skin passed red and went straight to purple, but there was a shadow of doubt behind his dark eyes. He might be arrogant but he wasn’t stupid, if this was a murder and he didn’t even investigate it a little, then it would be on his head and he knew it. Still his words dripped with condescension. “Fine. You have forty-eight hours, and just you. I don’t want any of the department’s resources wasted on your delusions.”

Grim faced Alarik nodded, it wasn’t enough time, I could see that in his face, the doubt behind his eyes, but he would try.

I knew two things definitively, the first was that I had been murdered. The second was that I hated Lieutenant Rivera. I tingled with my hatred, molecules I didn’t know I had vibrated with it. Who was this small man to dismiss me so easily? His own petty grudges more important to him than my life. No, I thought, not my life. That was over, now I just had death. A formless existence with massive limitations yes, but maybe also possibilities that I hadn’t even begun to explore. I could go after him, and experiment. I could test the limits of my new existence and break my ghostly baby teeth chewing on his arrogance. I almost followed him then, to pursue his foot prints made by perfectly shined, expensive shoes. I hoped the muddy forest floor ruined them.

Just as I was about to leave the clearing I stopped, for one last look back at my body. With grim faced determination, Alarik, careful not to disturb any evidence, was crouched down taking photos of my too-clean hands. Using his gloved hand, he lifted my limp one, to swab underneath a nail. While there was no dirt there to collect I hoped I had gotten a swipe in, and had my killer’s DNA preserved, just waiting to incriminate.

I wished I had known Alarik when I was alive, he seemed like the kind of guy I would have liked. He was earnest and lacked the kind of ego that so often led men to their own destruction. He had a gentleness to him, I could see it in the way he touched my hand, softly and with respect, even though he knew I could not feel it. I realized then, what a waste it would be to spend all this righteous anger on such a petty little enemy as Rivera, when I had a much bigger one. Alarik didn’t seem to be bothered by his confrontation, he had just dismissed it and gotten on with business. If I truly wanted revenge, on the person that deserved it the most, I had to help him. ……………………………………………………

I didn’t remember dying, I barely even remembered living. There were just snatches that stood out, with a glaring brightness. My life reduced to a highlights reel. The woman sitting opposite Detective Alarik Lavel featured heavily in that reel. She was beautiful, but in a less conventional way. She pushed back her unruly dark blonde hair, it was constantly getting in her face as it curled around her head in kinky medusa curls. How many times had I watched her struggle with it in a mirror while we got ready to go out together? It was one of those crystal clear memories, her bent over, dry shampoo in hand liberally spraying, the scent of it filling her small bathroom. She flipped her head back up, curls bouncing back to life like magic.

“Wow! That stuff really works.” I said with amazement. I knew about the existence of dry shampoo, I had just never thought to use it.

Karlyn smirked, she loved to feel sophisticated, and it was even better when her sophistication was in contrast to my own naivety. “Umm, yeah it’s good stuff. Have you seriously never used dry shampoo?”

I should have felt stung by the condensation, but I didn’t mind it really, I was just happy that she liked me. Her being a little bit mean made her approval feel like it meant more.

Karlyn looked across the bar table at Alarik, eyes twinkling conspiratorially. Her slender fingers swirled the straw in her drink, she never could be still for more than a minute at a time.

“If you want a drink Detective, I won’t tell.”

Alarik studied her, with that intense gaze he has. You can see his brain working sometimes, cataloging information as he observes it. He cataloged Karlyn now, not in a sexual way, but he still had to have noticed her attractiveness. His eyes traveled up from her casually crossed long legs, to her elbow propped up lazily on the table, he followed the line of her arm up to fingers with chipped paint, which tapped her full lips playfully. You’d never guess that an hour ago she had been standing in front of my dead body, stony faced. That’s the thing about Karlyn. Most of the time she was pure expression, but she never showed sadness, and she never showed fear.

“Would it make you feel better if I ordered a drink?” He ask it sincerely, although the words could have easily been sarcastic.

“If I say it would, will you order one?” Karlyn quipped, mouth curling up in a half smile that I was extremely familiar with.

Alarik flagged down a passing waiter, “I’ll take a whiskey neat.” Then he stopped himself, thinking better of it, “Scratch that, I’ll have an IPA.” Apparently remembering that he was supposed to be working, you know, solving my murder.

“So Detective, are you from around here?” Karlyn ever on the offensive, asking questions to the question asker.

He laughed bitterly, “Clearly you aren’t from around here.”

“Complicated history?” Karlyn asked.

“You could say that. My family has a bit of a …. reputation.” Alarik answered.

“Not a good one I take it?” she was intrigued.

“Like you said, it’s complicated.” He left is at that.

Then at a standstill they just sat there in silence looking at each other, each waiting for the other to speak. Alarik’s sensitive brown eyes met Karlyn’s bright blue ones. She had piercing gaze, she saw into your soul, but never the other way around. I thought she would get the better of Alarik, but then something happened and she dropped her guard. Her eyes softened and finally showed a deep sadness within her. Karlyn let him see her then, the real her, underneath all the bravado. That was the person I’d loved, the lonely girl she never let anyone glimpse. Now she had one more reason to be lonely.

“Tell me about yourself.” Alarik finally broke the silence. It wasn’t a question, although given kindly, it was an order all the same.

“Me? I’m a nobody, just a small town girl.”

“And now you’re a small town girl with a dead best friend.”

That took her a bit off track, even after she had seen my body in the morgue, only a few hours ago she had skirted around the issue. Even looking at me had been hard from her, but she’s had to for a moment to identify my body. Her gaze would land anywhere but on me. It was so unlike my fearless and direct friend. That was how I had known that even if she hadn’t broken down in tears, she mourned me.

“Yes, I suppose so.” Karlyn didn’t expand, she wasn’t going to make this that easy for him.

“Do you know if anyone would want to hurt her?”

“Mysa? No way, she was the sweetest. Too sweet for her own good really, sometimes she let people walk all over her. Everyone at work loved her. Anyway, why are you asking, I thought it was an accident, she fell right?”

Well that stung a little, I wasn’t that big a pushover, if anyone was walking on me, it was Karlyn herself! One of the hardest things about being a ghost, I couldn’t talk back, I couldn’t defend myself.

“We haven’t determined what it is yet.” Alarik frowned at that, no doubt thinking he knew exactly what it was. “What about outside of work, any boyfriends?”

Ah yes, I thought, it’s always the partner. Was I that clique?

“Well, no one recently. When we met she was dating a guy. He didn’t last long after, he was a real dickhead to her.” Karlyn said with a scowl.

She had hated him with a passion, but to be fair to her, he was in fact, a real dickhead.

“How was the break up?” Alarik asked, making notes on a little notepad. “Mysa didn’t talk about him much, but she knew I disapproved. He was a drunk, in and out of rehab. That’s how Mysa was, she thought she could save people.”

I wanted to disagree with her, it felt too much like criticism, but she was right, I did try and save people. That particular boyfriend had been a prime example. Poor Keagan just had too many daemons in the end to be saved, but he wasn’t really violent. He got loud a few times, he had scared me just enough for me to leave, and finally not come back after promises of change, but he had never hurt me. He didn’t have that in him, I thought, making excuses for him.

“The ex, had they been in contact recently? How long ago did they break up?”

I wished I could answer his questions instead of her, but my memory was blank for at least the month leading up to my death.

“It was about eight months ago, and maybe she did? I’m not sure, she knew I disapproved of him, so she might not have told me.”

Right, because it was over, I had no reason to talk about him! I hadn’t seen him in months! I was going to have to find a way to communicate, this ethereal muzzle was infuriating.

“Could he have hurt her? Does he have a history of violence that you know of?” Alarik asked.

“Maybe, I know he scared her sometimes. She had a restraining order out against him.”

Well, that was true on a technicality, I had needed to break our lease and that was the only way. He had made some conveniently timed, if completely toothless, threats that I had used to get the order. At the time it hadn’t seemed like a big deal, but that probably wouldn’t look great for him now. Oops, sorry Keagan. Karlyn knew that though, I had definitely told her, thinking she would be proud of my Machiavellian thinking. I had gone to his house and pushed him just enough to get those threats after all. It was something she would do.

“Do you have his last name? Any contact information?” Alarik said, sliding the note pad across the table for her to write it down.

“I don’t remember but it’s easy to find, he’s on her Facebook. You should be able to find him the same way you found me. Just go back in her photos about a year and you’ll see him.”

“Can you point him out?” Alarik pulled out his phone, he had my Facebook page already pulled up.

I was glad I hadn’t bothered to set it as private. Karlyn leaned over to look at the phone he held, their heads bowed over it together within inches, as she scrolled though and pointed out Keagan. There was a tension in the air vibrating between them as their body’s pulled closer together like magnets.

Alarik looked at the picture of me posed in front a waterfall, Keagan kissing my cheek as I took a selfie. That day was one of the flashes of memory I still retained. It had been a good one, he’d been sober for a while. I’d thought I had succeeded in saving him. Alarik nodded and saved the picture, no doubt he’d be looking into the lead soon. Alarik pulled back from Karlyn, contemplating something, “Any idea where her cell phone might be?”

Karlyn looked caught off guard, “You didn’t find it on her? There’s no way she would come all the way from Portland to Astoria without it! I doubt she would have even found her way without GPS. That girl would GPS her way across her own neighborhood just to avoid traffic.”

“We are still looking, do you know if she lost it recently?”

“Well she lost stuff all the time, including her phone, but she texted me the night before, so I doubt it.”

“What did she text you?”

Karlyn looked off for a moment, her mind going somewhere else, then waved away his question with a hand flip, “Oh nothing really.”

Her voice croaked at the end, and I was surprised to see tears forming in her eyes. My strong, brave friend brought low by the mention of texts? I didn’t even remember what they were about, but it couldn’t have been that important. Karlyn was crying now, full tears running down her face. Alarik got a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, of course he would have one, and handed it across the table to her. She took it but didn’t let go of his hand. She clung to it like a lifeline while she buried her face in her other hand, hiding herself with his handkerchief.

I felt bad for her, I really did. We had both been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours, and I was even glad she was letting down her guard a little and actually feeling some emotion. Unfortunately that wasn’t what I needed right now. I needed the steely bitch that never showed fear. I also needed her to stop distracting my detective. I had been used to her getting all the attention when I was alive, but really? She even had to steal my detective? This was getting out of hand. So far I had just been watching and waiting. Hoping that Alarik would find all the answers and I could just go along for the ride. Clearly that was not going to get me anywhere, so time to take things into my own hands.

Then I remembered I didn’t have hands. This presented a problem, but I was going to have to come up with something, and quickly. I saw it in her purse, reflecting light with a twinkle, my spare apartment key. I’d forgotten that I had given Karlyn one, she didn’t use it often, but I was worried I would lock myself out so I had given her one. Alarik needed more information, I didn’t know what might be in my apartment that would help him, but maybe he would find something. I just had to get him there. I jingled the keys.

Or rather, I tried to, it was mostly unsuccessful. They did move, but just a tiny bit, not enough to make any kind of audible noise, in the somewhat rowdy bar. I tried harder. There was more movement this time, but still not enough to be heard. I would basically have to pick them up and shake the keys in their faces for them to hear with everything else going on. I could barely even move them, the soft little nudges I’ve gotten so far had taken enormous ghostly effort. Haunting was surprisingly hard.

“I should go.” Karlyn said, finishing the rest of her drink in one swig. Apparently she’d had enough of crying in public.

She reached down to pick up her purse, my opportunity vanishing. They were just there, dangling half out of the purse. What if I just pulled a little?

The keys hit the ground with a tinkling.

“Your keys.” Alarik said bending over to retrieve them for her.

He held them out to her, and I silently screamed in frustration as he almost gave them back without getting it. As she was about to take them from him, he paused, looking down at them he frowned. There it was! I could see his mind working.

“Is one of these hers?”

“What?”

“Is one of these keys Mysa’s? Like a spare. You were best friends right? Maybe she gave you a key to her apartment?”

Karlyn stopped, her delicate skin growing even whiter. “Yes.”

Alarik smiled, “Well then what are we waiting for?” ……………………………………………………..

It feels very strange to watch people go through your things when they don’t think you can see them. I wondered, is this what people watching burglars on security cameras felt? No. It was worse, because these weren’t nameless strangers possibly judging my housekeeping as they ransacked my apartment looking for loot. They were actually there to judge me. They were looking for something bad, something that I did wrong enough to lead to my own murder. I wanted them to find it too, even if it was embarrassing to watch them look. If they could.

“She wasn’t much of a house keeper.” Karlyn told Alarik apologetically.

“Well, she probably wasn’t expecting company.” Alarik said, cementing forever my love of him.

Karlyn raised an eyebrow at that, “I can assure you, it didn’t look much better when she was.”

Bitch. Sometimes she just couldn’t help herself. Her place wasn’t that much neater either! I really hated not being able to argue. See, I wasn’t a pushover.

“Well it might help us, messy people tend to leave important things laying out somewhere obvious. Look for any paperwork, photos, if she had one, a computer.” Alarik instructed.

“I don’t think she had one. If she did, she didn’t use it much, everything was on her phone.”

As she said it, for a split second Karlyn’s eyes darted over to my couch. She knew I had a computer, she was right I didn’t use it much, but she knew I had one, and she knew where it was. Why wasn’t she telling him?

“Even if she didn’t use it, her phone might be backed up on it. Most of them automatically do that these days.” He explained.

We got together every Thursday night, Karlyn and I, to watch a show that was both ridiculously stupid but also fun. We liked being mean girls and making fun of the earnest people looking for love. We were cynical, and sometimes a little bit cruel, but it made us feel better. We would drink wine and ridicule, then whine about how there were no good men left.

“Well, I’m empty.” Karlyn said getting up to run to the kitchen for more wine.

“Careful!” I said as she almost stepped on my laptop.

It was on the floor, halfway tucked under the couch. By the time I said something her foot was already resting on it. She looked down in surprise, then back up at me.

“Who keeps their computer on the ground!”

“Clearly, me.” I said defensively, and a little sarcastic.

“Ok, why you weirdo?” Her favorite affectionate insult.

“Because, when I’m using it on the couch, I get tired and tuck it under the couch until I get up later, only then I forget about it. Obviously.” I explained in a tone that let her know, she was in fact the idiot here.

Karlyn rolled her eyes at me, “Obviously.”

Then she got us some more wine.

Karlyn sat on my couch and looked up at Alarik, who had begun shuffling through some papers lying haphazardly on my desk.

“She was behind on bills.” He said casually.

“You don’t make much on hotel front desk wages.” Karlyn explained defensively. I appreciated the sentiment, but given that we made the same amount and spent the same amount on cheap clothes and cheaper wine, I knew she was as hard off financially as I was. Perhaps, she was defending herself as much as me.

“She wasn’t killed for her money,” Karlyn stated the obvious.

“Love then?” Alarik asked, wondering over to my refrigerator to examine the few photos I had hanging from magnets.

“If it was secret, maybe,” Karlyn said with a shrug, “but she didn’t tell me about any new lovers.”

As Alarik examined my photos, Karlyn slid the laptop further under the couch with her shoe. That bitch. What was on there that she didn’t want him to see? I mentally cataloged all the various shenanigan we had gotten up to. The trouble was, I didn’t have great recall. My life before was still mostly a blur. Was it drugs? What had we been into together? I wracked my, well not brain, but shattered memories trying to come up with something, but has escaped me.

I understood her need for self-preservation. It had bonded us together early. She didn’t talk about her past very often, but when she did, I could see the darkness behind her eyes. Her childhood had not been kind. That she had survived it with any kind of sense of humor and kindness was really a marked accomplishment. She was kind. I know that I have not painted her out to be so far, but underneath her air of superiority was a ferocious caring. She might mock me occasional herself, but she was protective too. Fiercely so.

“Would she tell you? If she were seeing someone that she shouldn’t be?” Alarik asked, moving on from the refrigerator.

There was nothing interesting on it, just photos of my family and a few of myself and Karlyn off on our sometimes adventures. One magnet that said, “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels” that my mother bought me. I had never believed it.

“If you had asked me that yesterday I would have said yes, we told each other everything.” Karlyn answered, again lying.

I told her everything. She couldn’t say the same.

“But now, I don’t know…. something had to have happened. Unless it really was just an accident?” Karlyn lifted her voice hopefully.

“It doesn’t look like it.”

I agreed with him, I had to. His logic was sound, yes, but it was more than that. I remembered the feeling. Not anything about it, just the emotion. The horror and the anger. It existed out of time for me, just hovering between being, and then not being. I had felt something like it only once before, locked in my own bathroom with my cell phone trying to decide if I should call the police. Finally, when Keagan said he would shoot himself it they came for him and banged on the door again, screaming at me to come out, I did. I called 911 and got hold music. So, I hung up and called Karlyn. Why do I remember this clearly, but not what is on my computer? I don’t know but my only guess is that it was fiercely emotional. I had never felt blind panic and absolutely helplessness like that before until a year later when someone hit me over the head with a rock and then tossed by body into a ravine. She had answered right away, score one Karlyn, zero emergency services.

“Just stay in there, I’ll be right over,” She ordered.

“No, you shouldn’t come. He’s not right, he might, I don’t know, he might do something,” I warned her in a panic, “He’s threatening to shoot himself.”

She laughed then, actually laughed in the face of my terror, “He’s welcome to, good riddance.”

“Karlyn, it’s not funny, I’m really scared!”

She softened then, “Of course you are baby girl, I’ll be right there just hold on.”

She could do that; make you feel better about anything with one heartfelt “Baby Girl” said in just the right tone. So, I breathed deeply and felt the panic start to subside.

“No, no I can handle him, he’s probably all talk anyway, you know how he gets when he drinks,” I brushed away my fears.

“Stay in the bathroom, Mysa. I’m on my way.”

That was the last night I saw him. She did come and with firm authority handle him, he was half passed out by the time she got there anyway. That’s the good thing about drunks, they tire quickly when they keep drinking, and Keagan always kept drinking. She escorted me out, grabbing a few things to stay at her place. Then the next day we went back for the rest after she determined he wasn’t there. I went back to that apartment only once, to get enough evidence of threat to obtain a restraining order. I presented it to my landlord along with my notice that I would no longer be a tenant in his properties. She showed me how.

Alarik sighed, he had just been through my entire apartment (except underneath the couch) and found nothing. He sat himself across from Karlyn in my little living room. All he had to do was look down and he would see my computer, but who could take their eyes off her?

“Struck out?” She asked him.

“If Mysa had secrets, she didn’t keep them here,” he responded with an air of defeat.

“You asked me if she would tell me about a new man in her life earlier,” Karlyn said, “and she would, she absolutely would tell me about any new man. The man she would keep a secret is the old one.”

“You think she was seeing her ex again? The one she got a restraining order against?” He looked confused.

“She might have. I like to think she knew better, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she went back to him after he got sober.”

I hated to admit it, but she was right. I had, in the past, believed him when he said he was done for good.

“I know it sounds stupid, but she blamed herself a little bit for his drinking. He had been sober for two years when they met.” Karlyn explained, justifying my behavior in a way she never had let me, when I was alive.

“Still, why would she blame herself?” Alarik asked, clearly never having been in a relationship with someone suffering from addiction.

“Maybe because it was easier than blaming him? Because if she blamed herself, then she could go on loving him, even when he did and said terrible things. She told herself it was the alcohol talking, and it was her fault he was drinking in the first place.”

“She believed it was her responsibility to get him sober?” Alarik asked, he was getting it now.

“Yes, and she saw Sober Keagan as a different person than Drunk Keagan. If Sober Keagan found her, he might have convinced her to take him back.”

“Ah, so kind of a Jeckle and Hide thing? But why wouldn’t she have told you?”

“Because she thought I’d judge her, we went through a lot together to get her out of that relationship, and for her to just go back, well she might have been right. I probably would have judged her.”

Karlyn looked grief stricken. I could tell she blamed herself. I wanted to tell her not to. I tried to tell her not to. I sat my formless self down on the couch next to her and placed my ghostly hand over her solid one. She shivered a little and moved it. I could provide no comfort now.

“So, she might have gotten back together with him, then Sober Keagan, becomes Drunk Keagan and kills her?” Alarik pondered the theory, “But was he violent enough to kill her?”

“I would have said no, before. He was an asshole, no doubt, but kind of all bark and no bite. I don’t think he ever actually hit her, just yelled horrible things at her and punched the walls.” Karlyn said, looking troubled.

“That kind of thing can escalate quickly. He’s the best suspect I’ve got at this point. Any idea how to reach him?” Alarik asked, resigned.

“No, none, if he’s on Facebook he’s blocked me and is private. Maybe she would have told someone else though, I wasn’t her only friend at the hotel, damn, she was friends with everyone.”

……………………………….

Karlyn exaggerated that, I wasn’t actually friends with very many people at all, maybe five or six, the rest were all just friendly acquaintances. I had a crushing need to be liked by everyone, which led me to having a lot of superficial relationships and not many real ones. It also meant I was a gossip. I had learned early on that if you want to be liked by people, have the best dish. When you talk shit on everyone, well then you never really get that close to anyone, Karlyn being the exception to this rule. The irony of this being, that now of course, news of my untimely demise was the biggest dish in the history of all dishes.

“Yeah, he was around here and there, sorry Kar, she asked me not to say anything to you. Knowing how you felt about him. I’m sure she would have told you eventually, just wanted to make sure it, you know, worked out.” One of those casual work friends of mine, Brian said unable to look Karlyn in the eye he fiddled with a pen, pretending to work on something behind the desk.

Alarik had booked a room at my hotel, well I guess now it was my former hotel. I imagined the ticking clock in him like the crocodile in Peter Pan, tick, tick, ticking away right at his heartbeat. It felt so strange to be here this way, it felt strange to be at the hotel when I wasn’t working. Being dead was that feeling times a million. All my co-workers, going on about their jobs that now had nothing to do with me. I do think they looked a little bit sad now. No one was crying uncontrollably, they didn’t have a giant memorial at the front desk complete with a glamorized picture of me and scented candles but it was there around the edges. No one was laughing, normally there was laughter here. Two servers I knew by sight but not name whispered to each other across the lobby in the restaurant, looking at Karlyn. Everyone knew we had been best friends, so I guess it was strange for her too.

“It’s ok Brian, we just need to know what happened now,” Karlyn reached a hand across the desk to still his meaningless scribbles as she said it

. Brian looked up now, and despite my earlier observation, did have tears welling up. Aw, I was touched, we hadn’t been that close. I guess you never know who likes you, until your dead.

“When was he here?” Alarik asked, pushing the box of tissues on the counter to Brian.

Brian took one, more for something to hold on to than to try his unshed tears. “A few times, the first time he had a ton of roses, Mysa was clearly surprised. She took a long lunch and went off with him. When she came back she looked really happy, glowing really. I joked with her about having a nooner.”

“And the other times?” Alarik asked, notebook at the ready.

“Oh nothing major, he came to have lunch with her a few more times, pick her up after her shift, that kind of thing. There was no drama if that’s what you’re asking.” Brian shrugged off the question.

“How long ago? When was the last time you saw him?” Alarik asked, jotting down notes.

“Oh last week, I don’t remember which day, he was in and out a lot the last month. They seemed really happy.” Brian broke now, tears streamed down his face.

I wished I could remember this, it was so strange how I remembered watching trash TV with Karlyn three months ago, but not getting back together with my ex-boyfriend a month ago. Now that Brian said it though, it was coming back a little. I remembered the roses. I remembered being happy, but worried and a little scared. Had I been scared of Keagan? Or was I scared of Karlyn’s reaction to me being with him again? Probably, both had worried me. As it turned out, maybe not unfounded worry.

“Anything else? Did she ever talk about their relationship?” Karlyn asked, hopefully.

“Just the normal stuff, and of course to tell me not to tell you about him.” Brian answered, still sniffling. Ok Brian, calm down we weren’t that close.

“Thanks.” Alarik said, “Anyone else that would know anything here today?” “Just her,” Brian said, nodding to Karlyn

. …………………………………………..

Now I had to wonder, could he have hurt me? If we really had gotten back together, then, like he always had before, he started drinking again. I would have tried to end things, I knew I would have. I might have taken him back sober, sure. He could be so charming, so sweet, with his winning grim, dimpling at the corners. I would have melted when he came in to surprise me at work with a dozen roses. I remembered the roses. They had been a delicate pink, almost white, and very full. Not the typical long stem reds, these had been voluptuous and a little wild. It was coming back to me in waves now. We had gone out to his car to talk, and sitting in the front seat he had told me he got them because they reminded him of me. That had done it, I’d been putty.

“Well, what do you think?” Karlyn asked Alarik, that classic eye brow raised.

She had plopped herself onto his hotel bed, while he was at the desk setting up his laptop and notes. It sounds more intimate than it was, there were only the two seating options.

“It was him, I know it was him.” She said angrily, answering her own question before he had a chance to.

“Maybe, all we have is circumstantial, and even that is thin at best, but I agree, he’s worth looking into.” Alarik said cautiously.

“Great! When do we go?” Karlyn sat up straight, like she was ready to charge out of the room and knock down Keagan’s door at any moment.

“We don’t go, I will do some research and look him up tomorrow. You are a civilian.”

Karlyn did stand up now, she walked the few feet between him slowly, her long legs slinking against each other. She was stalking him like a cat, as he typed away at the desk, his back turned from her.

“But Detective,” she purred, “we make such a good team.”

She had reached him now, she slid a delicate finger along the nape of his neck. Just one little touch, but it crossed a line that couldn’t be walked back. Alarik froze in place, his eyes widened in shock, then deepened. I could see it in his face how much he liked her touch. How long had it been since he had been touched, I wondered. He closed his eyes then resigned to what he had to do, what his honor required of him, even if it did betray the desires of his body. He shrugged her away, but by leaning into her, moving her finger from his neck, but in doing so he held her hand. I could feel the air buzzing with them, their essence. It pulsed all around us. Alarik stood up, meeting her height for height so that they stood facing each other, just inches apart. He had meant to stop her, but somehow found himself even closer. The tension between them pulled me in like gravity.

They just stood there for a long moment, locked in a silent conflict that took place only in the eyes. Karlyn opened herself up to him, showing him her most vulnerable self. She was grieving yes, but that made her yearn for him all the more. I could feel it coming off her, the sadness and lust all mixed up together. To Alarik it was a perfect cocktail, matching his loneliness and fear. He couldn’t help it any more than I could when she pulled him in close. We both delved into her, him with his lips, crushing hers, their tongues meeting, tasting each other, and I straight into the core of her. I didn’t do it on purpose, I would never have crossed a line like that willfully but as she opened up to draw him in, she unknowingly laid a trap for me as well. She pulled me straight to her, right through her.

I could feel his lips on mine, feel his arms wrapped around me, crushing my body to his. He was so firm, and strong. I could feel my hand between us, still gripping his shirt from when I had wrapped it around his collar and pulled him into me for a kiss. Only these weren’t my lips, this wasn’t my hand. They were hers. I came back to my own sense of self slowly as the intensity of the connection faded just a little. I was still inside her, riding in the back of her mind. I could feel what she felt, I imagine I could see what she saw as well, but her eyes were closed in the passion of the moment. Then Alarik pulled back, and she did open her eyes. For the first time I saw him with living eyes. He was stunning, and so very sad. He looked at me, at her really, and shook his head clear.

“I can’t, we can’t. Not like this, not before it’s over.” He stammered.

Then I finally saw her, my best friend of over a year, she finally showed herself to me in a way I had never imagined. Rage flooded over her, absolute and total, she rang with it. I could feel her sly thoughts working their way through.

“Just a little longer,” they hissed and slithered across her mind like snakes.

I fled her body, shock jarring me lose. Never would I have guessed the darkness she held inside herself. She contained multitudes. You would never know it by her face. She smiled at him prettily, “Of course, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve embarrassed myself now.”

“No, no, it was my fault, I shouldn’t have…. But I wanted to, I want to, but after. I have to solve the case first, then there won’t be a conflict.” Alarik said, his heart still pounding with excitement so hard I could hear it.

I realized then, that I could hear a lot of things. I could see things much more clearly now too. I wasn’t solid by any means, but I did feel somehow, heavier. Whatever had just happened, what I had done, jumping into her like that, I must have syphoned something off her. Some vital part of the living I had taken away with me when I fled her mind. Well, this was an interesting development.

“Well then, Detective, you better solve the case fast,” Karlyn said, her lips curling into a cruelly seductive smile.

I saw her differently now that I had a peek into her psych. What had once seemed mysterious now just looked evil. When I had thought was humor, now looked like malice.

. Alarik smiled back at her, “I certainly will.”

Alarik escorted her to his door ushering her out. They paused at the doorway, again looking deep into each other’s eyes. I wanted to scream at him, “It’s all fake!”

Alarik shut the door with a disappointed sigh

. ……………………………………..

Alarik sat on the bed with his face in his hand, he sighed again, breathing out the last of his distraction he got up and we to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. I guess he didn’t have time for the whole shower. I followed him there, standing in the door way and watched him study himself in the mirror. I wondered what he saw. I had to warn him, somehow. I had to tell him that she wasn’t who he thought she was. I couldn’t be sure that she had killed me, I still didn’t remember that much, and maybe it was Keagan, he might have that kind of boiling rage in him too, but she wasn’t safe either. So I focused, maybe if I tried hard enough that heaviness I felt could be translated to sight.

Alarik saw me, I was sure of it. He has been studying himself in the mirror, but then his focus shifted to the right, just over his own shoulder where I was forcing myself into solidity. He could see my reflection right next to his, and yet, he didn’t react. I would accept many responses to someone seeing a ghost, particularly the ghost of the girl whose murder they are investigating, but literally no response was not one of them.

“Umm, Hello!?” I think ghosts are supposed to be all spooky and mysterious, but I wasn’t going to change who I was just because I was dead.

He sighed again, then turned slowly, rolled his eyes, and left the bathroom. Stunned I followed him.

“Excuse me!” I said offended, “It’s me, Mysa, the one who died?” I don’t know why I said it like a question, like he wouldn’t remember me.

He looked up from the paper he was reading, “Obviously.”

Well this certainly took the wind out of my triumphant sails, “Ummm, I’ve come to warn you.”

Now why couldn’t I manage to sound confident in death, I was a ghost god damnit. I had managed to overcome death itself, but I still couldn’t put a sentence together in the face of an indifferent man.

He sighed, “Well what is it then?”

Shouldn’t he be more interested? Oh well, nothing to do but soldier on now.

“Karlyn, she’s not who you think she is.”

He shook his head slowly, “Why do you always do this to me? Anytime I might get close to some kind of happiness you have to come and ruin it!”

Now I was very confused, “What? We just, ummmm, met.”

“Oh, sure this face is new, every time you wear a different face, trying to convince me your someone new, but I know who you are,” He growled angrily.

This I definitely had not expected, “Who am I then?” I demanded.

I was getting angry now too.

“Just me, just my subconscious, here to torture me, my slow decent into madness. The good ol’ Lavel family curse.” He said bitterly.

“No! I’m me! I’m Mysa!”

I really had not been prepared to defend my own identity. Although, looking at it logically, he was right. Which was more likely, that he was hallucinating, or that ghosts were real and the one that happened to belong to his murder victim was appearing to help him with his case….

“How can I prove it to you?” I ask him.

“Tell me something only you would know, something provable.” He challenged.

“My laptop is under my couch.” Well, I guess Karlyn covering it turned out to be for the best after all

. ……………………………………….

After my big reveal Alarik proceeded to completely ignore it. Apparently he decided to, “Pursue actual leads” and not “follow the instructions of my deranged sub-consonsciousness”. Whatever. I was interested in finding out more about the Keagan element anyway, and that’s the “actual lead” that he decided to follow up on.

It was surprisingly easy for Alarik to track Keagan down. For all his faults he had managed to hold a job down at the same company for the past five years. A quick search through the criminal data base was all Alarik needed. So there we were waiting in a dusty parking lot waiting for Keagan to emerge on his lunch break. Me peppering Alarik with questions, him ignoring me and obsessively checking his watch. I guess the ticking time bomb of his forty-eight hour deadline was weighing on him. Good.

Keagan came out from the industrial warehouse in his typical work clothes, a ratty t-shirt, jeans that looked like they had been tortured for information, and dirty, sturdy work boots. His tall frame was stooped in a somewhat defensive posture, and his normally bright eyes cast downward. Alarik hadn’t told him what he wanted to discuss only that it was about me. I guess he hadn’t wanted to break the news to Keagan that his ex-and-maybe-current girlfriend was dead over the phone. Maybe Alarik wanted to see his reaction when he found out. Whatever his reasoning he still didn’t tell him, not in that parking lot. Which did seem fair, I don’t think there is a good place to find out your girlfriend is dead, but a parking lot with a used condom three feet away was probably the worst place. At least pretty high up on the list.

“Detective Lavel?” Keagan asked, even though that was pretty obvious given that Alarik was the only one within three miles of this place not wearing work boots (or a thong, there was a strip club across the street. This was Portland after all, thongs are never very far away.)

Alarik just nodded in reply.

“Anywhere around here we can go to speak more… comfortably?” Alarik said, eyeing the lot.

Keagan led Alarik to the dinner down the street. I remembered the place, I’d met him here for many lunch breaks, or quick dinners after work. It was in a strip mall but surprisingly homey anyway. They settled into our favorite booth, as I mournfully eyed a cinnamon roll one table over, they had been my favorite, the size of your head, gooey with butter and icing. I hated being dead.

“So what’s the matter with Mysa?” Keagan, always quick to the point.

Alarik took a moment to gather himself, looking down at the table. Keagan might be a suspect but he had also (presumably) cared about me. Unless he killed me. I didn’t think he had, but if I was honest with myself I wasn’t sure.

Alarik looked up to meet Keagan’s eyes, “When was the last time you spoke to her?”

“Sunday.” Keagan didn’t volunteer information much, even when he wasn’t talking to a cop.

“What did you do?” Alarik said prodding.

“We had dinner, saw a movie. What does it matter?” Keagan said angrily, “Where is Mysa?”

“Her body was found off a hiking trail in Astoria yesterday morning.” Alarik gave it to him straight, no flowery words or apologies.

The blood drained for Keagan’s face. He sat in silence, stunned. I knew him well, he wasn’t faking this reaction. I’d never known him to fake any reaction. I went to sit down next to him, to try and comfort him, even though he couldn’t see me, but before I could he slid out of the booth and stormed out the door. He wasn’t fleeing, he just couldn’t stand to be in that dinner one more second. He climbed into his old rusted truck, and pounded the steering wheel yelling fuck over and over again. He had never coped well with strong emotions, my old apartment had holes in the wall as evidence of this. Alarik followed him out, I think he was afraid Keagan was going to leave, but he slowed seeing him in his truck, clearly grieving in as private a place he could get at short notice. Alarik approached slowly, I don’t think he wanted to disturb the man, but he still had questions. So he just awkwardly stood on the side walk, averting his eyes as Keagan worked out the worst of it. Anger finally spend, he came back to himself and noticed Alarik still waiting. Wiping his eyes, because yes he had cried, Keagan opened the truck door and slid out.

“Ready to go back inside?” Alarik asked gently.

“I can’t go back in there.” Unspoken was the grief, that was our place, he couldn’t just go back in there now, he might never set foot in that restaurant again.

“Ok, we can talk in my car. I still have more questions.”

Keagan nodded, and followed Alarik to his nondescript, but still somehow identifiable “cop” car.

“How did she die?” Keagan asked quietly.

“We are still trying to determine that,” Alarik said carefully, “Where were you yesterday morning?”

“You mean someone killed her?” Keagan looked up dark eyes flashing with a barely contained violence, ignoring the question.

“I’m looking into that possibility, yes.” Alarik said as diplomatically as possible.

“I was at work, you can check, but it doesn’t matter. I know who killed her, it was that bitch, Karlyn.” Keagan spat, in his anger it didn’t even occur to him to be defensive, that this cop might think he had done it.

I the up until this point silent third party sitting in the back seat, piped up now, even though only one of them could hear me.

“See, I told you! Now can we go get my laptop?”

Alarik was still unconvinced, but he confirmed that Keagan really was at work. His schedule starts early, and he arrives even earlier, so there was no way he could have killed me, then gotten back to Portland from Astoria, and still made it to work by 4AM. I was relieved, I hadn’t wanted it to be him. Memories were starting to come back. Nothing from the time I actually died, or even leading up to it, but I remembered him now. I might have been stupid to take him back. He had certainly gotten sober, then fallen off the wagon just as I was starting to trust him before, and maybe that would happen again, but now I would never know.

Alarik turned to face me in the back seat when I spoke, which must have looked very odd to Keagan. Alarik caught himself before replying to the woman only he could see, and told Keagan he could go. Then once safely in the car alone he turned to me again.

“I suppose I’m out of options anyway. Let’s go break into your apartment.”

"Oh Alarik,” I said with a sly smile, “I had more than one spare key.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………

I would have thought that showing Alarik exactly where I hid my spare key, and leading him directly to my lap top would have convinced him of the reality, but he still persisted in the idea that I was a manifestation of his own mind. For each new discovery he had an explanation.

“Lots of people hide spare keys under their welcome mat” and “I must have seen your computer when I was here before and just not completely registered it.’

“Well ok, Mr. Wise-Guy, how about this, what’s my computer password?” I asked him.

He sat there, looking at the prompting screen. He didn’t have an answer, and he wouldn’t be able to guess. It wasn’t that original, my childhood pet and some random numbers and punctuation, but it wasn’t anything he knew about either. So when I finally told him, after watching him sweat, and it worked, he looked at me in stunned amazement. It was such a little thing, but the implications for him were enormous. He wasn’t crazy.

“So you’re real.” He stated it with reverence.

“I’m real.” I confirmed.

“I’m sorry, I just…. How could….. It just doesn’t make any sense. But how else would I know that?” He ask himself.

“It’s ok.” I responded to the question he wasn’t really asking me.

“Well now what?” He asked, this time it was for me.

“You tell me Detective.”

“But don’t you know? Who killed you?” he asked me, bewildered.

“I don’t remember anything about that morning, or even that week,” I admitted to him, “but I agree with Keagan. I think it was Karlyn.”

“But why? She was your best friend, what possible motive could she have to want you dead?”

Alarik couldn’t marry the image of her as a murderer with the charming seductress he had begun to have feelings for. She was like that, before you knew it she had drawn you in.

“I don’t know exactly, she did love me, as a friend I mean. I loved her too, but she could be possessive. If she had found out I was dating Keagan again… but I don’t know. That still doesn’t seem like a good enough reason.” I stumbled through my words, as confused by it as he was, and yet sure I was on to something.

He just nodded, contemplating.

“When you kissed, in the hotel room, I sort of… got pulled in.” I said hesitantly. I really did not want to have to admit to him I had possessed her sort of, but I didn’t see a way out of it. He needed to know what I had seen in her.

“You got, drawn in?” He said confused.

“The passion, I guess it affected me somehow, there was an opening and I was sucked in. For a minute it was like, I was her,” I admitted, “I could see a darkness in her. Even then, even when she was kissing you, it was like she was drowning in this dark ocean. The evil of it shocked me right out of her.”

“Every part of that is awful,” he said with distaste.

I could tell he wanted to reprimand me, but wasn’t sure how. What would he say? “Don’t go around possessing people, even if you think they might have murdered you,” or better yet, “Don’t possess people that I happen to be making out with.” He couldn’t say any of that, because then he would have to address the fact that he was kissing someone that might have murdered me, while he was supposed to be concentrating on solving said murder. Basically, we were both in the wrong here.

“It probably was, but what I saw in her, that’s important,” I explained, “before that I would have said there was no way she could have done this, but now. Yeah. She could have, it’s in her.”

Alarik examined my computer, now that he had the password, going through programs I didn’t know I had.

“Did you back up your phone on here?” He asked me.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, “for a millennial I was pretty technically challenged”

“Where is your phone? Do you remember that?” he asked.

“No, I’m sorry I wish I did,” I said regretfully, “but Karlyn was telling the truth about that, I always had it on me, there is zero chance I would have left town without it. So it’s either still in the woods, or Karlyn has it.”

He continued fiddling around with my computer, pulling up my carrier’s website he went to the find my phone feature that I didn’t even know I had.

He sighed, “It’s not pulling up, so it’s either dead, or destroyed.”

“So, it was her.” I said definitively.

“But without your phone I have no proof,” He asked, “I can’t just go around accusing people of murder on the word of a ghost. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I already have a bit of a reputation.”

“Yeah, what’s with that?”

I had been wondering. It’s hard to get the full picture when all you can do is eavesdrop.

“Well, I thought I was hallucinating, maybe going crazy. There is a streak of crazy in the Lavels” He answered quietly, clearly still grappling with the implications of me not actually being a hallucination.

“What about your uncle? That asshole Rivera brought him up.”

“You were there for that? But I couldn’t see you…” He said surprised.

“I was. You couldn’t see me until after you and Karlyn… Well I seemed to have gained something from that. Gotten stronger somehow,” I explained nervously, “So then I was able to make you see me.”

I didn’t like bringing up the whole “I possessed a girl you were kissing” thing again, but he needed an explanation.

“Oh,” was all he said to that, so I needn’t have feared a lecture, he was too caught up in his own drama to be concerned about mine.

“But your uncle, what happened?” I persisted, I really wanted to know.

“He killed a guy, said a woman told him to do it, that he needed to avenge her, everyone always said he was crazy, but now I’m wondering, maybe he was right.” “Don’t worry Detective, I won’t ask you to kill Karlyn.”

He looked relieved at that, but we still were at a dead end. Without proof. Then I remembered, I’m a ghost.

“But, I could try haunting her.” I exclaimed.

Alarik looked at me confused, “What, to scare her to death?”

“No, but if she did kill me, I bet there is proof of it, or at least of why she would want to,” I explained, “If you had a motive, could you get a warrant?”

“Maybe, it would have to be good,” he answered, “I don’t know if you noticed, but Rivera isn’t exactly cooperative.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that dickhead anyway?” I asked, happy for the opening, I hadn’t forgotten that he was still an enemy, if only a petty one.

“Well, for one thing he is next in line for the Chief spot, and he’s afraid me coming to town is going to ruin that for him, seeing that I’m vastly more qualified. But it goes back farther than that. The man my uncle killed? It was his older brother.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Fuck, indeed,” he agreed

. …………………………………………….

Between the two of us we devised a plan. He would go back to Astoria and look for my phone in the forest where my body had been found, and I would go pay Karlyn a little visit. We hoped that between us we might find something to incriminate her, and I think he needed to see the proof too. I had convinced him enough for him to agree to look into her, but part of him still was reluctant to believe she had killed me.

“There will be funeral costs, I need that money now!” Karlyn was speaking into her phone as I silently entered her apartment.

I couldn’t quite make out the other voice, but based on her facial expressions, she wasn’t pleased with his answer.

“Of course it was an accident. They are closing the case tomorrow, I just need to get started processing the paperwork, I’m going to have to take possession of the body, and I need to have somewhere to send it. Somewhere that I am going to have to pay.” Her tone growing louder with every word.

More garbled words from whoever she was talking to.

“What exactly is the point of life insurance if I can’t actually get the money when I need it?”

Well, now that was interesting. I’d never signed up for life insurance. Like any twenty-five year old I had assumed I was immortal and had no use for it. I smelled a motive.

“Fine, but I better have that check the second they rule it an accident!” She said as she forcefully hung up on the man.

So, I had been murdered for money after all, how pedestrian. I may not have found the cell phone, but now I had something better. Motive. It stung, that it was this shallow a thing. She had been my best friend, I probably cared more about her than anyone else in the world, and she had killed me for a payout. I hoped it was more than that, even though homicidal jealousy wasn’t exactly a good thing at least that would have mean she cared, maybe too much. This was so much worse. I wondered if it had all been an act, our friendship just a means to an end for her.

Armed with my new found knowledge, I needed to tell Alarik. This was proof! I assumed things like life insurance were public record. I wondered how much it would be for, how much had my life been worth to her? At least he would be able to find it, establish clear motive and with that get a warrant that would hopefully turn up even more proof. I wanted her dead, if I was honest with myself, but rotting in prison was at least some kind of justice. But, how could I find him?

Coming back to Portland had been easy. I just rode in the car with him, but now I was stuck. It’s not like I could drive a car, or even use a phone to tell him to come and get me. Karlyn had no reason to get anywhere near that town, in fact I’m sure she would avoid it. When we parted, Alarik and I, we had failed to address this little technicality. An omission that was uncharacteristic of him, although, less so for me. Perhaps, he thought I could go to him. POP! Just Casper my way out of nowhere. I paused, caught by the thought. Maybe I could.

I wasn’t sure how this should go, or if I even could, but I was tied to him somehow. I think that him just being present at my murder scene might have had something to do with why I was still here. After all, I didn’t “come-to” until he was there. If my tie to life wasn’t linked to him, shouldn’t I have been aware as soon as I was killed? Maybe that tie could help me now. So I concentrated on him, on that connection. It was there buried in me, a thread that connected us. If I looked for it I could feel him, a light a little brighter than anything else around. He pulsed at me, radiating even from a hundred miles away in the forests of Astoria. So I followed the thread. Not physically but I went deeper into the darkness that was at my core. Into the unknown black I traveled though until, POP! (well it was more of a gentle shimmer) there I was, right in front of him.

……………………………………………

It was strange to be back here in this clearing. No, strange was the wrong word, painful. It was painful, knowing what I knew now, that the person I trusted the most had killed me, right here on this forest path. I looked around and saw, what before had been mostly a blur. The forest was beautiful, green, and teeming with life. I could feel all the little heartbeats of the creatures surrounding me, down to the knits flitting around the wet ferns. There was a steep rocky bluff to one side of the pathway where Alarik stood, and the deep foliage covered ravine, that my body had tumbled down, on the other. So I had been standing, probably right about here, when what? Had she snuck up behind me, clocked me over the head? Had she used the bloody rock by head had been lying on when Alarik found my body?

He was moving around the edges of the pathway, metal detector in hand, scanning for that precious in hopefully incrementing object. It was still possible that Karlyn had it, but I didn’t think so. Things were started to clear up for me, as I found out the truth of what happened, the memory of it also seemed to draw closer. I didn’t know why exactly, but I knew that phone was important. Alarik’s metal detector beeped a high pitch warning, it had found something.

He bent down to examine whatever he had found, still oblivious to my presence. If I had breath it would have caught in my throat, hoping that he had found it. Alas, he picked up a loose penny some hiker had dropped, looking as dejected as I felt. Then he saw me on the pathway in front of him and gave a start. He hadn’t been expecting me to find him.

“How did you get here?” He demanded.

I was a tad bit offended. What? He wasn’t happy to see me?

“I just followed the yellow brick road I guess.” I answered sarcastically, mostly to cover for the fact that I had no idea how I got here.

“I take it you struck out.” I said in a fairly mean tone, given that he was trying to help me. I guess I was in a bad mood.

His lips formed a thin line, and eyes narrowed at me, “It may not even be here. I take it you struck out too?”

“It’s here.” I don’t know how I knew, but I did. With certainty. “But, no actually I did not strike out, I found motive.” I said.

Alarik’s expression changed, eyes widening in surprise, and a bit of sadness, he had still been hoping it wouldn’t be her.

“What was it?” he asked.

“She has a life insurance policy for me,” I spat it out, like the bitter thing it was. His eyes widened even more and he whistled, “Damn, that’s cold.”

“Yeah, I thought so too,” again my comfort blanket of sarcasm.

“I know it stings, but this is good news,” he said to my raised eyebrows, “it’s verifiable.”

I just nodded.

“Rivera can’t deny this, especially if we can prove it was fraudulent,” he continued, “You never signed the paperwork right?”

“Of course not!” I protested.

“So then, she planned it, she forged you signature, probably months ago. This wasn’t just a crime of passion, it was premeditated. This is first degree Mysa.” He almost sounded excited.

“So you are going to arrest her right?” I just wanted this to be over, I was exhausted by her betrayal.

“Well, I’ll try. We can at least get search warrant, as soon as I’m able to get a copy of the paperwork and take it to Rivera.”

I narrowed my eyes, “She’s not going to get away with this, one way or another she is going to pay.”

I wanted to be the one to make her pay. The rage in me was welling up again. I wanted blood, literal blood, I wanted to see the redness spill from inside her, the way it had me.

“You said your phone is here?” He asked, “Are you starting to remember things?”

“Not precisely, it’s more of a feeling, I’m certain it’s here, I know it’s important, but not precisely why.” I explained, “I’m sorry I know that isn’t very helpful.”

As I told him this I realized I was starting to remember more, just like being in the café with Keagan had sparked memories of past meals, being here was bringing something back. I focused on it, even though part of me wanted to stay away. That was a dark place, nothing good dwelt there. I would find only pain.

“Are you sure? Maybe if you try harder?” Alarik asked, annoyingly echoing my thoughts.

“I am trying,” I snapped back at him.

I was, harder now. Him speaking was distracting me, going to the effort that I had been low key maintaining this whole time, to be visible to him was distracting me. So I let go of it. He looked around in surprise. You would think by now he would be used to me popping in and out at will. I forgot him for the moment. I can’t say I closed my eyes, I didn’t have eyelids, but I did the spiritual equivalent to that, I went in to myself. I followed the pathway of my own consciousness to the core of it, and focused. There in the forest that I died in, surrounded by the same trees, I let the setting soak in and saturate me. I remembered the emotions first, first just happiness, a feeling of contentment. This abruptly changed, it was immediately replaced by surprise, and pain.

I could feel it now, my head hurt. It throbbed, and pulsed with the pain, so unbearably bad that it blocked out all other thought. Then, nothing. I went down further, went back further to the time before the pain. I felt the happiness, contentment, my legs burned a little with the effort of climbing the hill, I was short on breath, huffing my way up, but I was happy. I heard her laughter ahead of me, ten feet further up the hill, laughing at my struggle.

“Do you need to rest?” Karlyn asked me?

I laughed, out of breath as I was, “Maybe for just a quick minute,” I said catching up to her.

I pulled a water bottle out of my bag and took a big swig, then offered it to her. While she was preoccupied gulping down water I pulled out my phone. I loved taking candid photos, surprising people, so that I caught them in their element, not posing. She hated that I did that, Karlyn liked to control her own image. Maybe that was why I liked doing it so much. I turned and snapped quickly. I caught her just as she swung that giant walking stick right at my temple, then came the glaring pain, the shock, then nothing.

I reappeared to Alarik, back in the moment with him now, knowing something important.

“It’s here! I remember now.”

He looked back at me surprised, I don’t know if it was my sudden reappearance, or my declaration that caught him off guard.

“You do?” he asked.

“I do, it was her. I caught it on camera.”

He looked sad at that, like he had been holding out hope this whole time that it wouldn’t be.

“So there is proof, if we can find it.”

I said nothing, but went over to the exact spot I stood when she clubbed me. I had been holding it, I must have flung it somewhere as I fell, like I had accidentally a thousand times before with an accidental stumble. I did a wide sweep of the area as Alarik came over and joined me.

“Is this the spot?” he asked quietly.

I turned to him, if I could have cried there would have been tears in my eyes, “Yes.”

He just nodded, but I wasn’t paying any attention to him now, because I had seen it, a glint in the rocks. I moved to it quickly, excitement welling up. There is was, my proof! I had her, even that asshole Rivera couldn’t deny this! My phone was there, sitting in a pool of water, right where I had flung it.

“Fuck!” I screamed like a banshee, my screech reverberating through the quiet woods.

Alarik came over and picked it out of the pool, examining the damage. It was not only water logged but bashed in from hitting rocks on the way down. This was it, all I had on her, other than the circumstantial life insurance, and it was gone, destroyed, bashed in and then drowned. It was as dead as I was. Alarik didn’t seem to grasp the enormity of this failure as he studied the dead phone, or maybe part of him was relieved, I thought nastily. He hadn’t really wanted to have to arrest her. He looked at me seething with hatred and rage, and raised an eyebrow.

“They can recover the data from destroyed phones you know…”

No, I had not known. Now I felt a little bad about my unspoken accusation. He was a good cop, I knew that. He might not want it to be her, but he had accepted that it was. He would do what needed to be done.

“Oh.” I said, slightly embarrassed.

“It can take some time, I’ll have to get it to a tech lab, they disassemble it and pull a chip, as long as that’s intact, we’re good,” Alarik explained, “it might take us past the deadline, but I think the life insurance will be good enough to make Rivera extend it.”

………………………………………………………..

Rivera, it turned out, was not an accommodating man. First of all he asked too many questions. Questions it was hard for Alarik to answer without coming out and saying, “Well, a ghost told me so.” Unfortunately, that was probably not going to work out very well, so he had to come up with some excuses. It also turned out that Alarik was not a good liar. These two things combined, were not great for making a case to extend the deadline and get a warrant.

“I can get a copy of the insurance policy by tomorrow,” Alarik argued. “If there actually is one, you’re basing this off what? A third party over hearing a phone conversation?” Rivera wasn’t biting.

“If there isn’t one, and the phone is a dead end, then you can close the case,” Alarik said, knowing full well that both those things would turn out to be viable, if only he could get a bit more time.

“Your forty-eight is up. I’m sorry,” he lied, we all knew he wasn’t.

“So extend it. That was an arbitrary deadline that you yourself set, just give me another seventy- two and I’ll have your proof.” Alarik pleaded.

“I would like to,” another lie, “but her family deserves to have this put to rest, so they can get one with their grieving.”

What family? I was basically an orphan, my father was presumably still alive, but I hadn’t seen him in twenty years, and my mother had died in a car crash when I was twenty. Karlyn had been the closest thing I had to family. Well, and Keagan. Then it clicked, Karlyn had gotten to him.

“And City Council no doubt, wants this put to bed,” Alarik said with a sneer, “murdered girls aren’t great for tourism are they?”

Antagonizing Rivera really wasn’t helping us now. If I could have stomped on his foot I would have.

“What a coincidence, that City Council also happens to appoint the police chiefs around here….you wouldn’t be compromising an investigation just to curry favor with them now would you?” Alarik continued, unhelpfully.

Rivera went that particular shade of purple unique to him, “How. Dare. You.” He puffed out in a rage.

This was seconds away from being a straight up fist fight.

“You know, I have contacts at the FBI still, people who owe me favors. People who can get copies of insurance paperwork, and can decrypt damaged phones.” Alarik said in a tone that could only be a threat.

“None of that would be admissible, you should know that Mr. FBI” Rivera sneered.

“Maybe not in a court of law, but I think the press would find it pretty interesting, that kind of miscarriage of justice doesn’t look good in a new chief of police…” Alarik trailed off meaningfully.

Ok. Maybe he was onto something after all. I wasn’t sure that would be good enough though, sure Rivera would get drug through to coals for that, and I did enjoy that thought, but if Karlyn would be long gone. I got the feeling she knew how to disappear.

“If that happened, you would be forced to reopen that case anyway now wouldn’t you?” Alarik wore a self-satisfied smile now, he knew he had Rivera over a barrel. “You have one more day, and you better get a goddamn confession or I am closing this case, and it won’t be reopened no matter what you threaten.” Rivera said through gritted teeth.

Alarik nodded grimly, there was no way Karlyn would confess. She wasn’t some scared girl easily rattled. The way she had played him proved at least that. I doubted I was the first person she had killed, the way her face looked swinging the thick stick at my head, she wasn’t mad. She had been cold, there was no malice in it. My murder was just a means to an end for her.

Alarik turned to leave, he didn’t have any time to waste. I hoped he really did have those contacts in the FBI, we would need them.

“And Alarik,” Rivera called after him, “I don’t take kindly to threats.”

What he was really saying was, “I’m coming for you.”

……………………………………………………..

Alarik and I sat in his nondescript but still very obviously undercover police car in front of the station. He was silent, contemplating his next steps before he left the parking lot. I hoped he had something, because I was feeling pretty hopeless. How on earth were we going to get a confession? Karlyn would never crack, even if he went over there and confronted her head on with all the proof we had, she would just spin it somehow, and make herself look even more the victim. She would paint him as a vindictive detective, with a history of instability, and a dubious family tree, hell bent on recovering his lost career by building a false case against her. Actually, I had a feeling she already had, this “family” Rivera referenced. That was her.

“So, what now?” I asked him.

“Now, I call an old friend and hope he picks up,” answered Alarik, in a tone that did not instill confidence.

“One of those FBI contacts?”

“Sort of. I may have exaggerated that a bit,” Alarik admitted, “if anyone owes favors it’s me, but I might be able to convince him to do me one more.”

“Even if you do, she’s never going to confess.” I said dejectedly.

“She might, if we have proof. She might confess to make a deal for a reduced charge, third degree instead of first degree murder. It’s more common than you think.”

“Third degree murder? What’s that ten years?” I asked him outraged. “Maybe less with good behavior,” he was resigned to getting what he could at this point.

I was not. I didn’t care if I had to haunt her to the ends of the earth for the rest of time, so help me god, I would make her pay. It hit me then, it was so obvious I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to see it. Granted this wouldn’t be easy, I wasn’t even completely sure I could do it, but it was worth a try. I had to try. It was really the only way through I could see. Well, the only way that didn’t involve a bullshit reduced sentence. Fuck that.

“I can do it.” I said.

He looked at me confused, “You? But you’re…”

Alarik didn’t want to say it but I would.

“Exactly, I’m dead.” I said with a smile, he hadn’t gotten it yet.

He just looked at me, still very confused.

“She won’t confess to you, no matter what you do or offer her. She thinks she’s cleverer than you. All she has to do is run out the clock and she knows it. Then off she goes with the insurance money, and I promise you. You won’t find her again.”

“Well, I have to try.”

Bless him, he looked so determined, I felt terrible for every doubting his resolve.

“She will never confess, to you.” I said triumphantly.

His brow furrowed. He was getting there, but too slowly.

“She might be prepared to you, she can lie and manipulate her way out of anything. What she isn’t prepared for is me.” I said more confidently than I felt.

“But, she can’t see you. You were there, the whole time with Keagan, and he had no idea. Apparently you were there with her and I, and she couldn’t see you then, what would be different now?”

“Now, I will be trying.”

…………………………………………………………………………….

I was in Karlyn’s apartment again, watching her. She furiously packed, like a woman in a panic that needed to leave town quickly. She must have heard Alarik found the phone. I wondered idly if Rivera had been the one to tell her. It wouldn’t matter, soon there would be so much proof even he couldn’t deny it. I relished the thought, of her rotting away in prison. I would haunt her there too, I decided. Make her look crazy enough to get put in solitary. I’d seen orange is the new black. There would be no jail house gang for her to rule. I’d make sure of it.

Alarik and I had devised a plan. We would divide and concur. We weren’t sure how long it would take me to get Karlyn to crack. I still wasn’t one-hundred percent sure I could even do it, but I didn’t tell him that. So, while I worked on her, he would get the physical evidence together, the photos from the phone, and the insurance paperwork using his FBI contacts. I could tell he wasn’t one-hundred percent sure he could do it in time either, but we both blustered through with false confidence. We had no room to express doubts with our precarious little plan. He would meet me (and Karlyn) here later where, with her primed by my terrorizing her, she would give him a full confession. Wham. Bam. Thank You Ma’am.

Now, I had to focus. I had a part to play, and goddamnit I was going to figure out this whole vengeful ghost thing. I was going to go full poltergeist on her ass. So, I concentrated. Hard. I focused on my own solidity the way I had when first appearing to Alarik. I had a feeling he was some kind of medium, susceptible to seeing behind the preverbal vail, but my theory was, I could make her see me too. With enough effort. Unlike before when I was trying to regain my memory I didn’t focus inward. Now I concentrated on my immediacy. I tried to be fully here, completely and totally in the now. Be solid. I told myself in refrain. Be solid. Be solid. Be solid. BE SOLID. It wasn’t working.

What was different now? I knew there had to be a way to do this. I would will into being, a way to do this. Then it hit me, what I needed to do. It was energy. That’s what was different. I hadn’t been able to appear to Alarik until I had possessed Karlyn. I had gotten it off of her. When I was in her I must have accidentally syphoned some off them. There had been so much sexual tension in the air, energy, life-force, had radiated off of them. I has accidentally taken a sip. Well now I would gulp.

I went to her, drawing closer. I noticed what had always been there, been around all of them. That pulsing aura of life. Everything glowed with it a little. I had gotten used to it, just flickering all around me. It’s a part of being a ghost, seeing things a little differently. Now I used that. I went inside her bubble. I pulled it into me, growing stronger with it. Powerful. She was mine now. She was starting to feel it, I could tell. Dizzily she sat down on her bed, flopping on top of clothes laid out to pack. I followed her down, growing drunk on her vitality as I drained it.

She could see me a little now, or maybe just feel me. Her sly eyes widened in fear as the life leaked out of her. I had thought I felt vengeful before, but that was nothing. I was justice itself now, cruel and fair. I had come here meaning only to scare her. I really had meant to follow our plan, get Alarik his arrest. I couldn’t do that now, I’d gone too far and lost any kind of control. She wouldn’t be leaving this room alive. I delved deeper into her, filling myself, gorging myself on her very soul. I could feel it weakening. Her heart pulsed so quickly, like a little mouse caught in a cats teeth, I pictured her squeaking in terror. The deeper into her I went the more I could feel it, her fear, and her anguish. All the regrets of her life surfaced now, the emotions she never let herself feel in life, she felt now. I could see her memories as they flashed through her, like a movie reel. I had been right she had killed before.

She played them out now, all the things she had done, all the things that had been done to her to make her the way that she was. It had been a hard life, full of sadness and pain. Eventually she had shut it off, shut down any emotion but the will to survive. In her mind, at least she had told herself, she had done what she had to, until bit by bit she became worse than those who had made her. I realized as I watched her life play out, that I was no longer outside of her. I had passed through the bubble and now we wore the same skin she and I. That was why I could feel her emotions, see her memories. I could feel her blood pulse through her veins like they were my own. It felt wonderful.

For the first time since that flash of surprise and pain, I actually felt something. I wiggled her fingers. I blinked her eyes. The tiny little evil thing that was her consciousness, her soul, was drained and powerless now, thanks to the big bites I had taken out of it. She didn’t even fight me, she had gone back to the scared little girl she started out as, curled around herself in a little ball. I could feel her there, pulsing with fear in the back of my mind. Yes, my mind, because I had taken it now. Those long luscious full curls were mine now. The intense blue eyes would look different if I went to a mirror, after all the eyes are the windows to the soul, weren’t they?

I built walls around that little person curled up and frightened. I imprisoned her in bindings tighter than any jail Alarik would have sent her to. There was justice in this, I told myself. She had taken my life, and now I would take hers. She, after all, started it. The thought of Alarik made me feel guilty, though. Any minute now he would know at her door, printed proof of her crime in hand, expecting that I had help up my part of the plan. He would expect a wide eyed, terrorized woman to meet him, ready to spill out all her secrets. I could do that, too. If I wanted. I could use her mouth to tell him everything, then repeat it again to Rivera, just to solidify her fate. Use her hand to put it in writing. Ride her body into a court house and swear on a bible then confess it all. There would be no plea deal for her then, and Alarik would come out looking like the hero cop who single handedly caught a serial killer. I could still do that. I could follow our plan, only better, but sorry Alarik. I wasn’t going to.

…………………………………………

There was a knock at the door. I had been expecting it, but it still made me jump. I knew what I wanted now, but I had to convince him to cooperate and that wouldn’t be easy. I got up off Karlyns bed, a little bit ungainly in this new body. I would get used to it, I assured myself. I opened Karlyn’s door, with Karlyn’s hand, and told Alarik “Hello,” with Karlyn’s voice.

Alarik startled, taking a step back. I wondered if it was because she really did look different with me driving inside her. Maybe, he had just expected a scared woman, ready to confess, instead of one brimming with happiness at all the possibility now offering itself to her.

“Come inside, Detective,” I invited, using the title she called him for some reason, instead of the first name I always used.

He followed me/her inside, and went to the couch where we seated ourselves civilly. Like he was over for tea, instead of to arrest me/her. He looked around at the condition of her apartment, it was clear she had been packing up in a hurry.

“Going somewhere?” he asked, setting down the manila folder he held on the coffee table.

So he had found something at least. What I had been hoping for before, now became unwelcome news.

“Maybe,” I said, smiling with Karlyn’s mouth.

I wondered if it looked like her smile, or like mine.

“Feeling the need to get out of town quickly?” He cocked his head to the side, in fake inquiry, he knew the answer of course.

“I’m thinking I need a change.” I answered, I knew I would have to tell him, but I was waiting for an opening.

There was never going to be an opening for this. He reached down, ready to flip open the folder in his big reveal. No doubt he was recording this all for later reference. He hesitated before he did, looking around puzzled. I realized he was looking for me. Right, he would be expecting to at least see me, even if I had failed, I would still be there. I placed my hand over his, stopping him from opening it. I knew what was in there, I didn’t need to see it.

“Alarik,” I said, sounding more like myself.

Enough like myself that he looked up, suddenly very confused. “It’s me.” I told him.

He knew what I meant, he knew who “me” was, I could see the recognition play across his face, even as he rejected it. I took his hand, the way people do when they want to comfort you as they deliver bad news. Why did they do that? Why was I?

“I’m Mysa.”

“Noooooo….” He trailed off, still rejecting the implications here.

“I had to Alarik! She couldn’t see me, it wasn’t working!” I tried to explain myself, “I couldn’t let her get away with it!”

“Mysa! You can’t!” He pulled back stunned, horror blooming on his face, “I’ll make her pay, I will. I have the proof now, but this isn’t right. This is not the way.”

“It is though, don’t you see? I have a second chance now!” I practically yelled it. I jumped off the couch impassioned by my own argument. I had to make him see. This was right, this was justice.

“Is she…” he paused, not wanting to have to ask, “still, in there?”

“She’s alive, yes.” I said, “she’s…. contained.”

“For how long?” He demanded.

“Forever, I won’t let her break free.” I said confidently.

I was pretty sure that I was confident. She was on lockdown. I hoped.

“Ok.” He said, logic catching up with emotion, “We can use this, you just have to stay in control long enough to make a full confession.”

“I thought about that,” I said, “but no, I’m not going to do that.”

“But, Mysa it’s perfect. Rivera can’t repute it if she confesses right in front of him! You’ll get what you want. Justice. No deal, no reduced sentence plea bargain, full justice. That’s a win.”

I knelt down in front of him, taking his hands, “Please,” I begged him, “This is my chance. I can start again. Just drop the case, let Rivera rule it an accident. Go back to the FBI, you know you’re not crazy now, you can get your old life back.”

“And, what? You’ll just go on possessing her? Collect your own life insurance and go on like nothing happened? What happens when she gets tired of you wearing her skin, and kicks you out of it?” He argued.

“She won’t I’ve got her!” I said, “You owe me this! Just let me live, and you’ll never see me again. I’ll go, start over somewhere else. We can both move on.”

He just looked at me, silently.

I

It can happen sometimes, that you wake and your day starts from grief. And just in such unhappy way has made unlucky debut this exclusively hopeless Thursday of Matvey Grigoryevich. It has begun with such a new, that has instantly crippled the whole of previous existence - Arkady Ignatievich, everlasting servant of rich and large Filippov’s house, so unexpectedly galloped with the very first light of the morning, has fussily, but emotionlessly and quite briefly reported: "Misfortune befell us. And you too. Anna Evgenievna has died. She had gone to the river and remained only dress on its shore. I had been fiddling with the cart, when had suddenly heard loud screams, I had immediately rushed, but I have seen already nobody. I had no chances to be helpful with my limping short leg. And I was utterly unable not to tell you, by the reason of being your secret assistant in such king of forbidden relations. Into house at now deep traw. Of course, it’s not allowed to be there. I will come after couple of weeks, will bring you something from the the funeral table. Maybe they will, at least, find her body in these tragic dark days."

Matvey Grigoryevich has insensibly crawled down the wall and deplorably closed his wet eyes: "What is my whole life since now? What am I having here at present?"

"Do not do something stupid, do not hide damaged soul into madness. After all, it's indeed lost decision to accept own despair, to get inwardly stunned. Such dashing matter never ends with goodness, never let you to rescue, just kills. True apathy is really greedy thing, its embraces are fatal. You can’t argue with them. Since you've fallen in abyss, you’re already not here, not as previous one."

"I barely will stay alive too long. I'm not that one, who needs to live... I'm a corpse. Inappropriate, meaningless corpse. Directly pitiful and deserted since now. I'm a rag, I'm an ash in inside."

"You had already so awfully often been in endless and hopeless sufferings, even then - into frames of relations, and at now you climb into coffin, ask to belong to number of deceased."

"My only place is just among of them. All entrusted and given had already been totally spent. There is no reason to see you either. You do not need to come once more. I will not be at here anymore. So, thank you for all. Without of your help and aiding, even this strange awkward temporality would have ever no life and development. Even sad cheerless pages would never appear. And now it's my finish. My final curtain of all being."

"Please, beware of youself - it's a sin to be so much windy with fate. That's not for good, not for state of next peace."

"In behind of grave's fence it’s not especially fussy - in lethargic prosperity. Tranquility for centuries, not less. For all and everyone in equal easy lavishness."

"It’s an absurd to wait for own collapse. Even being completely in grief."

"My collapse is a matter of short moment. No people will pour any tears, if it will promptly happen with me even strictly right now."

"It's not sane to desire own perish, to adhere life's edge by free will."

"Even kingdoms, empires and nations had been fallen and not only once. Even whole epochs had been burned till sad ash. And my own future ashes will never throw anyone in hugs of deep horripilation, be sure. And now go away. All the romance is finally played."

Arkady Ignatievich has obediently turned and, without of saying goodbye, walked away.

Matvey Grigoryevich has slowly got up and calmly gone to yard.

Enveloped with dim veil of hopeless gloom late dark autumn is monotonously sinking into bitter indifference. Bleakly freezing moist trunks of entirely faded old trees are with no emotions getting rid of their somberly sullen, worn clothing of dried wilted thin leaves. Meekly melting long contours of lifeless huge shadows. Turbid gray trembling puddles are drowsily glistening in murk. Sad large clouds unwittingly, unhappily and jointly swimming to horizon, are lonely and chaotically huddling into distance of heaven. Inconsolable colorless cover of dejected faint fog is despondently gliding away. Time from time are insensibly sobbing low creaks of cold branches. Inconspicuous spot of far sun is aloofly and flaccidly whitening over deserted lands. Accidentally dropping slim rays are moderately caressing and touching inexpressive and featureless line of surroundings. Chilling faceless sharp hopelessness is gradually descending down the district.

"What an awful nightmare, what a sorrowful grave has befallen me. I was unable even to pretend, that everything can end so instantly, that my whole life can easily get cracked in countless splinters. No even small ashes were left from my entire heart. So much time, so many of long expectations... And now only ruins..."

It is worth to clarify and tell, that Anna Evgenievna for the last two strange years had been acting as saint cherished goal and the only significant meaning of whole forlorn, unfixable existence of at now irretrievably broken by doom, full of sorrowful mourning, dismal Matthew Grigorievich. By the reason of being a member of exactly not poor estate, firmly made strong, huge money on factory business and voluminous usury, the lady had been having to keep long cold distance and to stand just aside and not closer, dividing all the mutuality exclusively in rare sudden cases – very sneakily and far from publicity. In which way had been Anna Evgenievna living and how had been spending her free time, the hero, by itself, was not knowing, as fact, even partly. He only heard from the words of his chosen one, that she live in her mansion with sister. The very mansion had been left by the parents and has been ruled by current sister's husband, who also has been managing salt factory, exactly similarly luckily inherited from the Anna Evgenievna's parents. All rare meetings have been getting own dim coming true exclusively in two location types – in some guest house and in rented small room of Matvey Grigoryevich. He has never been visiting, even just briefly, to aforesaid unachievable mansion, he has only been knowing the approximate address and also has been fluently acquainted with Arkady Ignatievich, represented as servant and helper in secret affairs, who has been many times rather furtively coming with long-awaited tempting letters from dear beloved. The whole line of love story of Matvey Grigoryevich and Anna Evgenievna has been commonly made of dark mystery, murk and fragility, constant hopelessness, sadness and vain expectations, uncertain, hesitant and vague. Each meeting has been carrying one blurriness, ghastly shortness and poor alarm, fear for the future, incoherence, pain and alertness. Their chaotic and breakable world, so helpless, defenseless and delicate, all the time fully sunk in obscurity, into countless traps of wrong circumstances and eternal unluckiness, stable lightless asperity of so sorrowful being and unsteady bleak fog. It was hotly desired to have solid, firm fixity, wide abolition of turmoil and of lack of strong will, was desired to have long cessation of so harshly intolerable phobia for safety of bloodless reciprocity, filled with worries, mourning and thoughts. Was desired to have real peace, not only imaginary one, but full of evident guarantees, of reliable cohesion, long-term prospects and irrevocable warm unity, inviolability, legitimacy, greatness and seriousness, true completeness and chances. Was desired to have an excess of the life opportunities, to have full presence of deep carelessness, of attainable free actuality of bright happiness, of its sure abundance and strength. But that was totally unreal. Final chances were utterly small for at least some consistent remarkable hope. All the things have been giving exclusively bare despair, endless suspense and relentlessly huddling huge doubts with pure indeterminacy about any of straight plans. In such way have been going one days after others, giving neither clear answers nor comfort. And at curtain has come black today, which has finished all startings. So much strangely and vaguely dragged reciprocity has impotently, ruefully fallen into breathless dead splinters.

So, now Matvey Grigoryevich was weakly wandering through deserted dark autumn park, thought by thought gradually realizing what has happened. Lonely walking wet wind was languidly moaning in hopelessness of shuddering thin crowns. Were calmly rustling falling down leaves. Was slowly getting dark.

"I've dissolved. I have melted. Just yesterday I still had been alive, and now only pale coals from whole me. One miserable handful of ruins from all the fate. What I am since this time..."

Once at very beginning, having fully believed, having met, having chosen the one from the endless life's chaos and devoted to her all the soul, the hero had sworn to Anna Evgenievna to belong exclusively to her alone and only – just always, all the time of being and without of difference what can happen, appear or come. And at now this oath has so abruptly frozen as indelible hard curse. There is no future. It simply not exist since current moment and no longer will in any form.

"At now only away. At now time to leave in nowhere. As far and as prompt, as it's possible. No passion inside, no life. My instrument has played all rare notes, has already got silent forever." - Matvey Grigoryevich has sadly looked around: "Yes, all is so, all is dead. I'll never walk here anymore. I'll never be both calm or happy."

II

At gray and cheerless gloomy street were walking pass two figures - Matvey Grigoryevich, who has only arrived into town Coniferous, and Oleg Savelyevich, his house-agent, who has quite kindly met him on the square and has already found some fine room, that should be fully suitable and comfy.

"Today it's right impossible to get from station so fast." - has gently said the interlocutor: "You are surely lucky."

"Are people ought to get exclusively in evening?" - has responded Matvey Grigorievich.

"Or at night. So your pleasant example without any vain exaggeration is an obvious miracle, a minimal firm act of clear magic."

"What a blatant low case. Just unprecedented one. I’m surprised how they still haven’t written in all of newspapers. What a rubbish you're saying? So, which room had you found? Is it really worthy and noble?"

"The thickest offer from all valid. Just impeccably lush. Let's gladly look?"

Matvey Grigoryevich has nodded.

What a for he has come to Coniferous was a question of doom - of indelible sad need to be constantly going, to be directing to somewhere, to hide, to lurk and to abstract. It happens so time from time, that people need to run from their thoughts, from memories, or, what more often, from oneself. All this rarely risks to be finished with some consolation. Even if at the first lightweight glance it so surely looks as some easy and truthful release. Any human in practice is far not transparent and simple: in part of moments too much inconsistent, in part – too monotonous and insipid. He has habit to build all unnecessary and to give up all evidently needed, to go with no goal and to stop at almost finished process, to repeat old mistakes many times and to have endless difficulty of agreeing with all fully worthwhile. It's very customary, alas, to wish all unattainable and hollow and to abandon feasible and right, to look for doubtful and vainly superfluous and to refuse from valuable and deep, to lay all hopes on emptiness and rubbish and to deny all lucrative and pure, to obey to some purposeless void and to oppose own sanity and mind. This is our sad essence, our sorrowful pithiness.

Just right the same Matvey Grigoryevich, according to the calls of own lost nature, has moved from previous location to Coniferous, in a couple of hundred long miles, where at now he was standing at his newly-found broad chambers and was paying with glad of this matter Oleg Savelievich, who has brought him not more than two minutes ago to successfully presented room.

"Yes, all right - no complaints, no ideas." - Matvey Grigoryevich has finally reported and handed over greasy money bill: "Great thanks for your participating, you had chosen delightful apartment – as from tempting and colored picture. Even totally speechless and dump will be fully unable to stay without words of lush fat praise."

"The original form of appearance. As at previous tzar, all is strictly the same. Both charm and tone. As at vague antiquity."

"Truly notable. Classicist's paradise."

"Be sure, it's paradise for all. And for you not an underworld too. So, settle yourself and try to get successfully accustomed. All is well."

The guest has left.

Matvey Grigoryevich has frozen in hung loneliness: "Whom has got presented my being at today... Dark guest-tress, wicked, completely evil and just helpless. All my meaning is lost, steamed as wax. There is no flame in inside. There is no former life line. There is no me. Who I am... Worthless. Useless. All good far away."

The hero has slammed the door and gone down by shaky old stairs. Has exchanged shabby porch.

In around is cloudy dark urban massif, fully faceless and totally gloomy. Faded lampposts are freely and sullenly droping deep and pretty sad yellowness, diligently and carefully filling cold and thinned lonely spaces. Stretched alone with uneven long contour bleak firmament is smoothly turning inside in indifferent ashy gray fog, filamentary woven of murk and sedulously rolled as pergameneous lifeless moist canopy. Slender facades of lonely and haggard buildings, monumentally frozen in shy weak confusion, are here and there proudly arising with sharp endless spiers soared upward. Hazed heaven dome, richly bleeding with rains, is silently, dispassionately shining through painfully indifferent dense sadness. Surrounded by cloudy obscurity veiled vastness is dutifully entering in motionless and timid, bored tranquility, attentively and carefully saved by landscape's melancholy. Impoverished and fragmented shy pictures are compliantly and malleably abuting to absolutely limitless horizon, unconstrainedly, languidly melting in hugs of whitish, careless sky's curtain. Quickly withered and still not flown away dry foliage is helplessly and ruefully fluttering in pitiful mute dying. Naked mournful nature is wearily plunging into widespread tart gloom. Far and pale, deftly scattered as kind of mosaic night windowsare sadly smoldering in rue.

Matvey Grigoryevich has longly quietly sighed: "So regrettable, vain is this late humid autumn... And I’m also the same. I am empty. Fully empty and dead. And all paths are just dark, are so much troubled, wretched and bitterly confused. My current way is lost in years abyss, into abyss of doom. Imputed path is finally completed. All what's able to happen doesn’t care and doesn’t concern. My life disintegrates on vacuum and void. On futility, ashes and gloom. And nothing will return me sense. Only little is left. No fire, no sparks. No taste, no mirage of past. All has passed, all has hastily collapsed. Where is my former paradise and joy..."

The hero has looked in cheerless distance of depressed winding street: "I'll blend myself with darkness and will win. It's so pleasant at now – to get forgotten, or to slip, to come broken and die. Just all I need. And at tomorrow I have to start finding some work. No good even partly. Without due help of noose no chances on rescue at all."

Matvey Grigoryevich has cringed and promptly added shaky pace.

The silhouette has calmly disappeared.

III

There is no joy into anxiety. This morning too has given only coldness, pain and darkness, deep sorrow, gloom and deep emotional detachment. Matvey Grigoryevich is huddling into market, is choosing boots and products for small dinner. Behind of shelves is miraculous fuss. Engaged is process active buyers are pushing, crowding, confering and watching.

Matvey Grigoryevich has taken one step forward and then instantly faced with some pensive young man.

"What an abyss has made me forget my own wallet! I've been dragging to here for whole hour – as an unlimited full idiot! What a hopeless kind of damned fate..." - has howled the stranger.

"That's daily thing, exactly usual." - the hero has sighed and hastened to cope: "Have you come here for groceries? If it's so, I can help, can give you my remaining pennies - you'll return after time. I myself am at here for the only fourth day, and only day ago have found the job, that's why exist on only one prepayment. But I'll share with you – I have also been dragging to here for an hour and quarter, and I'm unable to experience it twice."

"You need to be remembered, to be immortalized in relict human book. Such kindness nowadays is sadly rare."

"It's not worth to dirt paper so aimlessly - for the sake of my trivial muzzle. No one will allow such connivance, no one will forgive. Are you still for the groceries?"

"Yes, for most modest spectrum of such ones, so I need just a little. Almost literal alms."

"Then you can safely wait for my full sponsorship."

"What an astonishing financial prospect - a real feast of monetary waste."

"Yes, it is. An astronomical mad loan. I've no doubts, such huge operations are greatly dangerous for all world-wide economy."

"You are truly good-natured. You warm without any flask or fire. You so easily turn all the cases in plus – into joke or hint, such things are much more favorable much more approachable for heart, much more bright and laconic."

Matvey Grigorievich has wearily nodded, unhurriedly and lazily repeated this short movement one more couple of times, has meaningfully frozen, and then, just after counting few coins, has handed them to the new-found fresh comrade: "Rake all you need from endless shelves, then transfer everything to bag, and in revived by such pleasant broad actions nice mood we will tremble to homes with the similar usual paths, which had led us from homes to here." "We will do it quite fast. Not even having time to get captured by fear that it will poorly come overgrown with wild grass into our long absence. We’ll get some trifle food and rush away. But all of this, of course, will occur, if only we will cope to squeeze through crowd."

"It’s true. They're crowded as densely as twigs in close hedge. Sometimes you run away from here, even having forgotten at all about any of bought products and much much faster than from plague."

"I agree. This insane fuss will stand until deep night. Give them hand, and they'll leave only shoulder. So hard is this life, so bitter, frantic and unhappy. Slanted, then crooked. Like some curse or damnation."

"I'm not sure, that the last one is global, but if you'll get such poor burden, you will clearly notice – both with heart and with mind."

"Aptly, dexterously."

Have proceeded to making purchases.

Having packed all acquired goods, they have headed to exit, pushed through crowd, then successfully sat in town crew, sailed in way.

Anatoly Efimovich (whom turned out to be met by Matvey Grigoryevich poor fellow) has exhaustedly sighed: "Our grand immense buying is totally and finally completed. Congratulations for such luck. We've retreated in time. That's aesthetic."

"Probably even masterly, Exotic, masterful, I know. As if by some scenario, not less. Neither clothes has been torn, nor our faces have been spoiled. Just beauty."

"Really beauty. Indeed."

The heroes have suddenly got silent. The voyage has continued oneself and after half an hour was abruptly torn off by Anatoly Efimovich's order of to make stop at the corner two-story house with a broken stone arch, quite uglily and clumsily repainted in caustic red color, so startlingly rejecting with own evident tastelessness and already remarkably faded into places of fresh blossomed shabbiness.

Matvey Grigoryevich has followed his companion and very soon was found by oneself into small and indistinctly shadowy room of the last one. "Here I live." - has admitted the hero, then taken scattered money from the dresser and calmly counted appropriate amount, just the same that had been kindly lent to his person before: "Thank you, really thank, I am obediently giving owed back."

Matvey Grigorievich has slowly grasped such modest cash.

"So, let me feed you in some tavern?" - the interlocutor has lavishly suggested: "We have one in the next nearby house. Very nice, by the way."

"Will not you go bankrupt on all money, if you'll regale each guest in such a manner?" - has softly asked Matvey Grigoryevich: "My dear friend, we are strictly not rich."

"Still how good and how greatly accurate can poor people understand each other." - has lingeringly answered Anatoly Efimovich: "Such fact is shockingly surprising. It turns out that hardships and difficulties keep humanity close to together."

"But what kind of big difficulties do we really have? We – poor people. All difficulties surely belong to fully rich – what kind of new palace to find, where to order best servants, where to buy most expensive world's jewelry. And for us all is simple: if we don’t have enough for bun, we take a half of such one and go home."

"With such of judgments it's not long to become total optimist."

"Please, rescue from such destiny, I am entirely refusing from this role, protesting with whole flesh all the soul - till wicked grinding of teeth. Any optimism is just most pure and most evident marker of human insanity. Such a fact doesn't have even minimal shadow of doubt."

"In this position I'm in full agreement. As if your words were taken from my tongue. I would also perpetuate your nice initiative on the legislative level - would forbid to all optimists to take good jobs or to become politicians, I would even deprive each of them of any human rights. Or at all would right instantly send on the gallows."

"They will smile even there. No methods can help. And I’m even quite ready to bet, bet on cutting of head of my boss, that sick positive thinking is exactly incurable."

"Yes, noble leprosy. I know."

Have moved to bar.

"What about will talk?" - has interested Anatoly Efimovich. "About meaningful, essential and deep. About happiness or sense of our life. All the other is dust."

"Each happiness is utterly amorphous. It's rather difficult to be sufficiently correct in such speeches, being always exclusively sad and unhappy. Pretend, you're looking at a still -life and seeing skillfully depicted tempting lemon, you clearly know its tart taste and from one single glance you already are feeling firm persistent acidity approached your helpless tongue with understanding of gastronomic essence of the picture. But if image will freely contain something you've never tried, then your opinion of probable closed taste of observed vague object will include only guessings and errors, to dispersed weak attempts, to predictions and making mistakes. And even though food perception is fully differing from happiness perception, but for the last one, after all, you also need some positive experience, without which all vain discussions are nothing more than hollow void matter."

"Then let's choose more semantical context."

"It’s not much easier, as fact. What is life, what is purpose of being? After all, into essence, it's the same noisy bazaar, fussy, clogged and bulky, with wide bunch of all kinds of departments and corners. All depends on in where you are. If you are at initial end, then you're surrounded by one type atmosphere, and if you are just next to exit, then all will looks completely different: different conversations, different topics, even different faces and goods. Somewhere whining beggars, and somewhere respectable rampant departments for solvent group of population. With the world all the same: what exactly embodies its meaning, what contain most significant vector? Broad hospitable spheres for mad self-immolation are given clearly in abundance - all lines and all formations are in acting, all sorts of obvious existing. Each one is choosing most important by oneself, each one creates such vague category ownly. And life is deeply contrasting and endless,it doesn't care – are you a composer, a janitor, a lover, or maniac, or even wretched moron."

"Yes, life is contrasting, I will not even argue. Even seasons of year are surely proving the fact, that at the same one single place you can easily freeze into ice and sunbathe till hard burns, All is dictated just by season. But how then to understand, into where is tangible meaning and in where is absence of such one? If gradation is blurred and crooked." "It depends on viewpoint, on point of perception's application. And such one, by the way, is possessed by vain stereotypes and wrong prejudices. All this is fully sacrilegious, and dead, unacceptable, painful. It breaks whole canopy of world, all whole harmony and practical advantage. Even reading own language, but presented in words, that are turned upside down, we can't determine fast enough, what does these strange unusual letters mean are and which linguistic affiliation are they having. Any simple and obvious circumstances most often look as something hazed and difficult, as confusion or trick. Elementary things are all the time exceptionally misty, are blurred, foggy, far and dark. This huge world seems to be something strictly impassable. After all, you can't even imagine any thing more irrational, fluid and imperfect than our views, opinions and thoughts. And we've decided to discuss life's sense."

"In world of evil can't be any rightness, any kindness or peace, even slightest."

"That is right. All is spoiled. All pure, accessible and good. Both mind, sublimity and talent. What still saved innocence is openness of soul - that primitive naivety and helpless, naked simplicity from childhood, completely vulnerable, fluent and short-lived. "

"It’s too easy to get fully lost... Fate's labyrinth is dangerously cunning."

"It’s only at first glance. Realize – all is is subjective - any scales, any frames, heights, ideas, any idols and principles, any known religions and any beliefs. What is our existence, birth of children and sex, rites and science? Artificially taken particulars. Ask anyone – how you've spent your last day? Has eaten food, transformed it into feces, said something vain, heard something similar, that's all. What weighty is at here? You continue to live, continue generation's sequence. Sooner or later some of them will be born infertile or disabled, will die in war, or become usual scum. Why do we need in life itself? You've been convinced that people should get dead, should get sick, fight for something unknown and politely subservient to their superiors. You will be just a slave in any scientific community, you will tremble in front of all their regalia - I know many scientists, they do exactly so, among of them blind worship is more valuable than any sweet orgasm. We are equally trembling in front of politicians, in front of public firm opinion. If I'll want to destroy all the world or to kill couple hundreds of people. They'll start hate me. They will require my prompt death. But who are they, who are they all? Not more than dull molecular machines. Machines, got used to own defenseless, to weaknesses both of consciousness and flesh. What the whole world is? Earth and sun. And whole universe around – deep wide infinity of space, so generously scattered on parsecs. What is the company around? Even if current president, someone high from world's clergy, or the most outstanding psychiatrist will ardently persuade you to give up your inconvenient perception, tell, who they are? Who will remember at least one of them after century? And after ten? Who are they all for history and being? Who is truly significant there? I understand all atheists just perfect. It is difficult to trust and to believe, that this delusional mad world had been created by some kind of higher matter." "With such judgments, of course, you feel freedom, but you foredoom all yourself on oblivion, it's too sacrificial, too painful..."

"It's inevitabe condition. Isolation will never destroy. It will only save. The taste of truth is sensible in exclusively in total isolation. And in terms of neglect to oneself. You should know, that on thread of life's building is far not always possible to bead both wealth, success and glory. This is really sad. But anyway it's sweeter than mistakes."

"These things also born great fear."

"Any fear is feeling, as fact, exclusively just compensatory and only, it appears from one of three lacks - lack of firm confidence in force of own rightness, lack of firm confidence in world and lack of own disdain for all of people. These are all roots of any fear. Cut off each one and you'll become unbridled."

"Does such broad boldness have some real use?"

"Yes, has. Extremely priceless one. As you probably know, that both to abyss and paradise leads just the same unfussy road. So, all depends on how you are walking, under whose higher guidance. Under what motivation and aim. And freedom here is unique precious flagship in mind - the most productive one, most reliable and truly accessible."

"The only thing, too short is all this courage, too ready for to fall apart in any second."

"If you are going to surrender, you'll never be the winner – this is fact. And fear is that acid, which even with one drop can effortlessly melt all the mind, can eat it till uncounted wide holes. Weak grip for holding miracle is useless."

"But where to take the last one, where to get? What to choose as a reference point, as a guiding main beacon for expedition through the life."

"Choose the most sovereign route, most independent, free and autonomous. Remember one, truth does not tolerate the way of humiliations, it deny any kneeling positions. Only one, who is proudly staring into darkness of daily turmoil, will be able to see precious flame of enlightenment. Outside of belief into mind and excuse, in global reasonableness, we are having just purposeless vacuum, routine."

"And what about happiness?" "This is difficult topic. One fact, each happiness is citizen with no concrete residence permit, you never know where exactly you'll meet it. Where, how and with whom. I don’t obtain such miracle myself, that's why I'll better stay completely silent, do not want to become faked adviser."

Have subsided in staring to windows. After one half an hour have parted - said few words of goodbye to each other and missed.

That's all the meeting. All the dialogue.

Matvey Grigoryevich has left the tavern, seen off Anatoly Efimovich's retreating silhouette and dejectedly sighed. In around is monotonously colorless damp park, exhaustedly and cautiously bored and generously washed by icy water storm, not subsiding all previous night in stubborn restless beating to the citizens' many-faced windows. Above of covered with rumpled, shriveled foliage ground are haphazardly scattered into free geometry lacy layered clouds. Along the sides is drowsy nondescriptness of calm area. Into cold and thick air are lonely notes of mournful sad alarm. Among of dreary naked trunks of trees is silently indifferent twilight, so generously sprawled with gloomy blowing of sharp mystery. Into thoughts is broad vanity of perpetual true inconsolableness.

Matvey Grigoryevich has sighed again: "An invisible thread of the fate - where it goes, where goes spent time, to which part of eternity, to which unknown limits and extensions, to which of weird categories... Any human in general is a changeable runaway creature, so constantly seeking and suffering, waiting, so frequently irrational and mad, exactly unadapted to the measured living and logic, entirely torn off, enclosed in hopeless mixture of society and turmoils. It’s so hard to survive, hard to feel as yourself and to hide from harsh abyss of poor foundations. Possession of some peace or exaltation, independence or true inward harmony are strictly instantly get punished. Life is keeping you out of meaningfulness, out limits of mind. Any greatness is sinful. Any beauty or freedom, any lack of own vices and defects are directly condemned. Only grayness is broadly encouraged. Dull and ugly vile cripples, total lepers and morons - that’s what modernism needs. That's what now if fully in favor. Trouble... Grief."

Matvey Grigoryevich has fallen into thoughts, then walked along of blurred terrace. Then sat down on bench. He had moved to another new town. He had tried to forget all himself. He had changed his location. But by simply transporting of body you will never detached from oneself. Or from reality or longing. "What a for do I live? Now I work just on grave. On coffin's boards. I'll get his box and will calm down, will fall asleep. Oh, poor fate – only torments and bitterness. How sharply disgusting. How tired I am. Of everything and all."

The hero has fallen fully silent, sat still a little bit more, then has risen again and exchanged couple of quarters, looked at watchs. Has passed about two long hours.

"Where to go? Again to Anatoly back... Where else. At home I'll hang myself."

Matvey Grigoryevich has dived in space of arch and then climbed to already-familiar door. Has knocked.

"What an awful nightmare has so horribly lifted me up?" - has promptly jumped disheveled Anatoly Efimovich, then muttered and then looked at guest more close: "Oh... it's you... And I already has been sleeping"

"I'm not in time, therefore sadly sorry..."

"All is so. But come in. I has been able just to snore right now. The best pleasure for lonely persons is sleeping. At such one, you seem to have an intercourse with time, copulating with being and rewinding away its perceptible part."

"This is utterly funny. As for me, it’s most elegant form of the coition. But who f*ck whom?"

"If to judge by my terrible fatigue, f*cked was me. I've been sleeping for two hours only."

"I've freed you from foundational great need. After all, having truly defeated own drowsiness, you'll probably become completely independent of all insidious intrigues of every night. After all, who can know, when we seep, maybe somebody change our memory, tune emotions or fake all impressions. Paranoiacs would ardently dream of full losing their sleep."

"I would prefer to lose all contacts with the paranoiacs, their worldview is painfully contagious and infectious."

"Bad example is fiercely sticky. All the mental plasticity is pointed at sorrow and confusion, at destruction and nonsense, at fear. Not to be truly free, not to step with full proudness."

"We prefer just to crawl. This is deeply in blood. Let’s, at least, have strong tea, my wide offer."

"With huge pleasure, just pour."

"Then I'll splash you whole cup – till its edges." "Very nice. I will tell you it's luck - to have ability to spend even hour together."

"I agree, current abyss of darkness has taught us to rejoice even only from match. Any human, as fact, is a workpiece, eclusively malleable, so easily transformable in anything – into dust, in newly-minted idol or cold ash."

"So it is. And such a doom sometimes is coming, that it throw in wolf howls. And wandering by circle for forever is just the same as standing into corner: the same full hopelessness in essence. What brings the model of this fate? What kind of reckless trajectories do adhere so absurdly intertwined lines of lifes... We cling to total secondariness, to vanity, cheep hollowness and void... "

"Let’s talk about something weighty. At now I'll listen you myself. Let’s imagine, that this piece of sugar, which I so kindly given you for tea, is all the meaning that exists in universe — all of potentially accessible attainments, all clever thoughts and theoretically capable discoveries, how many from its global volume is already achieved at this day by humanity?"

"Hardly more than a couple of non-essential molecules and only. Please, do not think that our vain civilization has achieved something high. All alienation from the bottom is not more than one step. After all, there’s nothing at here to be broken – entire world is not more complicated than a stone. And anyway time from time there is so terrible fear for oneself and for fate, no matter that last one is empty. No matter that last one is stupid. Fly all over the whole motley globe of the earth and you'll not find even fragments of sense, only shadow. And the saddest unbearable thing in accepting of this very sense, in its straight understanding and even real finding and obtaining is the fact, that this precious sense doesn’t rule into our world, doesn’t serve as an obvious power, doesn’t even determine some real priorities, doesn’t bring any peace or firm confidence, only fully indistinct and doubtful strange confirmation of own justice and rightness, identically wholly controversial and only partially useful and convincing. Any fate is continuous risk, and in couple with sense it’s vice versa only more thoroughly and broadly realized. Life does not tolerate incomplete bets. It is given to play exclusively all in, on all the spectrum of your values. Well-being fades entirely and only. It dies at once. That's always irrevocable and hopeless. Grief comes just stubbornly, persistently and brashly. And almost flawlessly gets welcomed." "Tell me better what's meaningful for you, describe it, outline."

"Any meaning is feasible dose of eternity, enough reliably embodied in temporal and perishable things. It's light and minimally enterable fragment of infinity – that modest fraction of true miracle that can be really received and some a way indeed discovered. But, as I have already totally upset you, even such a bewitching attainment is also fully powerless and helpless."

"But how to catch, to notice and to snatch even this strengthless piece of the greatness?"

"It's believed that this life is opening your eyes exclusively if really appears what to look at. We're ceasing to be fools when surely arises some expediency in having own mind. And out of free points of its straight application, such one is wholly rudimentary, vain and excessive."

"It's so eagerly desired time from time to break out of endless harsh pettiness, of total routineness of being, desired to possess of something high, to have ability to trust and to believe - believe in something valuable and worthwhile, in something really deserving your frank hope, in something absolutely good, idealistic. In something crystal, alien from sins, from all fake, all impassive, deceitful and wrong. I want just to believe... To believe not in vain."

"You've chosen an interesting word - to believe. Faith into general is quite specific notion. Life-affirming, as fact. I will say even more - that at all there's no disbelief, only faith - in happiness or its unrealness, in grief or miracle, in whole justification or full nonsense, in God or sure utopianism of any its true presence. And to believe in wrong and bad, after all, is much simpler - sad examples, confirming own prevalence are more frequent, more strong."

"I ardently subscribe at every word, fuss and haste are too strong and too harmful, it envelops all things into veil of own vainness, of own impossibility and void, it ruins, kills, oppresses. And it's wished to be free, to abstract, run anywhere from this hell, rush as far as it's only possible – away from never-ending filth. I want kindness." "No kindness, no goodness exist - there is only evil and its clear absence. And most regrettable sad moment is hopeless fact that such antagonism, sedulously assembled from the randomness of endless troubles and sharp meannesses, is purely continuous and solid - much more than any monolithic object. Common evil is highly structured, is extremely harmonic and joint. All it firmly gives birth to one question – by which a way had it managed to synchronize all of evil's participants? By which a way had it managed to fill all the world with so impressively identical low nits? But all, as always, is quite simple – deep uniformity of values, principles and giving education, deep uniformity of soil of ideas and artificial sick perspectives. Growing up on such common conceptual line, you don't have even any weak chance to be somehow exclusive and free. That's why this world is flooded with wide bunch of ugly clones, surrounding you almost everywhere simply by so painful and harmful destructiveness and so strong and persistent oppression, which are erecting literal captivity for any use, any depth and each meaningfulness. Captivity of being inappropriate, of inability, oblivion and troubles, of isolation from success and ill and awful aspiration to belong to full slops. It is too difficult to try to disagree when you compete at once with whole reality."

"At here I'll let myself to argue – it's much more easy to break down and to discredit in own eyes just that world, which in inside is monotonously ugly, vile and wrong, it's much more evident and simple not to interpret its laws for the truth, to consider such ones for a kind of obsession. I agree, people's meanness completely devalues all sorts of materiality. We'll never come to paradise, that's fact. But how to survive and not to disappear, to save oneself in this race into hell..."

"Into walking along of each edge, the most important thing is not to turn. Keep durability and strengths, even being in process of dying, even right at the most helpless point of agony. Except of you yourself, nobody will rescue, nobody will warm or protect, no one single muzzle."

"But what you'll say about miracle? Or even meeting with its witchery is also powerless in matter of acquiring indeed profound, mortless prospects?"

"This is extremely friable and marshy ground for discussion. True miracle is scissors, which divide all your life on two parts – on before and on after. It's not just temporary thing, not short-living and fleeting enlightenment, not a spark, but a real huge flame, which one a day will transform all the previous fuss into ashes. True miracle is path direct to heaven. And its sure complete retribution - for past mortality and pettiness of way, is getting heeded and received with even much more great voluptuousness and pleasure, than the very prompt sharpen ascension to the highest semantic and sensual peak, which by itself is fatefully inherent to such matter. True miracle is hopeful escape, is brave reprisal over mediocrity. It is your personal detachment from the world of fools. But will we meet it, will we ever attain – how to know, how to presume..." "You've put too much on single magic. To be a god, some people say, is not feasible even for God. Nobody will reach irreproachable being. But I am worried much more of something else – of deep duality of any social matter: each one, who stays not full mad and insane, quite clearly understands, that all current society is nothing more than lifetime dose of hell, than bunch of freaks and miserable dissemblers, so greatly low, envious and petty, but just the same sick bunch of lepers had some a way acquired all best prosperities and benefits of world's civilization: both clothes, and writing, and even recently invented electricity. But how this wrong and destructive humanity had achieved all this tempting accomplishments? By which a way? Such fact so awfully perplexes and puts me in unstoppable hard stupor."

"You're stubbornly forgeting, that no era can be indeed illuminated by only artificial lighting. Any hopeful technical benefits for each of us are fully vain. Since the first one articulately speaking, this world has not become either better or kinder, or maybe much more logical, or truly justified. In our case, we've got lost on the route long before of the moment we've learnt to walk at all. The very postulates and laws of whole earthly existence are entirely filthy, unforgivable, rotten. This is world of contempt, inequality, sorrows and sadness, world of ones, who has fallen, and of ones, who has pushed, world of absolute squalor. Life at here is impossible."

"I accept, only madmen agree to survive. All life is expectation of some trouble, all life is endless painful fear of to miss something yours, all life is immense blurred hope – that one, which is so similar with torture. Why should I live?”

"Please believe, either sooner or later our noose will be also successfully weaved. Legs are given for chances to fall. And if to say about any fear - it's from weakness of brain. The most important things happen only at once - each cup gets made and broken exclusively one time. So, according to this, if you'll meet true insight, don't worry – you'll surely not miss. But such hazed vague chance is entirely equal with chance to have flying on comet."

"After looking in sky, you'll never turn yourself in bird, I accept this sad truth, but how to get free from this world of mad lepers?"

"The main thing is only to remember, that, justifying some flaws, you instantly automatically betray any greatness and grace. Your perception of beauty is tightly correlated with perception of ugliness. This is fact."

"Not in vain people say, that all notes for the playing in paradise music gets created and written exclusively in depths of hell."

"Maybe, partly right so. It’s not for me to judge, I haven’t been in any of these places. But probably I will correct it soon. Every life is too short, you shouldn’t hope, that something will come true. You must be fatalist, it's smarter."

"But nevertheless I really want to know – is among of this broad insignificance any sphere or thing, that can serve as a key to the truth, are any loopholes in wrong present?" "After all, any truth has a lot of wide doors. That is why keys are countless too. And the first from all keys to eternity is modern mathematics. With its help you can effortlessly imagine immense numbers, incomparably larger than all the particles of universe, these numbers are not physical, there is nothing material what is somehow embodying them, but such ones are existing. Another thing is scale of world, which firmly serves as main key to reality. If you're rightly comparing events with significance and clearly seeing depth of concepts, making correct gradation and hierarchy, then you're unwittingly getting as close as it's possible to most fair and sober opinion. Admit to truth, if you'll cope to catch it. Try not to be kicked out of its abode. Try to linger at there."

"So, it turns out, that having surely decided to get breath, you vice versa promptly suffocates. Anyway, all we have only risks and deep emptiness. Nothing else is imputed."

"If life is sending you at risk, then you are one who should be sacrificed and killed, or you must confidently win."

"What use from such a consolation... From any of most favorable outcomes. The taste of victory itself is fully hollow - our path is too temporary, too short and vague, after all."

"Temporality is not a stumbling block or an absolute obstacle, which can't be overcome. You walk along the sand and your helpless footsteps should come certainly melted with no leaving any proofs of own previous presence, but they will surely remain for a couple of days. If such matter takes place at an abandoned territory, then perhaps these dim steps will successfully show to some person his lost lifesaving path, having followed which one, he'll get rescued, having left after time both long posterity and some material and mental fruits, without of which's diffident existence all this world would be fully another. But what is this – just simple steps, which, at the first mistaken glance, have even no shade of own short presence."

"But it’s too scary anyway to get erased and broken, to come deprived of even aimless temporality of life."

"Such a fear is normal and natural. Any breaking of life is a thing anyway irreplaceable. From splinters you can easily make any thing you just want. Any thing, but except of the very original structure. Having fallen, you will not go straight anymore."

"Such understanding kills all freedom ..."

"Any freedom is working like clothes: total nudity is also fettering your mind, it’s rather difficult to behave in such state enough natural. All is useful and good only strictly in measure – even absolute paradise."

Brief calm pause has inefficiently hung down on a moment.

"Where to search this notorious grail of true wisdom, if anyway all somehow harms in unconventional and stupid application..." - has humbly sighed Anatoly Efimovich.

Matvey Grigoryevich has yawned: "Think another – in more broad and more gradual manner. Life of two is always just a little madness, life of small compact team is madness slightly bigger, and the life of humanity is at all total concentrate of insanity, total piece of delirium, rave and barbarism, outrage, humiliation and tears. Pure deep mind can appear in terms of full loneliness and nowhere else. That is why, choose this state as an absolute reference."

"I’m living in such one from very birth. For so long period I've got completely tired."

"But what for do you need any unity? For to be cannon fodder? Thousands of people day from day are tirelessly dying or getting maimed, injured, lost and crippled. And, if you're in society, they will force you to save them, to sacrifice oneself, and it seems that your personal life is most valueless. It’s so strange. And after all, any filthy atrocities are, as fact, entirely allowed by some highest world's principle, into trusting to which one they condemn your behavior. It's amusing. The one, who drops the vases, is reproaching those ones, who refuse to be catching the last ones."

"But what of benefits do I really have into being alone? Only bare enlightenment, which is totally helpless – as vain freedom, you've mentioned above. I've been always desiring to be at least with someone, but not in damn aloneness. But I have no one for to live with."

"The matter of life's chances has never been composing real canvas of any results. It's the first. And the second – just get up and go out, go outside right now, go and look - for most random and spontaneous girl. And I will stay instead of you."

"Yes. Deal." - Anatoly Efimovich has got surely up, then pulled on a raincoat and waved his hand: "See you soon. The apartment is yours."

"Well, I'll try to get bored into here."

"As you want. One request – don't play golf, these walls aren't spacious enough."

Anatoly Efimovich has left.

Matvey Grigoryevich has lonely longly sighed: "I've driven him away of own house. I even did not let him sleep. Well. What an idiot am I..."

IV

Anatoly Efimovich, who had got incomparably tired day before, has woken up only far after afternoon. It had sadly turned out impossible for him to come able to find at least anyone. He had been only aimlessly wandering from one place to another in vain walking at gray empty streets right until deep last midnight, which one later he had been calmly sitting just till three o'clock with Matvey Grigoryevich, boldly melted in darkness of night at the end of the dialogue and optimistically promised to come back at the evening.

"Oh, unhappy and meager affairs, endless void and dullness, endless troubles and fog. And after single hour I need to trudge to work, on my poor, wretched work. Some a kind of nightmare, not less."

The hero was working into local workroom of small theater – was making decorations and patching up motley scenical costumes, was repairing unlucky inventory and refueling kerosene lamps. Such position was modest and average. The salary was totally the same. All the fate was in grayness and fog. In deprivation, waiting and obscurity.

"What an excellent picture in window: all you see - only haze, but no daily vanity as an additional sweet benefit. I need to take a walk at least. Only where to go... No matter which dance is suggesting your life, take the rhythm anyway. If no happiness was given from the start, all is strictly the same if such one was surprisingly taken away. For lonely person it's indifferent where to walk – even right in the middle of cemetery. That's why let's go."

The hero has got up and reflexively cringed: "It's time to start to loose my mind – just systematically, thoroughly and surely on purpose, even lovingly bowing before of own loneliness and composing admirable praises to universal global insignificance and lawlessness of being, or even fervently dancing with those who rejoice with own personal and endless common wretchedness of mind. Fate never depends exclusively on only you yourself. The rules of game are always incomparably more influential than any of the cards. I still am dreaming of innocently bright and righteous beginnings. Okay, enough weak-witted reasoning and twaddle."

Anatoly Efimovich has gone in outside.

Bleak street is quiet, calm city is impersonal and faceless, inhospitable, cold. Wet quiet air is thick. All outlines are hidden under canopy of whitish immense fog, broadly spreaded in height over cooling in sleepiness area. Harshly desolate quarters are sad. All is silent and dead. Both not abounding with taste or eccentricity, exactly average and strictly monotonous, slightly pale, fully wilted landscapes are shyly and unhurriedly clothing into grayish and shadowy veil. Rueful silk of emotionless dampness is exhaustedly creeping by hopeless surroundings with all-consuming languid gloom. Enveloped with some tragic weightness facades are hesitantly looking in around. Defenselessly and humbly glowing puddles are time from time occasionally flashing into darkness. Is smoothly and effortlessly engaging with own tissue inseparable deep November anxiety. "What an astonishingly piercing woeful wind. What a fantastically perfect broadless numbness. What an enormously deep anguish. What an absolute sorrowful bitterness - like a mirror of my poor soul. All is joyless, all inside and around is crushed, all is sunk in oblivion, into mortal dispassion. What an exhausted time, what an indifferent and desolate dead season. Harsh apathy in any tone and corner. In everywhere of this world. But in the highest concentration - into me. Yes, that's right, all is so."

Anatoly Efimovich has gradually added clumsy step and wearily shrugged his tired shoulders: "Oh, endless hopelessness. In such weather you want to get frozen or lost, that is all. It can happen sometimes, that all day is entirely vain — no things go right, no mood, no strength, only total unluckiness. And some of us have one or two of such unhappy days. But someone has the whole life, which is fully like that. And it seems, that it's better and greater not to be ever born at all. All destiny in hopelessness, all share. The whole model of the fate is strictly wrong. It works like poisonous sieve – you only miss either one thing or other, all you acquire – losses and confusion, deep recklessness, disunity and slurredness of future. No even slightest, short enjoyment. Only hefty depression. And all the longitude of immense human being, all broad deepness of the life does not bring even tiny prosperity, no gleam, no echo or shadow of luck, even rare and wholly occasional one. All earthly way is a kind of some hellish dark swamp, which promptly gets more greedy and addictive after any attempt to get out. In such a state you're ready to believe in any curse, in any type of devil. And, maybe, even in TV meteorology."

The hero has turned towards local embankment. Everywhere is gloom, everywhere just coldness and silence. Into distance are rare dim lights of the single lone barges. Under gray weepy sky are calmly staying weary contours of horizon. Underfoot are chilled colorless stones of pavement. All is average, primitive, dull. At one of slim and blurred lanterns is standing unfamiliar bright girl, exceptionally rakish, quite immodestly clothed and inwardly inspiring unprecedented voluptuousness, depravity and absolute perverseness. Into hands – thin long cigarette, onto shoulders – leather jacket, on covered in stockings thighs – extremely short calico skirt, on white neck – golden necklace. Such variants have never been exciting, have been even partly allure neither body, nor mind, traditionally causing exclusively harsh shyness or firm contempt, but at this tempting time renewed palette of constant soul's disorder has inadvertently thawed, having luckily made all the previous hard hesitations irrevocably melted. Anatoly Efimovich has deftly overcome all inner doubts and made bold sure step towards fully bewitched by dirty lustful aura, indecent sinful woman.

"My best greetings. I'd like to come united with each other. I have completely ambiguous desire to become much much closer."

"With one like you? Am I an altruist for morons?"

"Which way my poor personality has sadly managed to upset you?" "But with what should I be even barely glad or inspired right now? Just one more idiot in front of my cute face and no shadow of benefits or use. Where my life still continue to take such silly elements as you. With even stick it's not easy to drive you away."

"You can meet with each other without any reason too. All I want just to get stable model of real relations, not of fragile and only exhausting, but of ones, that are pure and exalted."

"Stop feign your being smart, all you want just to f*ck me and only, exactly similar as all the brainless others. About which of high saint aims you're telling, an ordinary showing of your purposeless animal essence – for empty sake of egoism and only."

"You are thinking I'm ill, am obsessed with the poison of narcissism, am rid of meaningful deep content. You are making mistake, I am totally opened, with no duplicity inside. And you've already shown me as a professional seducer, as an unprincipled souls seeker. You've put me into so unusual skin, that such a turn is even comical and funny."

"For which time else you'll test my patience with your twaddle? You're only growing my disgust. Your speech is evidently stupid. You're far not interesting, alas."

"No heights are visible bottom. You can’t even imagine an irreproachable frank person - an unenviable fate, by the way."

"And from your fate each one will pee with boiling water? Which charm you've found in own being? You're so obviously eager to any kind of humiliatins for only one low worthless aim – for to get any pity. What a partner you are? You're not a man. Trashy miserable soul. Useless rubbish."

"And you desire rampant boldness? Such one is most deceptive from all features."

"And your self-humiliation, you will say, is holy, sinless, pure and fully honest. You're ordinary fruitless storyteller. Boring fibber and fool."

"How long, tell me please, will your arrogance bubble continue to inflate oneself? What amusing can be in trivial ability to make each one offended? You consider it's great, then get and greet my best my congratulations. You can't become a bitch from good sweet life."

"And you would like to be a psyllium - to heal my heart with only one appearance. It doesn’t work like that. It's better not to trust to people. Especially to men. If it in principle is possible to call you with such word."

"But who will follow you with such your manners, except of totally offended and oppressed?"

"You'll be first, who will instantly rush after me, if I'll let even small permission and freedom." "I've only presented my kindness, and you've already totally recorded my lost person in number of the henpecked ones."

"But having abruptly denyed any leniency, it remains just to send you away. What a for do I need you? You're suitable exclusively for being constantly used, deceived and fooled."

"It's quite simply and easily possible to deceive any kind of person – no matter a clown or an enlightened brilliant professor. Or you. All depends on the type of each case."

"At what kind of weak chance are you hoping?"

"On rather daily, gray and usual, not even partially connected with some miracle or will of lucky stars."

"So you indeed rely on fortune? Are you mindless or what?"

"And you're afraid of coincidences, I see."

"What for is all this babbling? What for you've done such strange acquaintance?"

"For fully trifle little thing – an ordinary turning into couple. I even can't imagine something better."

"It means, with fantasy you also have a tragedy, that's funny. So flawlessly aimless you are, so vain."

"And you yourself is thinking you're from clouds? What kind of reputation have you chosen for yourself? Such one, that no one can be compared with you. Without presence of observers any flag on the tower will be only a purposeless rag."

"And you are ardently desiring to be one of these devoted observers. You're even zealously salivating. What an unstoppable mad nature. Incorrigible beggar. Well, explain what you want? Tell me more, I’m still patiently listening."

"I don’t have any super ambitions, don’t feed myself with excessively high expectations, all I really want - just modest union of two - without any of excesses and with no mad riot of utopian plans, but with small tiny part of festivity."

"Tell more details and more particularities – what a for do you need this strange wishes? Do you want me to leave my address? Or should I generously spread my tender legs right here and now, having lost all my memory? What a kind of my craziness are you mindlessly counting on?"

"For acquaintance, for simple acquaintance. Even if it so surely seems to be totally cunning. Well, give me your address."

"You are weird. Good for mocking."

The lady has politely given a small and crumpled paper note with calm couple of short smooth lines: "I am Elena. So, fill yourself with utter gladness. You have got it."

Anatoly Efimovich has quite silently squeezed tiny piece, then shaken it two or three aimless times, put in pocket and briefly reported: "I will come."

"And now it's time to go to work ..." - the hero has sleepily sighed and monotonously trudged into distance along of gray and colorless embankment.

V

In boring grayness of a gloomy and dusty warehouse, is quite tiredly standing Matvey Grigoryevich - fully out of breath, unbearably exhausted, wretched and worn, extremely waiting for the slowly but rather surely creeping ahead peaceful finish of work, so highly appropriate and full of inspiration. In around are different boxes of all scales and dimensions, heavy bags and huge rolls impregnated with resin. Daily routine, no joy in addition. With dirt, harsh dullness and long longing. Neither vague salvation nor indistinct dim hope. But soon it will be cherished moment of so enchantingly encouraging returning back to home.

The hero has looked at pale clock face and stretched.

"With all hard lifelessness of my unhappy flesh, I thank my watch for so generous providing of such a bright, impeccably sweet moment. Incomparable time, most significant ever. It's right to meet it with applause. My relief is so surely limitless, that it's totally equal to getting in paradise, into bottomless, endless nirvana."

Matvey Grigoryevich has taken off his robe, then changed clothes and gone out to leading away from all terrible terrace, has exchanged two - three hundreds of meters. At sides are shabby, sadly mournful hazed quarters, bleak and gloomy, dispassionate, plain-looking and dissolved, with painful dark aesthetics of permanent and immense devastation and constantly unchangeable weak grayness. The sky is gloomy, overcast and threateningly blackened, strongly hopeless and doomed, enveloped with cold depthness and not passing, persistently torturing apathy. All houses are shyly unpretentious and stunted – of one - two floors, not more, surroundings are insipid, landscapes are average and simple. Close streets are deserted and empty. Crooked windows are often with inappropriate inserts of plywood: even glass is a luxury. But what to do... So are realities of working beggar areas. Nothing pleasing, exalted or holy. Single darkness, perplexity, filthy language from here and there, global poverty, stray ragged dogs, tattered children and countless cripples, in all the voice aggressively and obstinately asking for some money. There are few rare taverns - with thick tart smoke, undressed low girls, voluptuous spirit of cute sinfulness and cheep surrogate alcohol. Entertainments are scanty - to drink, to paid sex, to get sick or to beg and dilute boring calmness with fighting. That's the whole spectrum of meager adventures. You also can quite freely hang yourself. By the way, quite appropriate action for these local wrong latitudes, but unexpectedly unpopular and commonly unwelcome. It is much more usual to endure. Endure or complain. Such things are into blood. Sometimes it’s greatly sad what this dead world is doing with a human. He can be fully humiliated, deceived, turned out into fool or totally dishonored. All this is not too difficult. And after all, such poor ones – wholly stupid, or empty, or broadly unprincipled, absurdly petty, ugly, full of envy and hatred – such ones are everywhere, all the crowd is so. They are already broken. It’s too late to save any of them. And there's no sorry to fallen. Lost heartless whore, covetously standing with long cigarette, impetuously trembling into hand, will never show your fidelity, sincerity or frankness, rude untalented philistin, filled with evil and flaws, will never find inside of soul any tender right things - neither faint generosity, nor slight purity, love or devotedness. Such people serve as animated garbage. As useless corpses, falsely endowed with spoiled attachment to the world. They are also alive, in spite of ugliness and endless sins and weakness. They are at every corner. Hard poverty is turning out souls is stones. Together with your wallet, your heart is also getting poor. This is fact. When you haven't to eat, you'll at first eat your dog, then your friend, wife and mother. These are instincts – rather harmful and pestilent matter. It can't be hastily crossed out or forgotten. This world is bad. It's awfully unsuitable for love. Or for honor. This world is rotten bottom. The bottom from which one you even can’t be pushed away.

Matvey Grigoryevich has languidly sighed: "Life is inhospitable, lost, rectified from all truth. One more beggar is waving with icon - is asking for some coins. This one without both of legs. He will not go far..."

The hero has looked inside of pocket and sadly spread his hands: "Only absolute emptiness, no help for today."

The path has slowly continued. Half an hour later, the door has shown own face. The room is quiet, the air is unfresh, the atmosphere also the same. The window is closed with whitish curtain. At naked wall - small disfigured floor lamp. "What we have here... Nasty, ugly reality, but luckily and marvelously brightened by the precious memory of so saint and so pure immense feeling, by some great miracle experienced in past into blissful and priceless vast union, which was staying entirely fresh into thoughts. Anna Evgenievna, she was a kind of impeccably crystal obsession - sincere, sweet, serene, sweetheart, incomparably deep and completely mutual, exactly perfect, utterly majestic, divinely beautiful and unrestrainedly tart and impetuous, strongly coveted, sacredly holy, unprecedentedly frank and reliable, exorbitantly delicate, alluring, sensitive and tender. As whole eternity embodied in each second. And now no future, no life. This is surely obvious. It will not fade, will not grow with ashes, will not wither and die till the end of my being. It is so painful and tragic to know that, having touched the highest sky, you have to spend all the rest empty time on the earth. It's directly unbearable. This world is too spontaneous - all is appallingly chaotic: any happiness, any true meaning. Life is an abyss, a swamp, a damn wheel. All is given is only to seek, to get confused by expectations, to believe and to grow mistakes, to suffer day by day. Any chances are meager and rare. Life is hollow, hazy and aimless. Each possibility is only a spark, a blurred sign. It happens accidentally – by luck. And all the previous essence, all the reality gets crossed out by one influential insight, by single case - dividing all your fate on after and before. No future, that's so. No suitable choice. No things can replace irreplaceable. There is no me, no holy devotion. No joy, no miracle. Only gray daily life. Endless routine. Ordinary mornings and trivial evenings. Sure hell. So enormously long, if you're healthy enough. No future, I know. It's not existing. And never will appear."

Matvey Grigoryevich has gritted his teeth and motionlessly frozen at the window frame, then bursted into tears.

"The road is in firm deadlock, into darkness. Life is not somehow important, vain world is not essential, not valuable or pleasant. Indifference in all. Indifference and total devastation in absolute degree – in all-consuming, omnipotent way of harmful sad implementation. I am not here anymore. I've died in there - where our saint inseparable union was ended and my lifelong dark loneliness was started. All is fully burned out. All that was able to flame and to live has become just an ash. Deep damnation at me, impersonality and rue. No future ahead. All that waits - only death. Death and sufferings. And pain. No future."

The hero has fallen onto the bed and turned to wall: "To forget all myself, to forget and to meet own finish. To meet own finish and dissolve. To dissolve like a smoke. Like a ghost. What for to live... For to annoy the sky and only."

VI

"Our life is short-lived and by this so much pleasant – rather soon it will mix all my flesh and my mind with earth's soil, my torn heart will just sing, all existing is boundless plague, presented as a holiday, as feast, but nobody calls me to the table." - was muttering and whistling Anatoly Efimovich, returning from the theater's workroom: "The day is ended, work is finished, at now way to dear home. I’m so free, so clean and opened. For dirt and enslavement, accordingly. I'm free to do exactly all I want - to blossom or to wither, what is closer. Does it really matter..."

The hero has quickened his calm pace: "In the evening will come Matvey Grigorievich. I've left him duplicate of keys. And where is that paper. Where is it?"

Anatoly Efimovich has looked through his pockets and carefully taken out gray piece of faded paper: "All is here. Yeniseiskay 12, apartment 6. Hopeful, nice ... Now I'll make sure visit."

Yeniseiskay street was going at the suburbs, circumflexing whit poor oneself the most worn, unattractive dark neighborhoods, wholly formed from the dusty old barracks. Gray and boring pale shadows are lonely hovering around, wet winds are dragging over land, single rare pedestrians are meekly crawling by road sides. All houses are frail and remarkably weary and shaky, all yards are faceless, worn and dirty, all landscapes are exactly the same, all colors are deplorable and dreary, all views are trivial and dim. Gloomy weather is cold and oppressive. All is low, all is rueful. The twelfth house has slowly appeared as a two-story yellowish building, typified and comparably old. Bent staircase is rid of any railing, frazzled shutters are broken, roof is also flabby - all in sorrowful unison. Door is massive and heavy, door's handle is of grayish bone. Instead of rug - a cat.

Anatoly Grigoryevich has knocked. After short humble silence, calm footsteps have got heard and quite soon disheveled and battered Elena Mikhailovna has looked out from darkness of tired apartment: "Who I'm seeing right here! Why are you, pretzel, so rapid? Like young ripe cherries. What a for have you come? Did your innocent soul still wish to have a f*ck?"

"I have come by unsaid invitation - for tea or coffee in your abode. Or for hot conversation."

"I prefer to sip cognac. What kind of sick manners you have - to suck tea... Useless shit."

"Let’s try this strange absurdity at practice. Let's have own personal surrealism of meal."

"What a dreamer you awfully are. Okay, come in. Freak in feathers." "I'm obeying..." - the hero has crept inside and soon found himself into middle of dim, rather spacious room with a large wooden bed and a little cupboard. At the head of the bed – a small table. On the table – a thin tablecloth, a bunch of withered flowers, a heap of colorful bright magazines, a few white napkins and a bottle of odorous oil. Dense warm air is spicy, even cloying, faint outlines are wavy-blurry, vague contours are smooth and amorphous, sweet atmosphere is frivolous. Elena has alluringly sat down onto edge of her bed and then piquantly spread own legs, cutely straightened her stockings and pointedly walked with skillful fingers up from each knee: "What are you staring at? Is it really so joyful? Have you already fallen into pleasure or what? "

"I'm only quietly sitting at far distance, am observing your rich carnal values, so persistently shown to my eyes."

"Are you glad with such spying? Let's praise my hell. Deify me, flatter, squeal and lick with adulation. If you've so frantically wanted to be near."

"Why you've painted my role in so perishing colors. My modest shy participation is entirely sinless and shy."

"It's impossibly hard with your manners. Maybe now some things will be going more interesting." - Elena slightly has graciously got up and, having pulled her panties off, has playfully and smugly thrown this treasure in indifferent side of Anatoly Efimovich.

The latter has quite leisurely and calmly followed with own glance safely-landed wet trinket and remained wholly motionless.

"At least sniff for beginning, you should love such addictions."

"Like with cat, you are playing... What a fun is to fall into mockery, to abuse someone trustful, to come flooded with poisonous smirks and dishonesty, as if you're getting excited exclusively from lowness and only, as if you are obsessed."

"What a lover you are. An immense tragedy, not human. You're inept, sickly stupid, wrong."

"I'm fully ordinary, featureless and modest. I've only barely come in, but you've already sunk me into shame, in endless humiliations and reproaches. As if I'm damned, as if I'm leper."

"You say, you've only come in. So, linger for one half an hour. My boyfriend will come too, will smash your face in scraps and splinters. Such a fun will be priceless." Anatoly Efimovich has helplessly sighed and purposefully stared into void: "What a vile evil irony – so cheap and so aimless, cruel, stupid and sad. Misfortune. What a kind of lost world, what a fate do I have – dirty swamp, darkness, rubbish. It's disgusting and painful."

"Why you've fallen in silence? My heartfelt conqueror of soul." - has sneeringly and confidently asked Elena Mikhailovna: "As if you've filled full mouth with the water, you've so quickly calmed down, as deadly shot. Why are you speechless? Should I open the door and let your muzzle out?"

"Awkward meeting ..."

"But which one else can you perform? Don't annoy me, ill moron. Go away, till I let."

Anatoly Efimovich has indifferently risen, has approached closed exit and, having lowered own eyes, has obediently started to wait for door's opening, then has lifelessly gone outside. Has calmly gone downstairs, then taken one another couple of weak steps, slowed down, then inconsolably sighed and exhaustedly cringed: "So crappy plot, so disgusting. Each life is similar with night dreams: sometimes it's wished and full of sweet attractiveness, and sometimes – filled with coldness and sick tremor of fear. No escape from ill-fated reality, no way."

The hero has added own speed, turned the corner and then restlessly stomped into distance through broken old tract, with compassionate rich generosity thickly flooded with helplessly shivering, hastily fluttering foliage, damp and totally swollen from day slush night tearful rains, inseparable from last autumn, so immodestly stayed till the very postponed beginning of upcoming unfortunate winter. Everywhere just limitless sadness, deep wide numbness and drowsy confusion. Above landscapes is hanging faceless curtain of submissively weightless gray fog, enveloped deserted surroundings in random easy manner. All lines and contours are blurry, gently bordered with featureless veil, empty spaces are softly oblivious, depressed and calm and also fully lonely, all views are unpretentious and boring, disorderly and freely scattered by the sides, pale are is ruefully despondent, thickly closed by uneven and faded shy shadows. Silent town is insensibly careless, independent and murky. Atmosphere is feeble and frail, tints are scanty and meager, all is trivial, hollow, vain. No joy, no slight inspiration, no feelings inside. Fully nothing.

Anatoly Efimovich has exchanged rare meters of quarter and quite imposingly gone home. Matvey Grigorievich is already in there - is making tea and waiting for the owner of the dwelling, so generously sheltered him in. Appeared from the door Anatoly Efimovich is gloomy - unnaturally quiet, detached and fully lifeless.

"What kind of filth had caught your soul?" - predicting hopeless course of the recent events, has asked alarmed Matvey Grigoryevich: "As if you had returned from death."

"Worse ... Worse, my friend." - the hero has complained: "Such a low and disgusting procession befell, more than fatal, it can't be verbally depicted, but I'll still try to start descriptiveness..."

After these blurred words, Anatoly Efimovich has begun his disappointing story of past sharply unpleasant incident, so terribly egregious, blatant and flagrant, unacceptably vile, outrageous, painful and wretched. Having told all details and all aspects, the hero has helplessly sighed and involuntarily spreaded his hands: "All the story is said, experience of bitterness is immense."

"Such a context, of course, is entirely far from the being a gift, but theoretically tolerable too, offensive, harmful and insulting, but not over of measures, not over edge of inner limit. And if you want my personal reaction, then I’ll inform you of nice fact, that you had been a little bit a Hercules today, all own pettiness had hung this slutty mongrel on your shoulders. Was you bent under heaviness? Was you hunched? Was your weak spinal column sonorously cracked? On hundreds tiny splinters. If not – then nice. Forget this garbage, do not litter own soul. It has no janitors, by the way."

"But how to throw oneself in careless conditions – by one tension of will it's impossible. You can't remove all sediment from heart in one a moment."

"It's our weaknesses. Our inner lawlessness."

"I agree. This thing distinctly justifies so utter relevance and influence of Satanism: not the devil is strong, but each human is weak. Greatly weak. Weak and stupid, his essence is ridiculous and changeable. We go anywhere. Like a dog, and even with no help of leash, we stretch for every faint temptation. Or vice versa run away from fears."

"Fully true. We afraid to be dead, but not afraid to be entire fools. The last case is incomparably much worse. Much worse than all known plagues. Than any abysses and traps of current world. Believe, it's so."

"I believe with all power of trust. We grab the mind exclusively in moments, when it's lost. It’s so familiar for us to cry and try to bite the elbows. We feed us mostly just with them and only. Either get with no purpose amazed or shrilly weep by the similar reason." "Alas. Alas. Life's path doesn't guarantee you any final becoming smart holistic person, it also doesn't give you real gaining of due intelligence, deep skill or broad experience. And the most offensive painful thing is dark fact, that you easily able to become an extremely sick fool even being among of exclusively high mindful people. Any luck into essence is a degree of correctness and trueness in own interpretation of life's circumstances. Degree of favorableness in useful profitable coincidences and measure of kind pettiness of troubles. An amount of obvious miracle."

"Own degree of utopia. I've clearly understood you. It never will be really like that."

"But at the same identic time, nothing happens occasionally, no one thing in this world. We both are getting born and died, are both blooming and withering and are going to the heaven, as well as to the hell exactly not spontaneously. In such a way you can find your own person exclusively in some detoxification center, nowhere else."

"These philosophies, of course, are greatly deep and smooth, but such ones are not taught to console you or warm... This world is bad, it's so stupid and empty. Our current extinction is working so good, that do it mostly automatically."

"So it is. Into sieve you can bring sedimentary thicket, but not water, not liquid part - our world can preserve all past progress, but not past greatness, not own heights. Into absence of true generosity, no education will give mind. Our present reality is already provided with all, but no goodness is seen. Adversity and absolute contention. And endless emptiness in souls."

"Being's emptiness forces to rush, to stay active. And ones are filling it with greatness, but ones other - with dirt. All depends on the person."

"Everywhere one filthiness. Even deep into heart."

"But which unique exclusive features does this saint sphere really include? The most harmless safe thing you can get from a woman is her bunch of venereal diseases. Despairing exitlessness, being here and there, is squeezing right from everywhere. And, what's more wrong, this harsh world's viciousness looks for us seducive. No one of acquainted with shame will get ever connected with pleasure. And do not trust to tricks of life's conditions. Great resources, as usual, are embodying in life the most awful and terrible goals. And don’t worry for others - all of people are equal, each one of them is made of shit, the only question is with which sort of additional flavor."

"But how to guess and to predict, where you will meet with fatal swamp and fade."

"Anywhere of here. And at any of days and of moments. Predictability is also nothing else than akind of forerunner of errors: if your life has become understandable, then rather soon you'll stumble and get withered..."

"Quite consolable new, very calming... And most annoying awful thing is the fact, that all dirt and deception, in first turn, are concerning all maximally pure and immaculate spheres and matters - trusty love, saint fidelity, faith and deep empathy. They hurt you in most holy. It's utter sacrilege, that breaks all human times."

"It's new reality of being. The more precious coins are getting counterfeited first. Any primitive feelings at all don't need to be somehow substituted."

"All ideals are blurred and indistinct, entirely indefinite and faint – no obvious features, one endless vagueness and weakness."

"This is for safety. The clearer is border, the easier to cross. But in general, try to be sober: placidity is poison of right spirit, true philanthropy does not choose sentimental positions. Stay more hard, otherwise you'll be crushed."

"This is fatally painful... You don't know what to wait for. Grace and adversity are mixed." "It is equally easy to predict both great achievements and great troubles. Especially if you are not a scientist or confident predictor, but just an ordinary idiot and only."

"I agree. But it's also not easy to become an exceptional idiot too. It already requires some professionalism. For idiots such quality is fraught with soon quick death. In where to find reliably firm justification? At least, partial one."

"Mental gold is also quite materialistic. Life is far not eternal, all goodness can be really embodied exclusively in limited short way. So, look and try. You'll never will experience higher matters. And don't afraid to overdo - life is surely cyclical: if you're faster than time, then this life will quite instantly put you again back to finish. The more doubtful start you are having, the more tempting life's final you'll get. Just believe me."

"Where to catch any confident bliss? With help of what?"

"The brighter is your flame, the less smoke it produces. True stars don't soot. Look for correct and harmless phenomena. Truly useful and formative tools never have any features of damage. Just don’t be fooled by the beauty: even worst of bacteria can look nice into microscope, but such ones inevitably cause awful lethal pandemics with many millions of lives. People argue and seek. They consider that beauty is complex, incomprehensibly vague and strange. But, as fact, it's quite simple and easy. True beauty is the highest example of inner perfection. It very rare lives in soul. More often it's just physical and carnal. Beauty's prettiness can rather easily be densily combined with moral ugliness and dirt. Real beauty is miracle. But only if it's living into thoughts. Or deep inside of loving heart. Beware of beauty. And of pauses. Long standing near abyss inexorably causes quite insistent desire to step."

"I need to choose right way of thinking. Right ideology."

"Never do it, I beg. Each ideology has features of free creature - it enslaves you, captures as abyss. As grave."

"I have noticed myself, that consciousness is differing in dependence on thoughts. Sometimes you're getting great enlightenments, but sometimes - unforgivably stupid mistakes and eclipses."

"Each consciousness is similar with furniture: it's getting transported in disassembled state and only: from your one understanding till next one, you are usually staying as fool. You also have huge risk, that you'll never be rightly assembled again."

"So many downtimes fate has, so many volumes of harsh emptiness..." "Time tends to minimal intervals, it adheres to maximally possible compression, like matter of black hole. So, if you are having long delay, then earlier this adjourned event has been simply untimely."

"But how to come consoled with such a trouble."

"To be more mindful and attentive. If somebody will ask you to describe him a nail, you'll easily describe. But you'll forget to say of nail-head form. You'll be asked to continue your telling. And you'll cope. All is right, you’ve done well. But you haven't describe something else – the human head, in which one this damned nail had been hammered. You'll come instantly silent. You've missed the main. Don’t gravitate to things are nearby, develop force of mind and only. In most sweet and most interesting journeys we're going not by legs, please note."

"So, how to protect oneself..."

"At here we have a field of paradoxes. By the way, quite despicable territory. The more smart is a person, the more stupid and sorrowful fate does he have. It's a fact. Exclusively reliable and confirmed. The only thing - not documented."

"I ought to be in sadness all the time."

"So it is. Protection is entirely unreal. Drive away all, who have any doubts. Remember, parasites are clinging to host organism, not to similar individuals. Nits get glued in first turn to the geniuses."

"It really turns out, that the highest degree of your love to your God is your hatred to people. This, by the way, is getting born the question - can any hatred be for good."

"I agree. All is blurred. All we really have. You can distinguish enemy from comrade exclusively by color of his flag. We have no person for to love. Oneself and nobody else."

"But, according to lies of statisticians, this world is constantly developing and growing. In exponential sharp way."

"Exponential things don't carry any use, one inspiration. Their effectiveness stays near zero."

"I at all do not want to survive. I vice versa tend to grave. In ugly world, best place is next to exit."

"This world is made of sinking and unsinkable. If you're afraid of something wrong, then this shit will quite surely happen."

"All around - just anger and envy."

"Remember, envy is harbinger of respect, it's quite natural type of perception of being by any of the human nits."

"Into midst of them all no way to be saved, no evident road to paradise."

"Each right step can be made exclusively from correct right position. And our world is far from all of them."

"No understanding and no clearness of living. Of any of events and of world's path. And even of most primitive of aspects." "It is not possible to understand any madman with mind. Especially, if you are one of them. It's enormously difficult to analyze any overly smart complex person, but it's even more difficult to analyze an excessively stupid one: very primitive things have no logical and clear justification or at least any faint explanation, such ones are totally irrational and pointless, incalculably stupid and exceedingly harmful, insignificant, vain and rid of any chances of at least any use of own consequences. All of us are inside of this thick mental slurry."

"Where to get own identity?"

"Anywhere you want. Into ocean, each fish is a fish. Fish in aquarium is also the same fish. And even being into tin at the table of schoolboy, it still remains a fish. But, having got inside of soup, the last promptly loose such constant state. In such one it's a breathless corpse. Some a time your perfection does not require broad globality. It need one banal preservation. Preservation and minimal wealth. That's all."

"Mind and peace quite surely are mutually exclusive. And all of us are living in one life..."

"Life's road really is one. But turns are personally own."

"That is trouble... And so strange meeting can be brought time from time by such turns."

"That's right. All devils are primarily flting to soul's fire. And wings are not a tail, they never grow twice. Learn to travel through being. The road to happiness has no distinct signs. And be prepared for any paradox. The more simple is essence, the more dissimilarly it will be perceived."

"Where to rush? And how really long?"

"If this life has not given you any reward, then your battle is still going on. So, keep trying."

"But any rush is leading into errors, into abyss and only."

"All this is by the reason of predominantly sensual perception. But it is also entirely justified: collect all feelings in together, and you'll get a holistic depiction of world, but collect all of thoughts in together, and you'll get total nonsense. Get used to any flaws of humans, such ones are deeply under skin."

"World is difficult, alas..."

"World is highly mosaic. Its whole harmonious and integral boundless picture stays solely on countless amount of small accidents, of invisible coincidences and remarkably wide bright absurdities. At first glance all it seems fully stupid and greatly ridiculous, but at attentive second glance, after long observations, such a point of view is looking even more reliable. There are no chances, no true opportunities. For to get any real achievements you need to have some way, some path, appropriate for next implementations. Such paths are often twisted and confused. Fate does not tolerate straightforward boring movement. And all of wanderings are absolutely foggy – such ones don't give you any promises, any sure and evident hopes. Only endless uncertainty. All life is nothing more than depressingly long expectation, inconsolable, blurred and vain. It contains only murk. Murk and our lost souls. Quite sad association, after all." "World is sick, its strange tormenting path is fully dotted with thick chaos, with terrible impermanence of all. Current being is close to absurdity, it can be justified exclusively by rave, by deep delirium and utter imperfection. Reality is futile, wrong and ill. Its dark fate is unenviable, average. All the people are empty, daily life is entirely primitive. It's a swamp, a dead field and an abyss. Dirty bottomless pit. Huge, exorbitant, painful and hurting. You can only to lose. From exalted and delicate things till exclusively harmful and senseless. All feasibility is ruefully utopian. World is surely sick. Sick and wretched."

"Your thoughts are so close to mine."

"In pessimism all people are the same. Explain me better, why any luck is getting given us by so tiny portions? That we even can't feel its true taste."

"It is more prudent to catch any fish one by one - for not to break your fishing rod. All has some explanation. Even hardest delirium."

"So easy to get lost, to fade."

"Jealous vanity doesn't accept any nudity of being's meaningfulness – it in every of possible ways is swaddling any reason into lie, into immense harsh pettiness. And do it instantly and firmly."

"What is writing lifeline?"

"One guile insidiousness and only. Life does not lure, it only waits for your mistakes. For to give you self-guilt in addition. Than you're getting not only a victim, but also a great idiot and fool."

"We are led by oppression..."

"Oppression, weakness and addictions. No matter which ones - all of them are entirely equal, both religious, social, domestic or narcotic – anyway the same evil and misery."

"What a way to survive? Into immense vast world."

"World is huge, I agree, but it's filled with one fuss. So don't pay any real attention. Use all bad as a roadside, but not as road itself. Deny such harmful matters. And if to say of happiness – it works as thin spring ice: at the evening it's hard and you're easily walking by surface, but at next morning it will freely turn out in water." "Inaccessible, unachievable is any inward or outer greatness. There is part of processes, which ones are not supposed to get own finish, there are such paths, that never will be passed till very end. Apparently, the road, which is going from monkey to human is simply just the same."

"Life is different, mixed and dissimilar, it can easily have any status and form, the only question is from what it to assemble. With a human all works right the same."

"And after all, after every of steps, even after most little and harmless, are firmly standing awful painful consequences. All this instantly kills all your inner initiative."

"All consequences work as square of shadow - with proper lighting, such a thing can quite easily be much disproportionately more voluminous than the very initial object, that has dared to generate shadow's existence. Don't be afraid of any being's consequences. Be afraid of the evil ideas. Without them first ones aren't able to be born."

"No matter at all, how careful really you are. And no matter how fast you are rushing, anyway you'll finally become an outcast and only..."

"This is totally logical. Into crooked special mirror, the most ugly will look normal person."

"Amazing depth of contemplation. You promptly notice each detail."

"Just such ones are requiring most great broad attentiveness. All great things either perish and collapse exclusively by action of small things - lost screw-nut, having suddenly fallen away, immediately scatter all of parts, been united before."

"Tell me else - what ennobles us? What exactly, explain. If such thing is existing at all."

"What ennobles each person? Love and loneliness. Love allows you to rise to the highest of peaks, and loneliness alienates from mediocrity and primitiveness. The bricks of your self-building can be laid in two ways – you can expand the platitude of averageness, or to build endless tower of own individuality. And, please, remember one more thing - troubles never unite any souls on forever, sad such ones don't bring together on long time. Grief glue two people only on own period. Involuntary lashed to each other two dissimilar hearts will never mutually stick."

"You've convinced me, okay, there are no rules. Neither rules, nor evident norms. And no trust to commonly accepted."

"Any norms are first step to extremes. Don’t forget."

"Is understanding possible today? Isn't such one exactly utopian?"

"Well, let's try... What to tell me to you, if to do it most fruitfully. Drive away those ones, who are saying, that they understand you and feel or ones, who're saying you are good, stay away from them all, any human society is a bunch of sick vices and flaws, they are not able either to respect or to love, if they've chosen you, then you'll quite soon sadly found yourself chosen as a victim. Shy away from becoming a fool. Remember, gullibility and trustfulness are the hardest example of all vulnerability of human, so cunningly embodied and sculpted into our most sacred saint matter."

"It seems, we shouldn't look for the any of culprits or heroes?" "Exactly just like that. The game of fate from the very first start of own acting to the latest performers of play is purely and fully anonymous. And don't forget of being's guile: all life's tactics and tricks are mainly aimed at most frank and most worthy of people – the same fishnets are catching and capturing the most large and most weighty fishes, which are not able to escape through gaps of net's cells."

"Our present is wholly deplorable."

"The present is entirely deprived of any even partially tolerable barrier function. Separating your past from your future, it doesn't give true proper safety to any of these times. Any memory can be defiled, any future – come broken, plans - get spoiled. Neither things, which already are done, nor that things, which are only intended have no reliable chances of long-living and firm preservation or indeed fully endlessness well-being. All around has only unhappy involvement into total and strong omnipresent unlucky amorphousness, very vague and too unreliable, unsteady, blurred and chaotic – just that one, which, as fact, after all, is the only possible form of imputed existence."

"If to look into essence, even greatest and highest of things and events are exclusively foggy and shaky and, in poor addition, so helplessly rightless and weak..."

"All the forms and dimensions of globalism, from only purely social to wholly universal, in modest practice of this world are not more complicated and extensive than the simplest and easiest minimalism. Exactly any immense scale, no matter how huge and gigantic, can be with equal easiness quite instantly endowed with utterly detailed self-automation and with highest and strongest degree of own predictability and clearness, enslaved in frames of sure heavy constancy. This world, from every forest stone till the last of own countless galaxies, is uniformly straight and mathematical, entirely identical and utterly unvaried in structure. No even smallest difference at all, what a reference point you'll choose for own mental and soul development. Any truth can be only full, omnipresent, all-consuming and totally broad. If you are given to get mind, then neither place nor even time will ever be some weighty hindrance. Believe me, all can become subordinated. Exactly all, with no exception. As well as everything is surely explainable and willful."

"I agree, life can't be justified by scales or highest planing, all its flaws and iniquities, all troubles, pains and deprivations can't be forgiven or forgotten, or crossed out and written away, all such things are extremely unreal – anywhere, in any of worlds, and even deep in most enchanting concepts. No general harmony is in power to heal local tragedies. Ascending to whole universe and timelessness, you anyway will never answer to most simple reproaches - why someone is unfortunate or ill, why low society had been formed from last morons and freaks, from worthless rotten nits and madmen and how to give an end to all this horror. If our world is relevant and pointful from every atom till each star, from the smallest of ants till the greatest of scientists, if it's totally correct and logical, then such a world would simply not exist, at least in so nasty form. And if to say about mathematics, it was really funny and nice..."

"The behavior of any of crowds is solely determined by dispersion chaos, enslaved it. Any complex huge systems are surely identical and uniform. Having lost your uniqueness, you automatically sell your poor soul to hopeless statistics. And the last one is equal. Both for people and tiny molecules. And for miracles too."

"So heavy praises to statistics."

"Such ones are fully justified: the only law that functions everywhere is law of uniformness: any evil, as well as any kindness, are similar in own organization."

"If all things are so simple and so explicit, then it sadly turns out, that only you yourself and your previous stupidity are truly guilty fate's way."

"After all, all is clearly so. And any guilt is working, by the way, like a kind of cursed coat: it suits to any human shoulders, to any ones, except of your hopeless own."

"What circumstances to search for inspiration, where to look for such positive matter?"

"Any cases and circumstances are also requiring to have enough experience and mind, a smart one will quite easily turn any rubbish in evident plus, but a fool... You need to be more prompt, more quick – no running horse will ever get in shackles."

"And sometimes you are really rushing, so generously spending all own strengths, but you're stubbornly having no movement..."

"Just here you can see all unhidden destructiveness of the labyrinths - you've diligently gone the same duration of your way, but you've progressed not more than just a little. If you are running on the spot, then your long-suffering, cursed figure even partly aren't dragging to goals."

"And no prospects, no chances, no hopes, even weak..."

"All visibility of prospects is totally determined by one thing – by distance from your current life's position to the bottom: if you've not risen even slightly, then any evident horizons will remain far away from observing ability, but if you've flown directly upwards, then you'll quite broadly contemplate all your path from own birth the end of own century. So, sometimes, even getting much closer to goals, we are losing their view, right as well as all previous faith in their true feasibility. And don't forget, that thread of fate can be torn at each moment, and even at one step from sure finish."

"I know all this. I know such hopeless knowledge."

Have got silent, calmed ruefully down. And the evening has only started to gain own slow movement. And rather soon already murky midnight...

VII

The street is sorrowful and gloomy. The sky is filled with gray faint clouds. Into air is helplessly hanging cold and lonely autumn drowsiness. Inside of quiet and sad landscapes is unhappily frozen indifferent and mournful despondency. The day is promised to be dreary, the weather – to be wearisome and lifeless, and the time to be fully unhurried. No dynamics, no fun, no colorful shades. All is bound by harsh melancholy and boredom, widespread indifference and desperate oblivion. All is joyless and static. No wind, no people, no mood. Only vacuum – both deep inside and in around. One vacuum and bitterness. That's all.

Matvey Grigoryevich with calm and stenciled step is going through wide and vague street, occasionally looking at its sides and straightening old collar of own coat. At oblique chipped curbs is lonely heaping moist damp foliage. Near of fading horizon is meekly melting weary tent of veil, sadly whitish and sullenly pensive. In undistinguished drowsy houses are fearfully sparkling blurred windows, shyly closed with thin featureless shutters.

"The world is utterly unable to give miracle. Especially twice. This world is empty. Superfluously empty... And even vice versa - it's not empty, it's so immensely filled: filled with fuss and vain routine, with mediocrity and inferiority, mistakes and meanness, pettiness and fools. And in this abyss all we have to rot..."

The hero has dejectedly sighed. The day traditionally doesn't shine with brightness and goes aimlessly, relaxedly and smoothly. At calendar is Saturday - free time for walks, dark thoughts and deep depression. No worries, no goals and no plans. No interests too. No feelings. Rare thoughts are chaotic. There is only emptiness, grayness. Nothing more into meager addition.

About half an hour had passed. Matvey Grigoryevich has looked in one of taverns, in inside is unbounded vastness, in unbridled and calm atmosphere are sitting utterly diverse and motley visitors. Under sooty and shabby gray ceiling, are huddling thick pale puffs of smoke. Snow-white tablecloths are imposingly flaunting on tables, so elegantly sparkling in liquid faint darkness. At each corner are granite flower pots. Behind of low wooden rack are scurrying youthful pretty waitresses. Into heavy dim windows are hazed vertical glass. The leather-covered huge door is showing discreet small ornament. At the sides are volumetric statues. On one of walls is large Persian carpet. The hero has promptly looked around, has chosen one of tables and stretched out: "So, let's take one more look... What do we have at such a place? Fussy clutter, turmoil. Attractive vicious environment - dense mask, that gracefully conceals white spots of disappointment. My scraps of soul are flying into abyss, and I have no ways and no chances to collect all them back, but I want to believe, to keep hope, to faith in miracle and luck. I wish to get exactly rid of any rubbish. Of unsettledness, emptiness, fear. Moreover, there are only two real kinds of own fears: the first one for next future,and the second - for finished lost past, for probability to give it's image up. About tiny current moment we don't care. We're thinking purely in advance. We're afraid to lose things, that we even don't have. Or to forget events, that never will become repeated. And time is just an avalanche. Incomparable, hungry and bottomless. It can't be somehow restrained. And the person in front of its power is not much stronger than sand grain. Beliefs, or weaknesses, or sharpen vectors of vain fashion are so easily taking away from own sanity and poisoning defenseless ghostly mind. All of attempts are temporary, blurred. After all, nothing holds you at heights so good as clear memory of bottom. As nothing strengthen inner faith as firm as sure coincidence. Our God on his throne, in a fact, is still anyway workable due to last one and only. This is utterly true. Even saint omnipotent life's contrast will not ever save our lost souls. We so easily return own road to past troubles, we're so sadly and awfully ready to accept any miserable matter. We have no shade of generosity, of inner beauty, correctness and evident prosperity. Indeed exalted person will harmlessly participate in orgies, in dismemberment, torturing and agony. But one inwardly fallen will even pray with endless filth, will save a child with soul full of rot, will heal doomed leper with harsh pusillanimity. No things are absolutely good or absolutely bad. There very different things - available, desired and compelled. Don't mix reality and dreams. Each dream is mirror of the soul. Our plans and intentions are in highest degree reflecting truth of own humanity. You can be lying under the bridge, but think about something perfect, but also can, becoming married, be thinking of betrayal. There are no guarantees. No stability. Only hopeless swamp. Swamp and helpless lost soul into moving to bottom. That's all. This world is incorrigible and dead. You can't cure it, can't save. Only finish. Push away all the globe from its axis. It will be ideal decision. Even peerless."

Soon this mental excursion has been suddenly broken - an unknown pale-faced lovely woman with tender sunken cheeks, juicy lips, pleasant figure and mysterious splendid appearance has approached the hero and hesitantly started conversation, as long-awaited dear guest: "Are you also spending your evening? Such ones, as well as each of mornings, are never looking nice and good. You’ve also come to get distracted. Like me, not wanting to give up to own oblivion. Weak bonfire of soul requires to receive maintenance. Even death is much better than loneliness. If to belief, that seekers always find, it will be so fine to live." "With own hopes to get warmed as with ice – the same volume of use. What to expect... Among of ones, who voluntarily has gone in hugs of traps, any searchings are wholly discredited, exactly blackened – from the very young start, but for to dare to extinguish own soul there are no sufficient strengths. The end of world has not been somehow announced exclusively officially, and, in fact, it already is going – just all-consumingly and strictly irreversibly. For true goodness and kindness at here there are both no sources and no points of sale. All you may – just to drown into routine and only. No matter, in which a way to combine unsettledness and losses, you'll never get any marvelous idyll. The world in own complexity is equal to molecule. And the time has lost weight till own skeleton too. What is true, what is aimful... Everywhere is only randomness. The universe has totally expired, has got rotten and rancid. What to say of ideas, of reliable structures. All has already helplessly collapsed or will do it in matter of days. You can't meet something good, even wandering here all the century. No integrity, constancy, harmony – no. There is only swarm of huge troubles. The ones, we're strongly holding for."

"I'd like to choose pure randomness as helper."

"Such thing is surely unable be working, it’s too mindless idea to search entirely lost ones and to cling to their vain useless fates. And I myself is must damaged and broken – completely, irrevocably and fully."

"What kind of doom has happened with your destiny, if you are having neither light nor even grayness, only darkness and black endless murk..."

"I have collapsed, have got torn in small pieces. Since that sad time my star has been extinguished: without any living way, you have no need in guiding objects."

"Doomed, dismal ones don't have demand in talismans, I know." "For funeral all music is just secondary, formal. If they will want, will bury you so deep, that no moles will ever dig. And me myself have been already even sprinkled with thick soil. So, no variants at all. And if to start describing of my pain, such one will meekly occupy multivolume memoirs, but if to say as brief as only possible, then I need to report just one thing, that I had very sweet mutuality – greatly bright and impeccably crystal, unbelievably deep and exalted, not especially long and not full of abundant amount of happiness, but so immensely valuable, flawless and holy, so startlingly exorbitant and strong, like the highest of any existing obsessions, like some blissfully tart paradise, embodied in modest earthly being, like something after which there is only absolute emptiness... " - Matvey Grigorievich has got completely silent.

"Not every live is getting spent for good, I know, but you at least quite objectively had so much precious fact of this boundlessly priceless saint touch to own miracle, to the limits of heavenless, packed in lifetime inner paradise, where inside of your joint souls' alliance, right among of deep feeling of greatness, there is nothing extra but happiness Endless happiness, goodness and joy, creativity, mirth and sincerity, total frankness and love, that one, where every moment, every superfluously delightful common second are bringing only awesome harmony and bliss, where all of tones are written in white color, where vast expanse of affectionate, sweet gentle abyss is temptingly embracing two pure hearts and leaving them completely out of all reckless and purposeless rampage and lowness, from which one there is nothing to take, only dirt. Reality is only a tool. A tool of violence and meanness, dark arena for harsh humiliation, for despair and endless huge losses, for cult of faults and mental illness. It's not you wish to get as perpetual permanent abode, not you want to deliver to neighbor or friend. Such place is good for torments and decay, for all ugly and empty, for duplicity, anger and cynicism, not for life. It’s world's bottom. The same, below which one is fully nothing. Hearts are languishing, feelings - devaluing, thoughts - becoming more shallow, minds – promptly rotting. Nowhere to go. This is only agony, murk. Everywhere, in any of places..." - the interlocutor has hopelessly extended.

"All we have is embraced by deep tragedy, all of souls are constrained by hard anguish... You are utterly right. Where are you from?"

"From life's void, the same as lost you..."

"What a great immense source – it had given fast birth both to world and to us, surprising productivity and speed. What has connected you with void? With current doom and naked pain." "My fate is similar with yours." - the stranger has forlornly sighed.

"This matter is familiar and known, till utter sufferings and horror. Into essence of life is thick darkness and thorns, gloom and sadness. Reality is bottom of all vile. We're unable to get second birth, so all we need to share life we have. And what about your life's trouble? Describe own poor rueful plot."

"Just as heartfelt as yours, but without of parting, without losing any partner. Just endless void and harsh loneliness. And desire to find frank warm soul – close to mine, incorruptible, sinless and cherished. Simple dreams and not more. Extremely pure and fully honest, but so ridiculous and vain."

"I've been entirely the same. And then I still have truly found. Then have lost. And now am tormenting. That's all the story – unhappy, dark and wholly awful: at first you look, then get, then lose, then rot. That’s reality, horrible place. And you yourself still will breathe some short time, until your agony will also firmly come."

"To suffocate much prettier and better. As quick as only can be possible."

"I will not strangle you, don't ask. I'd so like to be deaden myself – to step from window, as variant of exit. The only thing, it's narrow and low, not spacious enough, as I can see. I'm afraid to get stuck just at start."

"Let's drink tea... As a kind of salvation."

"But what a sense, if it's not poisoned?"

"At now even usual and simple shows single bitterness and only. So, will we order?"

"If you so much want, then just do it. I will not drive you out anyway, lost souls shouldn’t be offended."

Have called the waiter, made an order. The heroes have stared at each other, then slowly continued own talk.

"Where did your path get broken down? I'd like to hear it once again." - the hero has asked.

"It has never been broken, but always has been going just by side, not by road, tormenting, howling all the time. But my soul was staying alive. Was calmly waiting for some hope. And now I'm here. Both fully stupid and unhappy. And wholly ownerless, as always. Worthless, vain."

"Someone has understatement, someone has total silence at all, we are all victims somehow or other, one thing - in different degree. Small shreds of rare joys are unable to wrap you in happiness."

"Luck is utopian, I know. I only want to become truly needed. To find myself at someone's fire. Even if at already extinguish."

"This world is cold. It’s a sin to be warmed. All are lost. All are pointless. No one will protect you from abyss. Life is rotten and bad. Dark and dreary. And utterly disgusting, after all."

"Where can I join me to joy? In which abode..."

"Nobody will call, nobody will answer... So let’s go back to your ideals - what does your mean as highest treasure? Describe these vague blurred matters."

"Deep honesty and rightness, light of trust - most affectionate, true and mighty to reject all griefs. Are such things able to exist... Within mean framework of lost present. For me just this is the highest of miracles, the most priceless and great. I'm looking for sincerity, for unity of heats, for similarity and peace. For harmony and tender intercourse between suffering souls."

"You're outlandish, you're unique - as a pearl in an abyss. It’s not easy for you to be here. You have to suffer and endure..."

"I can’t calm down without doing some attempts, without getting own involvment. It’s not for me, not for my temper."

"Such quality is useful, by the way, it is ruling this world. You have initiative. Amazing."

"The last one brings me no result."

"But it's able to warm for a moment."

"For a moment... Not more."

"Life is so... Vain and evil."

"And scanty into any place."

"All is so, you're right."

The conversation has continued own going, and closer to the end of second hour, the heroes began to say goodbye. Into role of companion has turned out Marina Valerievna, shyly insisted on writing down her address and on sharing with own - into order to fall into silence more rare and to be in together more often. They both have parted with each other with firm presence of strange sure sense of own immense affinity, equal warmth and profound repose – the qualities, of course, utopian and blurred, but very great and totally exalted and even delicate in terms of satisfaction. Matvey Grigorievich has trudged back to home, and Marina Valerievna has gone to wander by embankment - despair also need to walk, also calmly and even with ease. And then to home too. In emptiness, in void.

VIII

Overfilled with first snow-ness calm day of Anatoly Efimovich was going rather slowly and usual – with boringness and meek submission to own averageness, foreshadowing in next faint elongation neither miracles nor shocks or tragedies. The hero was routinely wandering around, examining pale neighborhoods and landscapes, so much eagerly blown by pacific fresh wind, like some sophisticated yog, habitually quiet and modestly detached from life's events. There was neither sadness, nor will, only muffled emotional mash of faint weakness and futile soaked dumbness, diligently enveloped and enslaved by familiar inner depression, successfully delivered most stable disappointment and sorrow. Time was crawling as well as a turtle, land pictures were unvaried and dim. Into distance - impassable grayness and faded featureless horizon. All outlines - indistinct, hazed and smooth, all expanses – entirely lonely, liquid air - enjoyably fresh. Anatoly Efimovich is gladly having no hurry, is humbly trampling cooling soil and periodically looking by the sides. All the city is utterly sullen. Sad, abstracted and closed. Sky is rueful and immensely bottomless.

At simple architectural ensemble of three benches, the hero has noticed one more girl - mysteriously restless, brave twisted. There were no sure intentions to heed to voice of rationality, therefore the next step has been taken just forward.

"Good nice day..."

"For me it's neither good nor nice. What a for did you come? There is no one you can legally cling to?"

"Since which time is aggression so trendy? I just have greeted you and only."

"What source of optimism you're giving - shabby muzzle, disgusting and nasty. Are you a lover of own worthlessness? Such ones are popular at now."

"If to push everyone into dirt, then you'll remain among of ugly lepers. You rejection is stupidly harmful. Why are you so? What just for?"

"For not to be surrounded by brainless fools as you, for not to spoil own life and to make it protected from idiots."

"But if to say of normal personalities, do you think all such ones are already unreal?"

"You certainly is far from such a type. Any moron like you even partly will never be named with so unique and rare term."

"And you yourself is just a goddess, an absolute pure gift?"

"For to get sure you are stupid, there is no need to obtain of tree heads. Having started to tell total rubbish, you'll never say me something wise."

"Then what from your supreme positions, so much critical ones, is important in this life, what serves as main and dominant world's purpose?"

"Am I your personal enlightener or what? or something personal? Do not spoil my mind? I have told you - get off. I don’t intend to speak with you, that's all. Leave me now and go away. Your person is uninteresting, sick."

"Am I not suitable, you're thinking..."

"Stomp away, drive you out right now. Or you're entirely a fool and still have plans?"

Anatoly Efimovich has drearyly cringed and, having sadly waved his hand, turned and walked into distance.

"What's wrong with current actuality... Any meeting is small inner tragedy. Either I’m so poor, or this world has already gone crazy... Utter trouble in any of days. She has emptied me even worse than devil."

The hero has assuredly rejected ill idea of next seeking walking and frantically started own way back: again to own apartment's door - the best curtain from world. And the only place you can get truly hidden.

IX

In nondescript, slightly crowded interior of Matvey Grigoryevich, are sitting two quiet persons - the hero himself and haphazardly added Marina Valeryevna, very shyly and timidly glanced to his abode. Their fully cautious, quiet speech, insinuatingly embedded in tuneful, pensive melancholy, meekly spreaded by gloomy and doleful room with a languid and malleable cover. Peaceful time of warm unity is sweet and tartly tender. Behind of humid trembling folds of thin watery curtains is glowing breathless, faceless city, bleak and gray and not rainbow-colored, dissolved in dense oblivion and rue. In translucent hazed square of window are gradually shivering wet branches, old, angular and frozen under ice.

"All the fate by itself is never-ending wanderings and searchings, woeful way through torments in role of hopeless pilgrims. We slowly grave ourselves. It can't continue long. Why all is so and what for..."

"And what for is this world? Who will answer... Its construction is greatly impractical, meaningless - involved in deep absurdity with every own detail. But we still live, not bright and rich, not colorful, but live. Our path is unsteady and stupid, but some people still tell us to value its road, especially those ones who are religious."

"They are even more low and disgusting. Even worse than devil and sinners. Not inside of religion is holiness, not in vain ceremonies and rites."

"I agree with all mind. So, what is life – one demon on the other and with devil in pair. Any face is a muzzle, any heart – garbage can. All salvation in staying noose - the last escape from any cases."

"If it will be in need – we will do, will squeeze lost necks in such embraces. It's not too difficult, as fact. Anyway, for survival no reasons."

"I agree, staying here is a torment. All is given – just absolute apathy, in any hypostasis of vain earth, all is petty and perished, fussy, fruitless and low – that is all."

"This feeling doesn’t let my person too. I see the world as some caricature, as ugly mockery, as global room of fear, as torture, dreary nasty swamp, hateful bottom and hell. Any people deserve only contempt. Any road – rejection and pain. Any thoughts - sharpen fear. All I want – just most prompt self-destruction. I'm so tired of endless enduring. I'm so sick of this vicious shit!"

"Here, for every life's hour, we have to get free glass of milk – as compensation of world's harm."

"I am afraid even milky broad sea will never make my soul cured. It's so much difficult and hard even simply to come free of thoughts, and to refresh own mind or feelings is unreal at all."

"All the soul has burned out, has transformed into dust."

"All the consciousness too."

"And all fate."

"And all fate..."

Have got silent. Lonely glances has stopped, then has crossed. Silence. Silence. All the fate lies ahead. All the fate, all life-road. Inconsolable, rueful and empty. The purest tragedy and only. X

As we know, the mood after firm disappointment, especially if such one was repeated, is not too optimistic and inspired. That is why Anatoly Efimovich was also either mentally and sensually empty, extremely apathetic and depressed, sitting purely motionless and with best lifelessness of spiritless wax figure forlornly looking at landscape into foggy pale window. Outside is just coldness and longing: vast deserted surroundings and dwellings, painstakingly enveloped and enclosed with opaque thick veil of whitish-gray reflective mist. Everywhere is dead desolation, numb shrouding by minor melancholy and all-consuming senseless disappointment. Along of lowlands and corners are loppy flocks of shapeless shadows, monumentally clothed into viscous silence and scattered in random pointless way. At careless and modest faint horizon, are heavy silhouettes of languid tasteless views. In humble sky - restrained vain clouds.

"Here we are." - has sighed the hero with sadness: "She has mixed me with shit. Almost so... The main great thing is not to get surrendered - not to be like all others: completely humiliated and harshly humiliating. The main thing is to stay outside, to stand far from the life. What’s weighty here... What we really have... Just emptiness and dirt, endless fuss and gray averageness, deep mediocrity and sins. They don’t live, they mostly only exist, they all are forced and wretched. Reality is ruled by widespread ordinariness – low routine vanity and primitively simple daily flurry. What purposes it's for... People are nothing more than an expendable material, cannon fodder - petty, stupid and sick, angry, useless and hollow. Are they able be somehow suitable? The whole world can be easily built exclusively for simple combination of two souls, sincere, frank and fully loving, for two high ideals, estranged from stupid crowds, from incurable humans and universe. Any people are futile consumables. And all of them are utterly afraid, that at one poor day will be sudden huge shortage and they all will be hurriedly sacrificed. Truly valuable great and unique personalities are never getting written off, they are staying preserved from above. And they have no troubles, no coincidences. In any case, as long as they are needless. Identity is cloudy and strange. The more weighty you are, the less support you're getting from around. Relations with each miracle are basically freaky and exotic, incredibly fragile and unforeseeable. They are so simple to destroy and so unreal to repair. And even having surely corrected all of obvious flaws, you'll inevitably get stuck at many others – less sharpen and remarkable at first. You can't get rid of all mistakes, can't eradicate them on forever. This determines their absolute permanence. But at the same dejected moment slick and marvelous fate fulfills own brilliant ideas with so astonishing huge speed and awesome accuracy, so much easily bringing or similarly scattering apart, giving chance to survive or vice versa turning into dust. After all, it should have some clear aim. Not only people take own risks, life also get great mindless risk by making bets our being and building vague expectations and vain hopes. Our clerical office of heaven is similarly staying onto edge. All of powers are also weak. Such ones are omnipotent very rare. It's so easy for them to cut off any process, but not to sculpt and to create. Kindness does not develop and blossom on ugly rotten soil of modernity, only fades and dissolves, disappears from souls and minds, from heart searchings and ventures. What remains... Only emptiness, grayness and flaws, abundant sins and their owners. Reality is deep and nasty swamp. Total bottom and hell. Exactly miserable and crooked. What to do... Just to live, to endure. As well as stupid purposeless ancestors and hopeless, meaningless descendants, what's more sad. In around is wretchedness, hell. Hell on earth. For all who are alive. Just punishment. Not less." The hero has sorrowfully sighed, reluctantly got up and, having slowly gathered, gone out.

Outside is profuse lavish snow. In monotonous and tired empty street, enshrouded in darkness and harsh coldness, are quite peacefully swarming prompt, fussy pedestrians. Dark mournful area is staying quiet and gray. Into distance are patiently yearning in haze faint and vague andscapes, calm and gloomy. Deep agony and apathy, depression and strong pain are everywhere. As well as sadness and thick murk.

Anatoly Efimovich has slowly turned to local public room for dinner – location, very poor and unfixably smelly and vivid.

In rather spacious and long unlightened room, are standing three firm dozens of broad tables in pairs with heavy oak benches. No tablecloths, no trays - nothing useless at all. At far end of the hall there is sharing point - small semicircular window with pocky face of fat and reddish cook. At here, for couple of voiced coins, you can easily get own bowl of viscid tasteless soup - thick and fragrant. There is also bread and soft crackers. Even pies as a present - with liver or potatoes. On weekends are pancakes. In addition is tea – quite bitter and disgusting, but carefully mixed and so perfectly black. Most often people are just swearing and gladly beating own faces. But they do it with part of intelligence - with kind of beauty and of grace. In some aristocratic, proud way. Great feelings grow from low, fact.

Anatoly Efimovich is estranged, entirely upset and absolutely dismal and indifferent.

"Give me portion of soup." - he has angrily muttered and strictly stared to the cook, hatched out from narrow window.

"So, what exactly do you need? Am I a shaman for to guess."

"Since when we've started to obtain once with several breeds of so precious soup?"

"We're expanding one-selves, we are growing. Assortment and service, as you see. In best of European manners."

"And what varieties do we have?"

"Two sure ones - with peas and beetroot. You can even take out some coin and flip it for to choose."

"I will prefer to throw it in your face. Give me one, that's with pea. And a pie, that's with liver. To the pie pour me tea."

The cook has started ringing with tin dishes.

"Take the money, as gift. I've put there one more coin – save the last one for difficult day." - has extended Anatoly Efimovich, then has taken the order and unhurriedly gone to free seat.

Still having occupied own legitimate half of modest meter of the table, the hero has extended tired legs and clung to tempting plate. The brew is truly great and noble. Both viscous and hot. Pure beauty. Belly's joy.

Atmosphere is normally fussy, nimbly prompt and inspiringly vivid, motley crowd is simple and low, time is lazy and languid. All is usual. Sure rest, even pleasure.

Soon, after several of moments, some unfamiliar tall lady with brightly pinkish poppy face and an average length of own hair has approached one nearby bench. For view of inexperienced eyeball she seemed to be about four of decades old. Excited by apparent inner gap, the lady has quite boldly and intentionally crept up to one of visitors and then sat down on his knees: "Pick up so lovely stranger. I'm charming. I'll console all your flame. All your pains and all sorrows."

"Get out, witch! Or I'll smash all your muzzle right now."

The woman has got up and promptly moved to other vacant knees: "Be a gentleman, please, don't leave in oblivion and sadness."

"What a filthy and low lamentation... It’s time to go just away." - Anatoly Efimovich has taken rest small part of pie, grasped in palm and then firmly trudged out.

"So miserable act... The one is full Gertrude of own flesh and the other is moron and nit, moral freak and dump scoundrel. And all of this is public, is for show. A nightmare itself. I was lucky with previous times – at least, I've been offended one-on-one. Such abundance of love is also not for good. Rotted matter, lost humans."

The hero has humbly looked around and finished taken pie: "Now I'm free to go home. From global ugliness away."

XI

On caressed by free fussy blizzards street, there is far not crowded. All of colors are meekly dissolved into silence, shades are simple and calm. Light frosty wind is fresh and friendly. With great diligence crumpled snow is still neat and entirely white. Thinned blurred sky with grayish liquid clouds is wrapped by dim and tender shawl of unpretentious dense haze. Habitually hopeless dark surroundings, completely dotted with long veil, are carefreely motionless and thoughtful.

Matvey Grigorievich and Marina Valerievna are leisurely and shyly go ahead – through alienated, peaceful park. Atmosphere is weak and relaxed, conversation is quiet, mood is usual. In both souls, as well as at street, is languid permanent depression.

"What our life is going for, I’m once again thinking of this matter." - Marina Valerievna has sighed: "After all, you get warmed just in such rare meetings and only. You come to life exclusively by case, from time to time and very briefly."

"All should have certain evident sense, explanation and reason. But I hardly believe into such ones. Especially in good. The world is cruel and dejected, indifferently cynical and vain. Such one is not not accustomed to stability, to any logic or high aims. It's not addicted to such things. Any smart sober person very fervently wants to get out of here. In any shelter and location. But they live, live at here..."

"It has own way by will of trouble, as well as many other things - from meetings to world wars. We all are pets of hopelessness and sorrow. There are no prospects, no clear opportunities. Degree of fortuity and freedom are not close - in truly probabilistic system there are no rules and no meanings. Any people’s decisions are made exclusively by fate. Our total worldview is just a simple sediment of way, of ideas inspired by living, it's inexcusably subjective and too useless. We can only to wait and to guess, to go through dim and ghostly road, to wonder and to make mistakes." "Fate's manners are unbearably disgusting. But I secretly want to believe..."

"We're going into abyss, you and I. You - by one track, and I - by neighboring, entirely the same. Don't dream, for us it's fully wrong. Clothes of fate are not tight, but it’s not easy to undress. You can't reject what is prescribed."

"I agree. Any hope is too vague, any chance, any glow. And it's not clear what you have – a long-awaited brightened exit or simple lightened deadlock."

"All good is just an unexplored part of bad. All is poisonous, crooked."

"We all are too much optimistic. Any human is so, no matter how hard he'll be punished, even moved onto guillotine, deaden, anyway till his head hit by floor, he has no shadow of believe in own end."

"I completely agree. Too seductive are hopes. There are two great troubles - trust and passion for mercy. Any kindness is just self-destruction and only - most effective painful its way."

"Yes, I know. There is no faith to the world. To its roads and deft circumstances. All is fatal - from magic to science. Ones, who've saved today, tomorrow will trample with great pleasure."

"So it is. The tragedy has place at road. There is no detachment from such one. Nowhere. And even in paradise."

"There's nothing for hope, no reason."

"Any hope is running - either timidly rescuing or harshly attacking, from something terrible and wrong, or to something desired and precious, each hope is just a kind of compensation - for internal deep discomfort, it's adaptive and vain."

"True hopelessness is also quite romantic. The thicker is the gloom, the brighter are the stars."

"You are surrealist. That's nice."

"All natural is rid of any shame, dreams too..."

They have exchanged with short shy glances. Their voyage has continued oneself.

XII

The road from work is average and stingy, although also so sacred and warm. Anatoly Efimovich is calmly going by its route - without will or firm participation, meekly glancing around and unhurriedly breathing with cold, condensed air. Lifeless quarters are creeping along, rare carts sliding by, unremarkable faceless pedestrians are flashing one by one. All is filled with oblivion, thoughtfulness, grief, daily routine is gray and indifferent, pale familiar frames are unhappy and faded. No mood. No plans. One despondency.

"I have to go to bazaar..." - the hero has advised oneself and, having promptly outlined the shortest route, has gone in needed plain direction. And once again one emptiness and dullness, impersonality and murk.

The bazaar is not crowded. All counters are scarce. All visitors are smooth. Tired workers are slow.

"Cabbage looks as at burial." - has inwardly concluded Anatoly Efimovich: "Clean and neat, but entirely tasteless and withered. It will not climb in mouth even forcibly. Potatoes are the same."

Soon the hero was called by the stranger.

"Tell me, where is the exit?" - some unfamiliar, plump woman, pale-faced and pitifully tired, has looked inside his eyes in waiting for relief.

"I have to be at now more suspicious." - has decided Anatoly Efimovich and held out in cold hopeless voice: "Right there - behind of last thick columns. If you so want – I'll see you off."

"If it’s not difficult for you."

"Then let's go."

"Okay." - the lady has agreeably smiled and wandered ahead for Anatoly Efimovich.

"And it's the talisman of freedom, broad way out – the one you have been asking for."

"You are so helpful, so humane."

"You're also great possessor of humanity. Of tenderness and kindness of inside."

"You confuse me..."

"Not on purpose, believe."

"I'm shying anyway." - the woman has got silent and timidly extended: "It's apparently joyful with you..."

"Are you also alone?" - has asked Anatoly Efimovich.

"Yes, alone..."

"I’ll buy some useless things and will come back. If you want, you may wait."

"Yes, I will."

The hero has returned to poor grocery and, after couple of short minutes, has been standing at previous place with gastronomy-filled huge bag.

"Have you already got equipped?"

"All is like that, and even more than needed. So, let's start own way?"

"Just with pleasure."

They've joined hands and stridden step by step. Peaceful road is calm, tender dialogue is gentle, thoughts are mutual, calm. Soon they've reached local square. The lady has got gladly introduced as Elizaveta Kirillovna. She has asked Anatoly Efimovich for his address and promised to gift visit, if it'll be possible to manage with own shyness. The silhouettes has parted. The hero has sighed and suddenly has felt an unforeseen unknown inspiration.

"You are so awesome, earthly routes." - Anatoly Efimovich has sighed again and sadly glanced at watch: "And again back to home..."

Again.

XIII

Behind of low window pane is slowly going snowy evening. Matvey Grigoryevich is sitting with Anatoly Efimovich in mutual meek spending of free time. They are brewing cheap tea and quietly making peaceful conversation. Atmosphere is friendly and hospitable, words are easy, vivid dialogues are deft. All the talks are devoted to being.

"Look around. Just look of you and get feared. This world is wretched, it's elementarily miserable and fruitless, irrevocably pointless and lost, vain, ridiculous, mindless. It's hollowed and destroyed not just in cover, not only externally, but also in inside – ideologically, deeply. It's distorted and rotten, disgraced, its life is utterly inglorious and meager, oppressed and useless, aimless, dead."

"And what's worse, this absolute tyranny is so much powerful and so authoritative over our living." - has remarked Anatoly Efimovich: "Life is wheel, huge and stopless, and all of people are too small, too much faint in its shackles and fetters. And there is nothing for to do with this poisonous matter..."

"To endure and only, to tolerate all time. And we've got masterfully used to such a process, got totally adapted to this way. Human brain is enormously patient to madness: such an insanity is playing in around, but only few of us got crazy."

"Very funny statistics, I see. Even rather impressive. But it doesn't deny global hopelessness."

"So it is. We are dying. Humanity can calmly be protected from any awful thing but not of wrong, pernicious itself. Our finish is not so far."

"Our fate is quite pitiful, wretched. Human's role is entirely modest. Any human is working as dog: within of leash it will tear you in pieces, and if somehow more far it'll just bark and not more. We burst with all of might, but anyway still stay with no result. With such trends we'll have no survival."

"Such one is not so necessary here... All of things our world does with us, it first of all is doing with oneself. But it's indifferent to any own future: it can equally easy and free both develop and die, fly and crumble in splinters, wilt and blossom. There are only coldness and dogmatism. Endless shackles and traps."

"No dogmatism is surely straightforward, its moving cannot be controled, all depends on the subjective, inner reaction, on personal experience and views, on measure of awareness and values — on individual responses, skills and features of each subordinate life's victim."

"I agree, the role of mind is immensely exorbitant, but single understanding is also not enough for real happiness. The idea of chaos' submission to thoughts is enormously wished, but equally utopian and vain." "This, perhaps, is for something better: chaotic processes don't need in any supervisory high organs, their stability is incomparably more firm than any others. We have arguments for mind. The last one only ruins. And not a swamp itself is armful, but its blurred coastline. So, out of weakness, no confusion is dangerous here. We have to fight and to endure, not to look at the scale of world's madness, we should be able to resist and contradict."

"This is true, but contacting with abyss and only, you can’t grow up idea of eternity. Such a foundation gives just devastation."

"I agree, outside of own positive sure experience, desirability of negative decisions is almost undefeatably alluring. In order not to suffocate, you have at first to come refilled with air. In order to survive own humiliation, one must preserve some memory of good, of past experience of greatness. Any harm and perniciousness, which are perceived by someone after glory, will be endured much more smoothly than initial lowness and meanness, where you are having no pristine breath of air, so helpful into time without oxygen. To be equipped with priceless skill of informational protection is much more needed than to eat. Dirt and grief are at every of steps. If not to blossom, they will crash."

"Fresh sharpen memory of beauty protects much better than guard dog. But no difference, no matter how you're hidden, no matter how ardently and fully you are relying on past flight, you can't get rid of sudden painful longing, can't get holistic rescuing peace."

"The taste of pain and humiliations is too fatal - each one, who has been living as a victim for long time, if it will not be stopped, will one a day become much worse than own tyrant. This is firm sure fact."

"All the world is not more than a swamp. And such strange similarily of fools, as a harmful and painful result, is gradually building hopeless line of glodal vanity and madness."

"And what's more tragic that this abyss quite strongly forms new daily life - environment on which depends all fate, all prospects, chances and all future. And what you'll do – meekly drown or float: in mercurial bath it's not easy to sink, as well as take long swim inside of helium." "Then tell me, how not to die, not to get disappeared and lost... What principles and postulates to follow?"

"Take as a rule one single simple thing: the concept of tap dance - even if you have taken step back - by poor chance or force, then right instantly do two steps forward, correcting past positions you have lost. Don't be afraid of losses or omissions: eclipse does not diminish star itself, it only limits visibility. Do not trust either feelings or thoughts. Empiricism is utterly unstable."

"I agree, it's primarily needed to protect your own head – in first turn from wrong thoughts and decisions. The worst thing, that can be with each person is own hopeless mental obsession, which one can be determined only by idea: both devil, god and harsh cold nihilism in essence are not than just ideas – no matter primitive and small or deep, voluminous and prudent, but anyway so powerful and risky. Do not stop taking care of head – of mental part, not of purposeless hairy. Sane mindful person, straight and sober, even being with crashed broken cranium is dying as a smart and worthy, but person blurred and deceived by vile duplicity and hoax will stay as fool with any safe and pristine skull."

"We impose all these terrible fetters by will, voluntarily. We so love such mental traps. Seeming volume of room is totally determined by interior, not by obvious size, as well as human vague mind is constantly determined by experience. And the last one is correct not often."

"I agree once again – true fool will easily astray without any forest. But world is too insidious and tricky. The deeper is life's swamp, the more harmless it looks. All of dangerous spheres seem entirely safe."

"Here functions our mental imperfection, our lack of free promptness and readiness for any complex, difficult solutions: any multidimensional spheres and shades are nothing more than simple combination of usual components and tones, which are not so predictable for guessing. This truth is rather understandable. But almost never opened for perceiving."

"Then what helps to be smart? In dense surrounding of fools."

"Experience of previous life-way. Such one like kind of priceless sieve divides all things on useful and on harmful from the, on right and bad, on purposeful and windy, on eternal and faint and short-living, experience is excellent barrier between amentia and genius subtext. Experience is absolute great gift, pure insight and huge treasure. But this world is so bad, that even priceless last one is often fully powerless and needless." "We're waiting for predictable clear spices. Cynicism, hypocrisy and dirt, which are flavored with mercy, compassion and ruth, are making you entirely confused. As fact, duplicity at all is not a human feature. It's too confusing, too much puzzling. This poisonous and mean characteristic in first turn is belonging to devil, it is not natural for humans. It leads us to deadlock. Such one contains some volume of duality, some internal pernicious splitting, traditionally hidden under mask. Any cunning is principally kind of mental illness, which one contradistinction to all other equivalent psychic diagnoses brings you pragmatic benefits and profit."

"You are right, so it is. We're not accustomed to perception of contrasting objects. All excessively bright is at once overshadowing everything gray. Being blinded by any of feelings, you're unable to see even abruptly objective, simple events. We are so much used to dividing all whole world in true friends and true foes. Parents, wife, mates and fellows are ours, and strangers, foreigners and beggars – they are alien. But what do really we have? Which guarantees and proofs? Yours is only you. You yourself. All the others are strangers. Both parents, children, husbands, wives, any relatives, anyone. Even God. You will read your night praying not properly, and tomorrow morning your saint God will quite easily cripple your body. No one will provide you with help, no creature."

"As for me, the most progressive of all people are astronomers: they are looking for life outside of the lost solar system. Apparently, they've sadly realized, that on our earth all is hopelessly useless."

"What this life mainly is? What does its matter really keep? All your way, all your movement to aims, expectations and prospects is going just by fortune: all being is a kind of ride on train, where you don't know time of final station. Your train is staying too much long and you're already firmly thinking, that it’s time to go out, that it’s really yours. But life's train starts own moving again and drags you to new heights and achievements. But sometimes it just stops and doesn’t ride to anywhere. Is it really yours? Is it really that cherished salvation? And what's more, time from time trains get broken. Life's modest locomotive too. Such one identically has unflashy limits. Not everyone will reach all expectations." "Once again we return all the thoughts to experience. To its use into struggle with hopelessness. We get determined mainly by the heights, by warming limits of achieved. And not by something else. Each person, who has never looked at God, as rule, will idolize some stones. The best cure from own pettiness is your acquaintance with alternative. A young, unpracticed can be quite easily attached to any sheep. But exalted and competent one will hardly get in such enslavement."

"All you're telling is correct and right. It's also clearly explaining inner essence of all fears. Any fear is lack of firm faith into better. Faith in better. In better and only, not in other vain things, not in any amorphous "god", "fate" or "truth". There's absolute bottomless goodness, an unlimited, boundless one – right incomparable with any other idylls, with any ideals and dreams. And just in this embodiment of miracle we so much ardently desire to believe."

"I also surely believe in something else - in principle of magnetism of objects: put all iron away from detail and the last one will never be pulled to the magnet, put all bad and all low away of yourself, and no adventures, traps or demons will seduce you and lure into poisonous nets."

"So it is, all I can – just to say, that I fully agree. There's no significant difference between of influence of darkness and of light. Nothing happens for free - neither God nor the devil provide us with their services for no aim and no reason. We are having no gratuitous purposes, the only thing that some of them are wrecking, and some are filled with sense and use. That's all."

"I deeply understand each single word. Inside of world, where society is only a herd, there are only two human roles: the role of sheep and the role of its herder. And whom you'll be in hugs of future – a harsh and merciless oppressor or a helpless and soft feeble victim - depends on inward shape of soul."

"It’s rather hard to change such roles. Having passed through sadness and stupid conditions at even shortest period of life, you'll get unreal immense hardships with returning in state of smart person, even doing with confident ease most great and brilliant inventions and discoveries."

"Here we are led by fog and doubts. But what the last ones are in essence? Total rubbish, not more. Any doubt is case, when vile lie, using helpless forgetting of sanity, tries to commit impingement at mind. Any doubt is absolute poison. That one which we're accepting from this life quite voluntarily and freely."

"You forget of strong lack of sane minds and firm meanings."

"Any meaning is utterly vague and weak, such one is shyly serving as the highest degree of the life's structurality, it can't be shown by method of amount - a large and wordy mindful text, exactly genius and awesome, but with wrong shifted order of letters will be totally equal in volume, but absolutely useless in own logic. Any meaning is only a form. Incredibly fragile and awfully short-living."

"I agree. Once again I agree. And after all, the most comical thing is that even if our reality is calmly separated from grotesque by most bottomless abyss, but from us to the edge of this gap is just one tiny step." "I'm sincerely sure, that if our lost universe is still accessible for kind of reconstruction, then the last one can really be done exclusively on hospitable soil of its preliminary overall destruction."

"I support. All is vain and unstable. And, fully wanting to survive, at first get sure that your own salvational force is itself not beneath of some dangerous threat."

"So it is, all we have is not simple, but don't give up to slippy tricks of frightening complexity of being. No kind of complexity can guarantee you flawless perfection, true geniusness lives in elementary, in pure simplicity and only. Take the same form of circle – as for me it's an ideal figure, one look at it brings much more pleasure than sex or gluttony together, I generally cannot understand how inside of a world whose rich geometry includes such form as circle can present wars and terminal diseases."

"But at the same entangled time, the only key to true simplicity lies mainly into presence of complexity: the multiplicity of lines enchantingly determines all directions - of each engaged in combination thread — one single line can be easily drawn as you like, but when the last one is connected with all others it has the only possible strict vector, determined by synchronous coordination with all picture. And the more components you have, the more unique is type of system. And now think, why we have seven billions of people, but not only a couple of hundred."

"From my part, I will add - that, contrary to many misconceptions, the authorities also are weak - in spite of any hierarchies. Recognize this phenomenon clearer. Recognize and remember. At first you are experimenting with bacteria as with the most submissive simplest pets, and next the very same bacteria calmly are eating your damned body from inside, in desire to leave only swollen disfigured corpse. At first the lord is whipping own slave, and next unruled and angry slave is deftly killing and crippling the aforementioned gentleman. Any forces must constantly know – they are short. By the way, we are also the same."

"And the shorter is any of powers, the rougher are its measures..."

"Is all this a reflection of one currentness, or this world all the time has been wholly like that?"

"But what is any era in inside? A short-term portrait of infinity and only, it does not carry any sense. Any era is only a mask. True face will constantly be hidden."

"I agree, each subjectivity is totally specific. Painted tiger is greatly more peaceful than any real cockroach – someone else’s disaster and grief even partly will never be equal to own."

"It so easy to make a mistake, to stay a fool, to get directly lost. And what is else – do not trust any polar phenomena, shy away from such type of events. Life at all is a bunch of great contrasts. All what last ones most frequently can – to hurt and to depress and only. Besides such ones may hurriedly get nullified in harmful mutual addition, having left only absolute emptiness. And vain and hopeless us." "I know. Be aware, I know. Fate can't be curbed by intuition. It's greatly painful to accept, but all is so."

"Here works the measure of each consciousness. Any consciousness has own capacity, own strict volume. And doubts are just circles on its surface. Their presence does not somehow depend on mind itself. Depends on thoughts and their application. And as you know, thoughts are fire. With the help of last one you can easily make rescuing fire, gifting warmth in cold forest at night, but you also burn own house. All depends on the vector of use."

"And from decisions, from attachments. You can be tied right with everything – with each ephemerality and abstractness. Moreover - very tightly and forever. And what is really more – a lot of finest threads around of some tree and you are much stronger and worse than hawser."

"Quite perplexing and ravishing tellings. Cognition is so strange and vague thing that when you do it, you don't even know whether you're calmly getting more sober or conversely becoming deadly drunk."

"I agree. Unquestioningly, fully. Simple forcing from doom gets differentiated very very hardly."

"Any forcedness always is temporary, and any doom is usually lifelong..."

"We never know what is good, and what is poisonous and harmful... No matter, what we think and do."

"At here can help the benefit of utter lie's excess - in such a world, in such its system one foolish lie is regularly exposing some identical other."

"You're looking right in essence. A spark of truth gets own birth exclusively from stone of deception."

"It is important to seek, to stay active, not to fall into friendship with pain... To fight for these extremely rare sparks."

"Serenity is choice of fools and winners. And whom you'll be depends on single luck."

"And it's so simple and so easy to get used to abundant and vicious emptiness, persistent, irrevocable and global."

"True emptiness is fully indestructible. Can you keep own survival for many trillions of years? ... I'm not sure in this. But world's emptiness clearly able to do it. And don't forget of compromises: their path is nothing more than way to evil, the most ironic, cynical and low, it's road to death, to murky finish."

"So, what's uniting all of us? – at once with emptiness and satiety together."

"Both humans, human God and devil are similar exclusively in one – in periods of their own involuntary powerlessness – no one of this triad is not enough for acting as a sure leader in this mutual strange hierarchy. Each of them time from time comes through sufferings – from saint angels till baleful devils. From leper childs till crippled soldiers."

"Such state of things is path to to hysteria. Beat at one time both alien and yours. Such way of acting is so firmly known – both for God and for devil at once."

"According to this cheerless truth, even those who's going to God are anyway much closer to the the devil." "It is not possible to follow God at all. At least to worship such an object. You can worship one devil and only – having bended till knees, you're unable to see hidden face of own Lord. And you don’t even slightly know – is it really saint hopeful God or tricky and dishonest devil...."

"That's fully actual and right. God also doesn’t have a post of fool – such ones get given only by people. We ourselves get dressed in role of idiot. With some help of the devil, of course, but nonetheless we do it freely."

"That is why keep own personal flag. Do not choose neither faith nor philosophy – otherwise you will rot."

"And once again about darkness... The devil never lies in little, he only stumbles in such things. Into global he's staying unnoticeable. And into something insignificant, we sometimes can remark his fain presence."

"And what about people?..."

"They are even much worse. No demon is equally wrong. Take a look at the state of humanity - the face of world is washed with endless blood, all history is crowned with wars and only, with deaths, betrayal and hard losses... Any people are aimless, be sure. They are too primitive and simple."

"Simplicity is strong by one fine fact – such one can be effortlessly repeated. It kills by own unlimited amount."

"In such a poor broken world, all you're really free is to rush from extreme to extreme."

"And if to say of such a theme, are the opposites really similar? What do you personally think?"

"Extremes are similar exclusively in one – in own immense injustice – in rushing from the cold to heat, you agree to the same discomfort in return for the previous one. This is all similarity."

"Stepping back from extremes, from recognizable specifics, you're also slowly getting lost – inside of deep uncertainty, fog, in amorphism and vanity of blurring."

"I know, vagueness is harmful. But in its hugs you're feeling less offensive - it is not visible who cut your thread of fate, no sources of grief stay observable, no poisonous roots."

"One crooked way or another, life will surely win. For to bend any metal, you need either hyper impact or superfluously high temperature. Our fate has enough ways and methods. If it wants to defeat you – it will."

"Here you need to be able to see given chances – too see wished light inside of darkness. For to reach any heights you needn't wide huge road, you need just any place in front. Place for movement, for path. And any tightness is quite tolerable."

"But current features of the path are building all its content: the same fact how you walk – with which pace: quick or slow, entirely determines time of stop and nature and acceptance of events." "It's right to trust to independence. Most of flowers get died not because of barbaric harsh trampling by some rough uncultured people, but by negligent care of gardeners - inept and plainly stupid. Be more thoughtful and deep, then the question of false world acceptance will go out itself."

"Here the integrity of attitude is useful. And such one gets cemented by the dreams – amazingly, but still. One single dream can easily resist to all the world, to all its disparate rue facts, in second healing from all fears!"

"From fears isolation is most useful: in loneliness all fears get experienced more calmly – if you’re sailing alone on some boat and suddenly you get approached by storm, you even don’t pay attention – waves as waves, not much stronger than usual. But what will be at crowded liner? Some person surely will start to cry and scream, explaining that you're drowning with whole company. If you're alone it's much more useful – for thoughts, inventiveness and madness – the most assuredly reliable and large-scaled."

"That's also fully right. Big troubles come, as rule, when you're inside of company. After all, any danger is kind of an abyss, and any fear - step ahead. And hesitations are the same: the longer you're preparing, the less time you will have on the road itself."

"Here also works perniciousness of scales – all such ones never argue with real infinity - with each other and only, all truly absolute is not available at all for any of comparisons or comments."

"Besides some romanticism is needed: access to sky begins from simple runway, which one is modestly located onto land, each path to greatness grows, as a rule, from small, from inconspicuous and weak, from something that at first has been just nothing, but with long time transformed in flawless miracle."

"I know. Eternity is heavy bulky rock, which's staying on thin shoulders of moments. On rare accidents and trifles. And so wonderful is every strange connection between of thought and future matter: what yesterday was only an idea, tomorrow will calmly be a part of entirely real reality, and any matter in own turn one a day will give rise to new judgments, inventions and ventures."

"And what's indeed more great and shocking – the fact, that for the purest bliss we need exclusively one banal correspondence - to hugs of happiness and joy, of pleasant helpful cage of circumstances: the very coincidence of width of long fate's rails and of personal sharply strict distance between of pair of your wheels."

"In addition each case is extremely unstable. Fate never keeps brave theories: it is impossible to follow any variable objects by an unshakable strict road, for one of certain life conditions you are perfectly suitable and for other conditions and frames is suitable some other lucky person. And no wind can blow in two directions."

"Only so it is. Full confidence in luck of all ideas, in broad success of everything and all is inherent to only few of directly notorious madmen."

"And anyway, fate is surely quite influential. All casinos are different, all fates are just the same. If you're unlucky into one, you'll be unlucky into all." "I agree, all the life is a coordinate plane, and your ability to stay in its positive part and not somewhere else is determined by one arithmetical indexes of your internal inner structure, any person as fact is the same equation, with own graph, own firm integer indices and with own fractional remainder, and which digits your fate will insert in your living is a matter of simple luck's case..."

"It's a pity, all this is just puzzling and only... Even far and indistinct background can't be some a way changed or improved, what to say of own road and essence. But in a fact, the only tool for to use any circumstances is our personal reaction on their presence. The point of transforming all the being is lying deep inside of mind."

"Here work prerogative of state: the form of chosen existence determines all the essence of its content, all width, all usefulness and meaning - life still remains to go on, even having entirely lost all the previous values, molten metal remains to be metal in spite of absolutely liquid consistency, this is utterly inert, but painful: yes, molten metal is a metal, it can't be taken, can't be used for dense structures, but such impossibility is short, it's always temporary, pointless - after cooling, each metal will easily get pristine properties, having calmly returned in original state. But can some broken life repeat the same? No pain pass through fate with no harm. This is bottomless tragedy. The one, which is so clearly familiar. From the very first day till the last sluggish sigh. All the way, all the limitless road. All the being at here. From its start to its finish."

"Into what to believe?"

"If someone suddenly will ask me - into what do I really believe, I'll answer - I don’t know. This question is too too hard and too much painful for any helpless human brain. I don’t believe in the world of matter, reproach religion and reject any use of humanity. All we do, learn or study, get from rumors and gossips is just a silly mournful walk around. Aimless, empty and sick. Any road to truth is simply doesn't given. This world is wretched. In its frames any pureness and greatness, any true independence and sense are enormously punishable. They approve only sacrifice, inner pettiness, dirt and cognitive crudity, obedience and broad insensitivity. I live where nothing for hope. At here I do not want to stay myself, I do not want to leave here my close neighbor or even to advice such lost location for my enemies. Here's forbidden the main – right on being yourself. They constantly demand some integration - with others, with the system and its dirt. Today each ideology is poison. But what do I still hope in this abyss of rotting modernity? Which forces and events I'm waiting for? If to tell in few words, I hope on human right on freedom, on independence of their minds. This is the best remaining opportunity. Even if, due to powerful circumstances, you can do only small, just choose an elementary oblivion, choose your own isolation - from all reality itself, choose immaculate freedom and strength. Give away from all dying. From all surrendered and forgotten. Don't hesitate, each survivor should have sure chance to reject the prefered to die. Having stepped into abyss with others, you will save no one from number. Be only for yourself. Then, by the end, you'll find yourself as entirely honest and innocent - at least for single own fate. And, what's really more, the path to God gets shown more often by the devil. The ones, who rush to cleanse oneself and to fall in repentance, are, as rule, the most lost and most burnt by the fate broken people. If you want to deliver oneself into sky, start to push from the bottom." "My thoughts are totally the same. No matter how strange it may seem, but in our world for safety and own superiority you need to show confident passivity – deep personal internal reservation, but struggle. You'll never overcome all injustice and flaws, you will not wipe all human tears, you will not save all those who are dying, you will not satisfy all needs. For unshakable faith into good you have to keep persistent disagreement, ignoring all destructive, false and empty. You will not stop world's moving into abyss, but you, at least, can not to do own step. Deny all blurred intermediateness, deny without hesitation, be glad to sacrifice with all that is imperfect, boldly throwing away all of meaningless things and vain purposeless lifes, which are far from to be little part of eternity. Believe in saint prosperity of future, in inevitabe right order of all things, in unambiguous perfection of next peace. Believe in firm authority of greatness, in sense of birth and living route, believe in randomness path, in its justification and next depth. Believe in correctness of idylls, in global harmony of all, in feasibility of paradise and joy, in undeniable supremacy logic. Only then your small path, even dying, will calmly see bright gentle flame of mind. We live for acute purity of brain, for helpful unity with purpose. Outside of high reasons and truths, outside of wide fullness of being, outside of sensations and pleasures, there is no you, no balance, no true inspiration and fire, only vacuum - endless and painful, all-consuming, tormenting and dead."

"We all are slaves of any rubbish..."

"Not of any, don't lie... Remember, our human world is controlled by one rampant phenomena only. Only something that surely claims onto being a storm can enslave people masses. Such things are clearly known – war, sex, thirst for profit, religion and lowness. These are events, which make the plot of history, the history of miserable and sick, decorated with bunch of hard weaknesses and unable on any resistance to sinful temptation. Therefore, don't look for force in grace, take most destructive cruel tools and send people on obvious death. Have no doubts – they will go." "But how not to be afraid of so much fashionable evil?"

"By the way, rather simple. For this you need one banal non-involvement – in any kind of confrontation. True kindness living fully out, it doesn't owe anything to evil, true genius is free from fools' opinion. Graceful people have no attachment to ugly, saints have no duty to love sinners. Exist in total isolation. This is smarter. Otherwise, your existence will fade. Preserve own firmness and steadfastness. And use cruelty as tool. If the devil will shyly obey our God and all people and will do self-destruction, will you really forgive him? Apparently, yes. And just by this you'll betray truthful light. Remember, devil in all cases deserves exclusively contempt, exclusively straight punishment and bloodshed. The same applies to foes too. And what's more, any rotten commitment meekly hides under mask of own excellence, under rightful and glorious veil, under fruitful and meaningful shade. The same weed grass most abundantly grows on fertile mellow soil. The devil hunts on aimful sinless souls. True averageness stays directly needless – for darkness, God and even people. And what I'll say in huge addition, they are disgusting for themselves. But such ones represent the majority."

"All it means, that this world is so much inappropriate – for any good and aimful things: for happiness and any of bright heights."

"The fact that modern world is utterly unsuitable for luck is explicitly clear. True happiness needs different conditions, the ones, that can be made in isolation, in individual greenhouse. And having got entirely imprisoned, you shouldn't have some stiffness, harm or tension. Professional and qualitative court completely suits for playing tennis. Outside of its square there are wild thick forests, broad highways, long car parkings and metal constructions. It is not possible to play in such locations, but playing onto comfortable court you don’t think that the last one is far not infinite, not spreaded to whole earth and even universe, you need a local area and only. Don’t try to give own happiness to all, don’t try to turn each one in its saint matter. Most of people are simply not capable of feeling and experiencing it, they are initially internally defective, unsuitable for greatness and sincerity. That's why, the alliance with them, even faint and entirely short, leads to death of your personal harmony. Learn to be happy deep inside and among of unfortunate ones. They are unhappy by themselves, by their absolute wretchedness, such thing is not a your reproach. There is no global happiness. It's bliss of chosen ones. Our world is so strange by the presence of meaningless part. Most of phenomena and deeds don't carry any useful logic, don't carry depth and involvement in inner perfection. We see one pettiness and baseness. Reality consists of sins and flaws. That's why I so want to cry. To cry and to be silent and again to be silent and cry. The world has turned in painful mockery, vile and empty, deceptive and low, enveloped by dense fog and laught of devil." "Where to take self-control in such abyss..."

"Remember, God bequeathed to believe in first turn in oneself, and only after into him and in others. Self-doubt is straightforward God's betrayal. You also should not go just to light. Life's lantern can belong to devil. Look only at the essence of each kindness, analyze its true aims and sincerity. Don't trust to double-faced good. Do not take it. Most skillful sweet idealism and best perfection can be shown, as a rule, into vileness, or art of to kill, or in alcohol drinking. Don't be good into negative ways. Don't look at naked skills. They never show degree of their use. Otherwise, you'll be thickly surrounded by most gifted and talented cynics and murderers. You must admit, it works as poison. Despise all people – each of them, without any small exception, not allowing to love them or feel. Remember, playing with the victim, the main thing not forget who is hunter."

"But who is guilty into all?"

"Creator. Only Creator. Remember – surely and firmly, no person will ever become more sadistic and sinful than God. Nevertheless, human staircase of claims almost never ascends till his person, people criticize only small implementers, but not direct organizer of all madness. And what is more – all emptiness and fullness are united, are conjugated by some low interaction – here you are taking cup of water and want to drink all its free liquids, the cup is staying wholly full, and you are staying sharply thirsty, but next you overturn aforementioned poor vessel and it becomes completely empty, and you are getting rid recent thirst. What does it mean? The fact, that fullness causes emptiness. They rather easily change places with each other. It turns out that any world's emptiness is someone’s secret huge excess, someone’s satiety.This is utterly topical. In world of social stratification, heterogeneity and distance, life becomes harshly polar and splited – on poor and rich, successful and unhappy, smart and crazy, sincere and low. And in this abyss of disunity, lies main root of the evil, of pain of ones and of prosperity of others. It shows us a transshipment hurting point, which in a strange and fairy way divides all fates on flight and fall."

"It's so much simple to get mad." "And what, in fact, is our mind? And who to whom belongs: do our thoughts belong to us or we to their matter? After all, at first glance, it entirely seems, that we're completely rightful owners of own heads, that we are their holders and full managers. But in fact it’s not so. What all our mind is? A complex fruit of past associations and hazed views, result of deep combinatorics of experienced. In whose hands is this list of evens and commitments? You leave you house, see some person, he sticks to memory. Or not. Depends on brightness of his features. You could be beaten into childhood, be hardly injured or raped, your list of personal experiences is, probably, more harmless, but no less specific and unique. It can't be artificially repeated. You make judgments on basis of past, of your own mental baggage, you make any free choice just the same. You could grow up as fully rotten, but you've been made as pure and good. In whose hands is your fate? We all are victims of own minds, not their commanders and authors. We are slaves of desires and weaknesses, dreams. We're prisoners of heads. Of memory, which's constantly transforming, stimulating and sharply upsetting, inspiring and depressing, deifying and throw down. It's firmly staying over all – over thoughts, over deeds and life roles. Over all we are getting and feeling. Over all human path, so much aimlessly given in hands of unstable and changing conditions."

"With so endless nihilism and so full-sized, significant decisions, are you yourself afraid of anything or someone? Do such mad things exist at all?"

"You want to know, what makes me scared? Lack of limits in all. Any sphere and thing can be freely expressed in unlimited immense degree, any state can be utterly wrecking – humiliation, despair and powerlessness, inner wretchedness, losses and pain, it can be totally exorbitant. The person who has got into our world can become fully worthless and crippled, torn to pieces and lost. We have modern technologies, life is constantly moving to progress, but it densely keeps endless lawlessness, deep oppression and hurts – into each of own days. It impossibly kills. This is the worst of world's manifestations, the most disgusting and unjust, the most nasty and shameful. It puts your into scale of real madness, of nightmare and hell."

"Why bad entirely prevails? What a for, by which force?" "Why poisons are so mighty? The biggest tragedy of truth is its full indistinguishability by the everyday life. You will never distinguish true love from the false, as you'll never divide real affection and mockery, frank reciprocity and use. For such of confirmations deep situational revision is required. Deep and rare life's circumstances. It's similar to way of denouncing a fake – good gilding never differs from true gold, but in acid it instantly melting and dies, unlike to real precious metal. Without an appropriate experiment, no gradation between of true gold and its fake will be ever revealed, even if you will spend time of century. Into fate all is fully the same – without some specific twists, it is simply not real to verify authenticity of love. It's the biggest of pains — the fact of possible upcoming disappointments, of betrayals and lies. This is close to an abyss, an abyss of mistakes, despair and detachment, of alienation, sorrow and oblivion. We are not competent to separate evens. We are free just to wait. We have the right on one hope of revealing soon circumstances. The very ones, that, by the way, are so needful and so much rare."

"My question will be probably delusional, but nevertheless - with whom today it is most correct to identify hopeless human - with God or devil? Who is closer?"

"With no one. Every person is too complicated. But whole society, by the way, is already quite able on being compared - with an anthill: the same fuss and harsh nonsense. That's why compare yourself with kind of disinsector – exactly tired and distressed. Or with anteater."

"This is awesome. In my turn, I will add my entirely frank admiration of how gloriously, hurriedly and brightly is agonizing our lost society. We demand a third-party opinion, a view from outside of us. We interpret it as most objective, reliable, pure and fair. This is simply breathtaking! We all a priori surely admit that all opinions of people close to us will be initially unjustified and false. We seek truth from the strangers. This is a tragedy, not less. In such reality we're having no future. It's not life. Even near. It's torture. Moreover, I am extremely sorry that most of prominent world's figures don't have professional profound education in sphere of biologic study. It's unacceptable and wrong. Information of worms and of parasites would be extremely useful in frameworks of the current humanity. There is an unforgivably huge number of the last ones in nowadays decomposed population. Such excess is entirely awful."

"And most regrettable sad thing is the fact that we all go nowhere, and do it by a circle way, by eternal damned ring, where people calmly move to abyss, and we also move by identical route but only into opposite direction."

On this, their conversation has got frozen. Silence spreaded own hugs. Faint semicircle of the moon has appeared in small blurred window. One more sad aimless night. Hello, dejected hurting darkness. We were waiting for you. You're a guest.

XIV

Completely covered by blissful calmness city is staying totally confused and fully faceless. Air is clean, any outlines – sharp and contrasting, any lines are devoted to sad graceful rigor. Deep, dejectedly sorrowful sky is washed by endless muddy grayness – meek and lonely. All world is unconcerned, but at same time, so alarmedly tense and internally alert, even puzzled and slightly perplexed. All expanses are densely full of frustration, of unfriendly and sick melancholy. Everywhere is hopeless oblivion. On icy trunks, deprived of last thin crowns, is humbly sparkling whitish hoarfrost. Underfeet lies well-groomed broken sidewalk.

Anatoly Efimovich and Elizaveta Kirillovna are slowly walking by main street, in contemplation, thoughts and conversations.

"So depressed joyless weather, just exclusively bad." - has observed Anatoly Efimovich: "But we are walking, building talks. We don’t care..."

"We're unique." – has shyly smiled Elizaveta Kirillovna: "We're not involved in games of nature. For us we'll find more tempting entertainments."

"We are lucky with such exclusivity - no worries, no useless involvement. From now on, we have own personal selection for all matters."

"Now all will be ours – both deeds and dreams and even whole reality."

"You've decided to build autonomy?"

"The most sweet and most durable one."

"It's a desperate matter - to build a fairy tale in swamp."

"Mutuality does not serve risks, it does not bow in front of their will."

"But betting on one chance, you'll never get big future."

"We have no other roads - either hazed, or the one, that's to bottom..."

"But where to get due inspiration for the first one..."

"In inner hopes, in light of heart."

"Heart is dead. All of dreams turned in corpses, decomposed into pain and regrets. All is lost." At here it's purposeful to note, that human hopes are not able to leave something else. As fact, all concepts and all objects are getting decomposed in common way: any greatness on absolute emptiness, any sense onto any of things, but more often on flaws, and fear – on self-confidence or calmness. It's just for information and not more.

"Think in positive way - more optimistic and more bright." - has suggested in tender response Elizaveta Kirillovna: "It is possible, that world is only outwardly miserable and wrong, but inside is surprisingly weighty and aimful, filled with greatness and use – with pure true fates, outstanding life plots and strong feelings, which are painfully hidden by wretchedness."

"All this is not of our world. At here we're having no exits. Only countless huge misfortunes, fatal lawlessness, contrast and dirt."

"Even if all is really so, for happiness is needed one desire."

"After all, good position, I like it."

"All we can - to believe into good, or to stay into troubles forever."

"Having place, do a step. I agree, but it's strange to wait miracle vainly."

"All the fate is pure absurd. But between of two madnesses, it will be smart to choose the most alluring. We, of course, are accustomed to wrong. We don't believe in miracles or heights, we rely on one grayness and sins. That is wrong."

"This tragedy is old. The world is broken from the start."

"But let's believe, let's try to hope."

"Romantic. Let's. Such way is warmer. I think, it is excusable to dream."

"In happiness you needn't even mind."

"Nevertheless, with the last one it's calmer."

"But sweet mistakes can easily replace all bitter truths."

"Very gorgeous. Enchanting. I'm flattered."

"Soon will be even sweeter. Do not doubt."

Have exchanged with short glances.

XV

In tired light of sad, faint lamp, in the midst of entirely static oblivion, are meekly sitting two calm silhouettes - Matvei Grigorievich and Marina Valerevna, both are close to each other and to wide faceless window, abundantly enshrouded with darkness. All around is surely boring, firmly buried in hell of caustic indifference of liquid hollow atmosphere. Behind of heavy shabby frame, is humbly staying into murk lonely blurred lamppost, gently lost in unbounded cold and enveloped by silent cool glow of own pale sleepy halo. At all of bleak and sullen sides, is sluggishly and languidly tempesting wet and amplified blizzard. Inside impenetrable heights, is waiting deep dejected heaven's abyss. Near of tacky and watery road are idly standing silver white, newly mounted cumbersome drifts of fresh snow. That's all the harmony provided for perception.

The heroes are commonly united, uniformly oppressed and perplexed. And although crooked and broken fates are not supposed to grow bright expectation, nevertheless, there is no evident line, after crossing which one your life ends and begins final dying. Grayness sooner or later will abundantly get own supremacy, but soul's color will never agree to fade at once and so simple. Having got to deadlock, we are deciding first to stand, to choose waiting. We look for exit everywhere, exactly managing to use all of ways and of methods in sure time before of death. Each human life deep inside is a kind of illegal equipment: such one can't be returned, exchanged or publicly repaired.

"Once again, we are spending own longing as usual." - has pityingly remarked Matvey Grigoryevich.

"But what else can we do... Sometimes we have to share own pain." - has quietly sighed Marina Valerievna with dismally detached and somber look.

One of main painful troubles of world is the fact that all possible idylls, by some of miracles, arisen in its frames, are rid of any chance of own implementation. It's inappropriate in all-consuming abyss of nasty lost surroundings of chaos. But, nevertheless, no one is forbidding to people to share with each other with ideas, with most sophisticated perfect ventures and intentions, which ones, of course, are far from own embodiment in present, but at least are much sweeter than sadness. That's why the heroes, accustomed to straightforward joyless truth, were sullenly exchanging with own their hopes, fully vain and exactly utopian, unrealizable and poisonously vague. Such ones are dummy, torn from any prospects, but anyway still tempting and consoling. "I so much fervently desire to believe that human happiness is possible and real, that such thing is indeed truly feasible - within of framework of today. I want to know, to be sure, that this phenomenon is not just an unreachable utopia, that its marvelous matter is viable – at least some modest period of time. I want to know that something deeply good is truly tangible and able for to try. For me it's most important and most helpful, most life-affirming from all things. Such thoughts are healing from all hardships, endowing with incredible saint strength and enormous freedom. Daily life is not bright, not abundant and mighty, but its dark greedy pit anyway will never let your soul back in freedom."

"Hope is bitter and hazed, washed with myriad tears. For stable harmony of wishes you have to be extremely sensitive and prudent. The depth of human mind is totally subordinate to one strange indicator -to ratio of mental flexibility and strength of views and ideological commitments. Such quality is globally determined by experience, and not by any one, but only by positive, which by the way is harshly rare. All local truths, attainments and conditions are awfully amorphous and short-living. If your life has become vain and stupid, it’s rather difficult and hard not to break it at all. That is why even small pointless tragedy is nothing else than a step from unbounded disaster, as well as any clear differentiation between of truth and hollow fake elementary doesn't exist. Bad medal never shows own opposite dark side. Poisoned mind never gets even part of supremacy. And it's extremely difficult to live in such close frameworks of life's abyss of global insanity - such one is not accustomed to gift freedom." "But we are calmly sitting just right now onto edge of the very life's abyss and are peacefully talking. After all, we still live. Apparently, for some unshown reason..." - with kind of rue has sighed Marina Valerievna.

"No matter, which view on existence you have, any life in inside is a kind of such function, which exists just for final derivative. All the process of growing and being, all we do, keep and build, all the time of life's way in practice lasts exclusively for modest final fruits, for next results of contact with the world. All imputed by accident fate with all its facts, all tasks and meetings has no weight, no viable essence itself, if it's rid of holistic high goal and huge mission. One pure endowing with your life and with sick randomness of presence is not an aim, not a road, we cannot live like that. Long senseless series of deaths and next rebirths are far from any prudent meaning, world needs to be directed from above. World live for all, not for any of personal beings. In the end, all the fate can be built just for one single word, perceived by some important interlocutor. We are a moment, cleverly inscribed into canvas of immense eternity. Each human role is unforgivably defenseless, faint and small, strange and almost invisible. As fact, it's only a drop in never-ending sea of world's existence, so much enormously mysterious and large, that even inaccessible for any understanding, for any sober analytics and even for most simple criticism. Such one is suitable exclusively for primitive acceptance, fully patient and totally selfless, monotonous, long and not frequently promising any successes, any beauty or blissful and logical final. But it's so much pleasant to wait..."

"You are trying to wrap me up with flame." - has smiled the lady: "So generous act. In empirical world of sensations, each strong emotional experience, as a rule, is called as deepest wisdom and mind's grace. So often it seems that there is no exit, just because of its true inexistence. As for me, our world is more stupid than cunning. It has no even shade of encouragement for any smart and aimful things. Full emptiness and greatness here are equal."

"Gradations live exclusively in consciousness. Or in heart. Existence stays above of such vain trifles. We have to make perfection ourselves. Saint staircase to paradise is growing from the faith, from strong belief in ideals and prospects, from inner values and intentions. And, as a fact, from soul itself..."

"From soul itself... Well said. That's pretty. Maybe our staircase will grow too – just from this joint moments of hearts. I always wait for something good, for soon embodiment of hopes, for useful fruits of our unit. I still want to believe, and no matter, if life is unfixably driven by chance, hazed and rare. Life's path itself is already huge cause for to go."

"We will cloth ourselves into dreams and will go barefoot in nowhere. With no aim and no compass or route."

"Just together – as firm sinless couple? With free trust to next luck and conditions..."

"Just together, you're right. And with strong sure faith into better as helper."

XVI

In barely awakened tender city, is staying young and mellow spring. First rare rays of slim sunlight are lonely gliding up and down in foggy drowsiness of sleepy morning sky. Slowly quickening colorless distance, relaxedly enveloped by warm calmness, is meekly spreading with long views. Although spring is directly predictable and entirely far from to be any mystical miracle, nevertheless, each bewitching arrival of the first warm spring days is a sure strong act of unexpected endless optimism and holistic and deep inspiration. Right now all is just the same: all region and whole heart are opened for next beauty. Pacifically freed of snow limits, completely bare, fresh and pure, are shyly getting washed by timid streams. All is weightlessly gentle and slightly confused. Impregnated with damp spicy thaw pleasant air is remarkably thick and capturing. Gray district playfully arisen from oblivion, is temptingly extended with dimensionless hollow spaces. Modest shawl of transparent thin haze is uniformly free and weightless. All around is friendly and innocent. Deeply clouded uneven horizons are dimly blurred and forgotten. Into role of last traces of recent harsh frosts are feebly lying rare plates of ice – already cracked and fully helpless. Everywhere is total serenity, sweet tenderness and harmony of nature. In empty lowlands are walking bored winds. In muddy puddles swim pale faceless shadows. All is nice and surprisingly trustful, all clear and bright – all of countless places and views. Even awesome.

Anatoly Efimovich and Elizaveta Kirillovna are systematically wandering around, enjoying with new friendliness of world, so blissfully exalted, strict and virgin.

"So straightforwardly excellent spring at this year, so charmingly pleasant and fresh, so tender and nice, that even incomparable with any states or miracles of being."

"So it is, you are walking with someone together, and all world is your personal abode, that's given only to you, as kind of paradise or heaven, protecting from all alien and filthy, depriving your from fuss and soul extinction. In such of frames you're torn of low or bad, you want to thing exclusively of good. To think and wait for soon embodiment." "Such luck is purely exclusive."

"But anyway each case of true uniqueness is first of all determined with one thing – with simple width of your imagination. All we need – just to think and believe. It’s not a secret, person starts to blossom exclusively from blossoming of soul, and soul blossoms from own faith... We have only to ask ourselves to keep dreaming, submitting all the world to greater aims. Full happiness can be just free and timeless, such one gets born exclusively at once and never ends, never dies or turns faded. All will be instantly forgotten, if you're happy. But after all, each one is only guest, only seeker and wanderer. Its priceless, if you've got some aim. But anyway and in any of sorrowful cases, don't stop to go and to wait – for real miracles and better."

"All real miracles are coming from above, we'll never make such one by our hands."

"Repeating something what's desired, you can one day get something real too. Good walk is starting from right step."

"But where to get such tempting nice direction. We all are striving for some pleasure. We rely on sensations, on empirical inner enjoyment. And this is fully justified, completely justified. We all are ravelers of way in nowhere, and it's more pleasant and more right to do all this at least on cozy road."

"And with someone desired in pair."

"Then aim and path are not significant at all..."

"But are such ones so actual for us? Do we really need them?"

"We’ll tear my map and throw away your compass."

"We'll reach all aims without them. I promise."

"In which of countless directions do you call?"

"To common happiness of us... Or, at least, to its sweet tempting borders..."

XVII

Dark evening, lonely, chilled and frightful, has timidly spread out by surroundings. Dejected and unpeopled faded district gets tightly closed by tartly shrouded dusk. First shadows, meekly strayed in flocks, has boldly taken wait-and-see positions. Impenetrable gloomy viscous murk has thickly hung on faceless spaces. All places fell completely silent. Exhausted, shy and quiet indistinct figure of Marina Valeryevna has humbly looked for sad and lonely walk, looked in hopeless dead wilderness, looked and timidly sighed: "How strange is each our share, how far from becoming explained. After all, I myself would not ever believe into happiness. With what I live – with hopelessness and only: no one owes me love or some care, I'll never have some fruitful plot and all I have is very little. But I don’t need in something else. I don’t need any passion or meetings, gifts or joy, or rich prospects. I'm feeling good in where I am. In world, where I'm a guest and where he is my own interlocutor. Where everything I really pretend – just to catch his empathic sad look or deep meaningful silence. And I feel fully blessed. I am glad that it happened - in my fate, in my quiet modest being. I am glad, even grateful that it was my reality, my truth. I'm grateful to my God, or someone who has made us. He may not hear me at all, but I am grateful. I just want to protect this condition, to elongate its tender frames, which I don't want to see just melted, to see just passed or vainly lost."

Marina Valerievna has shyly stepped in wet cold darkness. The silhouette has slowly dragged along – by broad deserted tract. Contemplation, as fact, is indeed the most sweet from all sins. And now back to home again. It's already quiet cold – time to stop. To return and get lost into silence. That's so.

XVIII

The room is quiet. And also warm. Time blows with mystery promises temptation. Anatoly Efimovich and Elizaveta Kirillovna are sitting with together, in diligent calm sharing of mutual hugs and each other. Voluptuous and greedy atmosphere attracts with own amorousness and tart taste of upcoming soon pleasure. Dark colors, mixed together, embrace with rich and splendid vice. Single shadows meekly wait - in unison with other sharp conditions.

"Good happiness is right to use in couple - with proper seasoning of pleasure. Will you shyly agree?" - Elizaveta Kirillovna has playfully smiled in sinful teasing manner .

"I agree with all will." - has responded the hero and insistently reached for already not slightly inflamed frisky partner.

Sweetly juicy and straightly attractive, hot and piquantly naked slim body of Elizaveta Kirillovna has hospitably spread in fabulously dreamy stubborn languor. Anatoly Efimovich has tenderly gone down by alluring sweet hips and, having frozen right between her legs, has passionately clung to gentle flesh, submissively and endlessly dissolving in venomous serenity of process.

"How good." - Elizaveta Kirillovna has stopped in godlike bliss: "Go on. I'm begging – more and more! More persistent, more sharp. My sweet one, keep it more. So warm it's in there... Like in oven."

Full of unbearable servileness and thirst, fervent hero has lavishly rushed with his lips to most secret and pleasant locations, gladly losing himself into zealous bottomless trembling and devotedly diving and freezing into sweet lovely fragrance of captivating and delicate wetness of freed lecherous flesh.

"My precious, are you happy?"

"Peerless time. So sweet, so pleasant and tasty. Most incomparable and darling!"

"Come here and let me try you too. And then take me with force – wildly, harshly and mercilessly rudely, till inability to hold beastly tearful scream, till pure shout. Take in all of my inputs. Fly inside. Like spring wind."

"With the highest of joys! I am yours."

Have entwined in hugs. Here we look at the easiest pass to the heaven - through of intimate gates. The most effective, by the way. And most tart. Most alluring. Pearls of young timid morning have calmly brightened up the room, thickly filled with sweet unity and firmly hanging smells. In around is tender shy twilight. Onto wet, disheveled bed - Anatoly Efimovich and Elizaveta Kirillovna, pacifically bathing into stopped static time, departing souls from recent bliss.

Anatoly Efimovich has unhurriedly wiped his tired face and slowly held out: "So good, so nice. Much better than nirvana. You'll never get such grace in any church. This is fact. Each one, who don't admit intimacy as miracle, should be deprived of any rights on sex. Moreover, these vain people should also be deprived of their right on the life. And if to say of their killing, I would prefer to choose some ancient torture. What our body really is? After all, it's your personal pass to the world. With its help we can communicate directly with reality, with everything that only exists. Each body is a ticket to the present, a ticket to the universe itself. We get connection with the world exclusively with set of own sensory organs, we do it bodily and only, all impressions and any conclusions are also nothing more than kind of summarized specific transformation of initial carnal sensations. And you trust all your flesh to some person, to somebody except of you yourself. What else can be more valuable and sacred? It's apogee of dedication. Its highest peak of unity and feelings. I strongly faith that any intercourse keeps much more holiness than any of religions. You trust to partner all yourself - most precious thing that human has. It's one of most magnificent commitments, the same as our presence here itself. Or as God."

"Today my god is you."

And once again new lustful coition.

XIX

As we know, most sincere confession is your confession to oneself. And now all was just the same: Anatoly Efimovich, enslaved by empty gloomy bedroom, enclouded by tender lonely twilight, this time was greatly clean and frank, deep and prudent. His sullen gaze, sticked to one single point, was remaining entirely motionless. Thoughts were lavish and prompt. Inner mood was deftly fluttering from something incomprehensible to simple.

"Still how inapprehensibly much mutuality really means, what an exorbitantly key role plays its precious presence. All my fate, all my previous share – what it was with no meetings with her, without chances of next unit. All was so secondary, fussy, vain and worthless, so insignificant, unnoticeable, gray, so meaningless, distorted and unhappy. All my being has no slightest logic, no faint justification, no sense without this saint woman, whose name has surely become much higher than the God's one. And there is nothing more expensive, more valuable and needed in all universe. Nothing cannot be even compared with such kind of enormous obsession. It's the purest, the deepest of miracles. So omnipotent and so strong. Immense, huge and unthinkable. Incomprehensible, holy. Eternal, ever-burning and impeccable. And it will certainly come true."

XX

No matter how to explain such human fact, but nevertheless, any constancy, even saddest and totally modest, with way of time becomes enormously familiar and natural. In sure absence of own future, any moment of present gets inwardly perceived exclusively as cruel harmful kind of inevitable harsh punishment from heaven. In most of frames and living's cases we have nowhere for to go. And that is why Matvey Grigoryevich with Marina Valeryevna, having humbly accepted such truth, were selflessly and carelessly trudging along of deserted night street, enjoying with the growing summer dusk and their mutual presence in being, as if, apart of both of them, there was nobody at all onto whole immense measureless planet. For inexperienced first glance, it may seem some a time, that in so much bulky huge universe it's almost surely impossible to remain inappropriate, lost or forgotten, unnecessary, lonely or abandoned. But the larger is our world, the less space it's including for good, for reciprocity, heart unity and meaning, the more problems and deep disagreements take places, more hatred, soullessness and hardships sends your way. The greater is the scale of being, the less is its degree of any harmony. If you're composing dithyrambs to globalism, then you are stupid and short-sighted. It illustrates main tragedy of world, so sadly concluded in fact, that it's not capable of building any greatness, even if such will be only temporary. It is not capable of it in very structure. And any spiritual sphere is precisely the very crown - the crown of greatest doom and lack of rights, of overwhelming heaviest oppression - inconsolable, wrong and destructive. That's why all souls walk here, as rule, alone. And it’s good if they walk. But more often just crawl – completely fussily and fully humiliated, madly looking at cage of lost being as at saint healing abode of sky. We all just seek. And do it for long time. Sometimes till plate of own grave. This world is utterly distorted. It's distorted in very attempts, in beginnings, and any chance to correct something is always leading our path to fully opposite result. Futility, oblivion and pain – that's all that really remained. It's kind of dying, of extinction. All is surely rotten and spoiled – from blurry abstract hopes and ephemeral ideas till simple straight desires, aims and actions. All is clearly lost. At now even luck has got just useless – it's wholly fruitless for true chance.

But heroes were keeping their hopes. Completely secretly, but still... "It's so nice just to walk and to be with your chosen one, to be firmly and constantly near - into sweet irreproachable harmony, frank and bottomless, sinless and flawless, where you're each second staying next to someone, with whom you're always coming back to life." - Marina Valerievna has brightened.

"It’s much more easy even just to breath, when you are close to loved and loving one. We're spending time most frequently in sadness, all it’s surely so, but anyway I'm feeling so good, so much free and delighted."

"We always so ardently rejoice with any touching of two souls, with any fact of their connection with each other. It's real miracle in frames of current being. It's rare marvelous treasure, so alluringly tart, unprecedented and deep, endowing with straight sense and clear prospects. Each reciprocity is truly omnipotent, life-giving, gracious and saint. All immense, bottomless existence is just a rubbish in its absence. And such futility is endless and eternal. It’s not a life and not even a kind of its likeness. You live and suffer. That is all. You also wait, if you're still able. And then you probably just die. We have no path away from aimless road. Each little trouble calls to you some huge. Life is long, but it's totally barren, fully fruitless and utterly vain, we have no time for to be happy. All we're free – just to fall into abyss. Fall and try to keep calm look. After death of own essence, all around turns strictly indifferent. No matter, which plague will come. All of finals come surely equal. If you are rid of higher fairy halo, then you'll be lost in any of life's plots. And such a fact is infinitely stubborn."

"I agree, now it's easy to faith in all strange. And what is true, all world with all its ways, all processes and chances was invented and built not by us, all languages, all human nationalities, all feelings, words, all thoughts and all ideas are made by acting of creator – by someone else, but not by you yourself..."

"It is quite sad. In such case, it turns hopelessly out, that all chances on our salvation are belonging to alien hands. And not fact that such ones will tender."

"It's fully needless to safe us... At least, humanity's majority."

"But at here there are only two – you and I, we're outside of other crowd. And we are feeling more than good. As for me, that's main secret of joy."

"The only trouble - I'm constrained, I'm not free, fully tied and squeezed – by harsh severe frames of oath, of former unchanging fidelity. All I can be for you – just only a guest. I will not gift you love or hot affection, only modest and sinless attention."

"But I’m fine in such meager conditions, I understand, I never will get more, and it's my choice, my firm decision - decision to devote my soul to you, not my body, not passion, but at least all my soul - from and to. That's how I truly want. All other variants are only an ashes."

XXI

Sweet-smelling summer evening has tenderly enveloped with own veil exhausted by the recent morbid hotness lonesome evening. Tart and liquid twilight is cautiously melting into shallowing gloomy ensemble of cascade dim shadows and tones. Impassionately fading rare paints are meekly getting lost in gradual chaotic order. Warm gentle wind is sleepily increasing with long minutes. Anatoly Efimovich and Elizaveta Kirillovna are walking in forgotten quiet district in process of relaxed sluggish talking.

"So wonderful it is to be together, where no barriers, no frames, no difference between of lines of souls." - has said the hero with gladness: "As in a fairy tale, in heaven. In our tower of deep selflessness and joy, in our personal oasis of pure hope. In individual nirvana."

"Yes, as in miracle, I know..."

"Are you sad? Or it only seems?"

"All is right. Do not matter."

"Don't be afraid, we'll never be apart."

"I am not shy for to have fear."

"So life-affirming confidence and calmness. Infectiously pretty."

"For your health..." - Elizaveta Kirillovna has smiled.

"And for luck."

"And for luck."

"Luck in priceless."

"Exciting, tempting and addictive."

"Like life itself."

"Like sinful dream."

"Like broad tangible chances..." - Anatoly Efimovich has drowsily sighed and timidly asked: "Let me visit your home. You never let such of visits... We all time meet at my rueful room. With only darkness in addition."

"Not now. Maybe one a day. For us your darkness is best friend - for pleasant processes it's useful."

"With last words I completely agree."

XXII

Monotonous, sad slushy rain has grievously washed promptly ended short summer, which so hastily finished just one day ago with all own persistent sweet heat, deftly changed on strict coldness and downpours. All is dark, long deserted terraces are indistinct, streets are empty. Among of frozen canvas of the sky is hanging waxy looking moon. Everywhere is absolute sadness. Barren district is quiet, filled with bottomless numbness, deep depression and tearful hopelessness. Landscape is simple, gray and silent. Bitter gloom of detached lifeless vastness is causing sadness and sharp rue. Far houses are fully distinguishable, shyly faceless and tightly embraced by apathetic painful harmony and all-consuming harmful dying. Air is fresh, chilled and static. Lines are strict. Views are soulless. All is sunk in oblivion, harsh agony and haze. All is motionless, inert. Matvey Grigoryevich is wandering around by colorless stone road of terrain with dreary thoughts is hurting vain addition.

"What for is life, for which of vague prospects... What for is it entrusted and imputed. After all, any heights, any greatness are rare. All is aimless and vain. All gets built by pure random, by its strange blurred roads. Souls are weak, minds are useless. If you go with wrong steps, you will perish. All rules of game are fruit of current winners – I know this truth, I know it really well, but how to become that one, who wins. Into fuss it's completely resultless. In the hustle and bustle of it all. Miraculously, if only. Yes, it’s also less likely to comet. It's matter of fate's will. What is life.... I don't know. Someones know, but not I."

XXIII

Outside of the window's frame is hopeless languid, slowly approaching first frost. In noticeably viscous cold air is shyly circling playful prickly blizzard, dispersed with frequent snowflakes, unwillingly achieving first light weightness. Abstracted spaces, closed ice, are lifeless. Onto temptingly gleaming low roofs, are hanging evil growing icicles. Along of pale and yearning street are stretching old indistinct facades. By the sides, are meekly standing hollow landscapes, dressed in rigor and endless oblivion, enshrouded all surroundings and pictures. In corners are unfriendly estranged shadows. Oblique snowdrifts are thoughtfully dejected. All outlines are wearisome and faint. All is totally faded and murky. In the midst of oppressed lightless square, are two dim silhouettes - Anatoly Efimovich and Elizaveta Kirillovna – again are humbly walking. This time in unison with season - in silence and

"We have to talk." - has remarked Elizaveta Kirillovna and then immediately lost in hesitations: "But conversation will be not so easy, not especially pleasant and not expected for your soul. But I will try to do it calmly, without all unnecessary pain – with totally turned off emotion sand in temperate manner. I've introduced myself to you not fully, not completely. But, faith, I didn’t want to lie. I just have been unable to say all. I've been greatly afraid. I have a child... He's named Petya. At now he is twelve years old. I've been alone with him most often, his father... Our meetings were rare, he hadn't any need in me. But recently he came, and I'm unable to refuse and instantly devote all myself, like weak-willed, like replaced. I have been loving him so long... So many nights were spent in tears, so many dreams were fully burned, so many desires and wishes. I have been know, that I'm unloved, but I still have been waiting. Have been and wanting. Have been so ardently desiring. Like no once before. I've been so glad with every meeting, with every look and every intercourse... Forgive me please, I'm wanting him too much. And Petya by some reasons hates him... I really do not know why. That is all. All I had for to say."

Anatoly Efimovich has entirely faded with whole appearance and mind, then has helplessly clenched his teeth and got frozen, unbearably harmed by sharp, harsh pain.

It seemed, that whole his life today got splintered, got firmly separated from all luck, from all joy and prosperity. It happens so time from time, that practically full and finished happiness can get cracked and internaly burned. Just this has happened with the hero. He has helplessly shuddered and lowered his eyes.

"We have no need to see each other now. I have already told you everything I planned."

"I’ll ask about one small thing - let me please see your Petya, I want to say few words to him."

"Okay, I'll let."

"And do not to leave me so sharply... Will you promise?"

"I can't..."

XXIV

The room is small. Air is static and viscous, faint outlines are dark, atmosphere is simple and careless. Mood is lowered. Thoughts are bulky and largely chaotic. Views are sad. Anatoly Efimovich is sitting next to Petya in attempts to begin conversation.

"I am not used to being an enemy to people, not accustomed to that. Each connection between human hearts is a fruit of full calmness, of understanding and affection. I want you peace and lavish future, which's so rare at today, by the way."

"All people are the same. You show your kindness only in words, and in fact come and go away, only making me pain. What for I need your understanding... To understand is able even dog. But dog is more reliable and more decent. Just stop and don't spoil my soul."

"All I’m saying is fully sincere. I can’t be with my Elizaveta Elizabeth, that is why I can't be and with you. I cannot be a stranger into house. This is worse than torture."

"I don’t need in your cynicism. All people really love is just to lie. You consider me foolish and young. I have seen any people, and each one had no soul, only cover."

"And I have the same opinion and views. The same thoughts of the people. And of any of them."

Petya has not expected such answer, and that's why hesitated and timidly asked: "And what's for you the aim of life?"

"The main meaning of life, dear Petechka, is to be here a Human. In full degree of such a word. And not with lowercase small letter, but with proud and powerful capital one. All we need – just to live here honestly, deeply faithfully love and keep hope for better. We have to save own precious souls, not to dirt or to fall into pettiness, in betrayal and rot. All we have – just to be. Not to exist, but surely to live - believing into miracles and creating the last ones for others. And the greatest of miracles, Petechka, is hope. The most important, pure and life-affirming. The most strong and most holy. Most influential for soul and for mind. Nothing else can inspire you more, nothing else can give path to the light, to correctness and clearness of goals. Only hope heals and carries through abyss, truly leading to rich worthy finish. Only hope keeps presence of God. Only in hope, only straight strong believing."

"What if I'm having no hope?"

Anatoly Efimovich has paused and hopelessly sighed: "Then it's death. All will be fully useless. The worst of all conditions is hope's absence."

"And, by the way, most frequent, after all."

"I agree. The path to correctness is short, short and narrow – one wrong step, and you've stumbled – stumbled, wilted, collapsed. And all the meaning disappeared..."

"Zero is head of any numbers. It brings them down right at in once." - has said Petya: "It’s not my habit to trust people, but I’ll try. Please, do not disappear after week, don’t leave your mother all previous dozens of partners. I remember each one of their flock... Will you have cup tea?”

"With rich pleasure."

"Then let's go. I even have lump sugar. It’s also kind of miracle, like hope."

XXV

Unhurriedly enveloped dim expanses with monotonous sad whitishness young dawn has confidently stretched by modest peaceful room, started playing with things.

Petitechka, who has got finally accustomed to new mentor in past three weeks of their communication, is already not sleeping – is waiting for the time of noon. And for huge reason, not in vain – at such good time should come, Anatoly Efimovich, who has become completely irreplaceable: with him you can have joyful time, you can discuss all shades of life and do all this on equal full positions, without mockeries and contempt, you can go for walk and to listen to tellings of city, you can even get journey too zoo, and he will easily provide it. What a marvelous beauty.

The door has got own sure knock, and on the threshold has appeared familiar angular silhouette.

"Hello, Petechka. I've come to you again. Today we’ll visit one my friend — he is entirely like me. And maybe he will be there not alone. We'll also buy some gingerbreads at way."

"I'm wholly filled with hugest wish to go."

"Then let's start."

The path got birth.

As it was recently predicted, Matvey Grigorievich indeed is not alone - with Marina Valeryevna, who has tenderly come to meet guests.

"Step inside, take a sit.." - has extended the lady: "I've baked pies."

"And we've bought gingerbreads in addition. An arsenal, not less!" - has remarked Anatoly Efimovich.

"An imperial set." - Matvey Grigoryevich has smiled: "We’ll gift to our bellies true feast."

Have joyfully sat down, laid out all the food, then curiously stared at each other.

"How blissfully warm is close company..." - has delightedly sighed Anatoly Efimovich: "Just paradise at earth."

"But not with everyone it's possible to talk at sad today." - has extended Matvey Grigorievich.

"Why people are so bad?" - has asked Petya: "Why all is so?"

"Current people are dying at now..." - has complained Anatoly Efimovich: "Such ones became completely rare."

"These are not people, Petya, do not look." - Marina Valerievna has joined: "It's simply stupid to rely onto worthless opinion of those who despise themselves, who are tormented by such trifles as hatred, envy or betrayal, they know neither truth, nor even sweet alluring part of lie."

Petya has looked directly up and then suddenly asked: "May I call you my mommy? It’s so much good with you in pair, as we were sculpted from one stone." "Of course, you may." - has asked him timid lady.

"So, how not to lose own heart?" - the boy asked again.

"As a rule, any meaning arises more often there, where desperation has become to feel bored." - has remarked Anatoly Efimovich: "And time-line is entirely endless and mean: at first life cherishes you, then beats. But please persistently remember, true soul will never die or shallow. High feelings never fade or disappear. It’s rather difficult to find such priceless treasure, but it must be, must have existance in this world."

"I believe." - has nodded Petya, gritting teeth.

"Don’t be sad, my sweet boy. All is surely fine. Let's better go to play in lotto." - has suggested Marina Valerevna.

All have concordantly agreed.

Have started to play lotto. Now, at least, next two hours will certainly be not so gray and bored. Game is better than life. This is fact.

XXVI

Bitter day has achieved poor Petenka. Scary, dark and disastrous. Fatal, dashing and horrible. Heavy, black. But started it completely harmlessly and calmly – with hopeless murk of ashen morning.

The ceiling has got whitened. Behind of cold and freshly misted window – long veil of monotonous thick fog - cloudy gray and opaque. All the house is still closed with darkness. On things are many-faced slow shadows. In tartly viscous air – familiar from very birth depression, slight detachment and yearning, rather careless one, by the way.

One minute from the waking up and it’s already time to go for lessons - to put the books and drag to boring educational procession at local charitable school - the most available of studying institutions. With piece of trouble, all is done. And now the road – monotonous, joyless and long. Some torments more, and will be usual class.

Six vain hours has flown rather quickly and uniquely calmly - no one even beat and forced to humilations: for school realities such luck is outlandish. And now back. And once again long tiresome road. This time in opposite direction. On the street all is quiet, but at home... At home, agony and hell. The door is opened, in inside is strange noise, some new people. Petechka has got timidly hidden, then carefully crept inside of room, sneaked and fallen in shock.

All things are upside down, on bloodstained floor is lying lifeless Anatoly Efimovich - with broken head and scratched face, next to the body - Pavel Alekseevich, thevery “father” of our Petya – fat red-haired policeman with rank of captain, also stained with the blood and with freshly dissected blue eyebrow. Into distance of meter is young fearful sergeant – with some paper in hands.

"Do you know what to write?" - has rudely asked the kinsman.

"An accident..."

"Write, as I told. You will write, that the victim was drunk and, trying to get up from chair, lost own balance and fell, broke the head by the corner of table. And write my Lizka as a witness. And not a word about me. Or I’ll split your head too. Has you heeded?"

Petya has instantly gone limp and, having gathered last strengths, has immediately rushed in away.

A sharp attack of incomparably caustic hurting pain and inexplicably excruciating humiliation has promptly bursted with deep waves of internal breakdown and not passing harsh bitterness, so immense and frantic. So recently arisen pure awareness of life has got entirely erased without trace. Where to go, where to run and to whom... The only variant is given – to start to rush to Matvey Grigoryevich and Marina Valeryevna – they are able to save.

And now their dear cherished porch.

"He ... He ... I must destroy him, I mush punish! He has killed! Has killed my Anatoly Efimovich! We have to kill him too. Right now."

"Who?" - has asked frozen Matvey Grigorievich.

"Father..."

"What a sorrowful tragedy!"

"All the house is now upside down. I'll never go back. It’s much better to die on the street, if you will not accept me."

Matvey Grigorievich has urged Marina Valerievna: "Past peace is finished. We have to ride away. Far and quietly. And Petya will have way with us. All should be done completely rapid. Pack your things and some goods, into evening we'll ride on Siberian train, I hope we'll have be enough of coins for to be taken with no tickets. And then obscurity and random."

"We must kill, we must do it."

"At here we have to do step back. Please, shy away from shit like him. You have to live, don't spoil line of future. And you, Marina, put some tea. Maybe last one in our life. The main thing is to get an escape to disappear for life-time. To disappear, but get rescued."

AFTERWORD:

Life after moving to Siberia was fully unremarkable and joyless, plots were plain, past emotions were canceled, all was given – lust endless uncertainty, inexorable, hopeless and gloomy. Unstable, shaky line of painful fate was adhering to rigor and constancy, having either in near or in far distant future no tempting chances or bright prospects of meaning or luck. In such a way have passed two years – completely lifeless, sad and aimless. And in next all has got even worse - has died Peter's mother - got a cold and then has not recovered. This dark event has caught Matvey Grigorievich like thunder – having striked him away and fully plunged in an enormous deep weakness. But even this was not most memorable thing, the loss of Marina Valeryevna has seemed as something rather feasible for so patient and strong Matvey Grigoryevich's burned soul, very painful, of course, but quite bearable. Something else has remembered remarkably better... That happened after five of years after death of Marina Valerevna. Petya, who has totally grown at that time, has recalled this dark day very well - it had happened at local bazaar, Matvey Grigoryevich, having took dear Petya with him, had been walking through ranks and examining trivial goods types onto shelves. The day had been completely hot, people had been tirelessly arriving, time had been going in a hurry. At the end of the market, an unfamiliar, already aged man in a frayed frock-coat had approached Matvey Grigoryevich and unexpectedly greeted his person, then had explained him some of things and handed over some small letter, demonstratively bowed and pronounced goodbye. After this rather trivial meeting, Matvey Grigoryevich has instantly got changed - he had got sharply boiled and angry, almost wanting to rush at the stranger with fight, but kept calmness and helplessly crawled down the wall, loudly sobbed and grasped his poor head. Petya also had got fully stunned and embarrassed with such matter, then had hurriedly run to Matvey Grigoryevich and had taken his hand. He had remained entirely detached, and only after few of minutes had despondently said, coming back to oneself: "All is lost. All the fate." Only later our Petya has sadly found out what a person that time it had been – none other else than Arkady Ignatievich.

"Good day! By what of fates we've met!" - he had greeted that time: "How long has been our parting... I have to tell you some a thing. I have to do it for long time. And now it's moment for to make it. At last meeting I've told you full lie. But not myself decided so, not by my will... Your Anna Evgenievna... She did not die that helpless time, she went to the other man - moved to live to his house. After year or two she decided to tell you the truth and wrote apologetic letter, where timidly said, that she is happy in own marriag and got birth for two children, which are good, smart and healthy... But you so promptly disappeared. And now we met each other once again. How you are? Have big family too, lots of children...?" Here Arkady Ignatievich had been mocking, very shamelessly mocking - he had been clearly, firmly that hero was entirely alone. He had been knowing it, but been completely smirking. Since then, a lot has slowly passed. Matvey Grigoryevich has changed - has become very quiet, depressed and dejected. His mood has melted far away, his strengths has faded and dissolved , his hope has turned in senseless ashes. It has been seeming that past loss has returned with a hundredfold volume, having fully disenfranchised all kinds of hopes. From that moment the hero has got deeply silent, rid of any emotions, addictions and joys, having sadly acquired one habit - to go almost daily to the cemetery to Marina Valeryevna: to speak with grave and dear soul, the one, that longly left, but stayed alive if frames of mind. In frames of current abyss...

************************************************************* Blurred distance is sad, hazed outlines are bounded by dusk, smooth views are lonely and depressed, indifferently dark and sharply hopeless. Everywhere is absolute bitterness, apathetic oblivion, pain and dejection. There're two standing silhouettes at one of faceless graves - Petr Pavlovich and Svetlana Sergeevna, a nice young girl, whom the hero has met in a crowd – just single couple months ago.

"Matvey Grigoryevich, my mentor and my parent, successor and full substitute of Anatoly Efimovich, you've always been a Human, and now you're no more with us, already painful half of year, at now I’m gladly not alone, as you can see, I’m sorry – have not found my partner at your life, you had been so much wanting to provide me with couple and family, you been always afraid, that I'll repeat your poor fate.. You all last time had been instructing – remember, Petya, the saddest thing is when you have no one to talk to except of grave, this is most bitter, painful statement, an unbearable, uhurting and dark. I so clearly understand you... At now I have no one for to come to for advice. November eighteenth is a bitter date, dramatic, difficult in our hopeless destinies. On eighteenth of November you has left this mad world, left forever, but I remember this dark day in other colors too – that day Anatoly Efimovich had met me for first time. I've broken him all life. I was born fully useless, I know. Anatoly Efimovich... Bright, clean human you've been. Such ones are so rare at today – as never."- Pyotr Pavlovich has got completely silent.

"Let's believe into good, try to change it... Let's seek for positive direction. We’re together right now. And I faith that forever. Let's play the wedding in next year at this dark date, having broken sad vector of being."

Pyotr Pavlovich has stayed directly silent.

"For happiness we need just to believe, to gain true hope and save its matter." - Svetlana Sergeevna has taken hero’s hand and looked in eyes: "Let's just believe - sincerely, nonchalantly and saintly... Let's believe into soul."

The hero has looked up and slowly nodded.

Let's believe. Let it be.

Oh no! Don’t tell me I’m nothing -

something lives inside my head,

my black eyes have seen it all.

I leave my calling card on doorsteps,

scattering echoes of wind as proof

that I am a new beginning, waiting

for the fog on the deserted road

to develop wings and begin to fly.

I bare my tainted pen, becoming

something in shadows climbing

over empty spaces, leaving space

for something echoing in soup bowls.

Feed me! Feed my emptiness of soul -

move the migraines in my cloudy vault,

follow footprints into charisma of dawn.

I may mean nothing but I am your world

your empty spot, just waiting to be filled.

realignment

transfigure your spine blithely

overhaul by sex

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Never know how much I love you, Prose

never know how much writers care

when you enclose me in your open arms

you give me heat to write and flare

sky’s the limit, I’m not censored

fellow writers flash daytime with ideas

Prose flames moonlight by its challenges

guides me along the fire of promise

shared with group of fevered creators

gypsy souls intensify my imagination

roll my verve down flamed inspiration

flared open to suggestions and thoughts

Prose exposes me to delirium of my essence

encourages me to strike in new directions

I light up when I call the name of Prose

because I know that it will treat me right

now you know how much I love you

igniting creativity until I glow my torch.

New challenge for this season~ Seniors love posture corrector

Inspired by JulianRace:

https://theprose.com/challenge/10365

Anything goes- poetry, short works, a tale\story etc.

#SeniorsLovePostureCorrector

I tore my hair in clumps leaving raw skin and drops of blood which began

to course down my worry-creased forehead in a stream of wetness. I was tortured by visions of Patsy Cline’s song “Crazy” in which she laments being left for someone new and being crazy for crying. I had been wailing for so long and so many hours that my face looked like a balloon twisted in a caricature of what I vaguely remembered. I was amazed that I was still in one piece because I felt utterly unglued but at the same time, I felt as if I were in a straightjacket crushing my innards. Why oh why did he leave me? I had always been there for him – soothing his brow, listening to his problems, romping in bed with him for hours, lending him money – the list goes on.

His new girlfriend was plump and simpering and had a brain of mush. She must have given him something that I could not, I reasoned when I was being coherent, which was not often the last few days. I felt like a psycho, consumed by my feelings of lost passion and bereft at his lack of honesty. I knew that I had to get hold of myself before I went down the path of dementia into an abyss I couldn’t escape. Deranged, crazed, bonkers, unzipped - was this who I was becoming?

When I stopped my sobbing for a breath of air, I realized that this was not who I was. It would be more positive to channel my unbalanced persona in a different direction. It was payback time! He was picking up the rest of his clothes and his mattress next week. I forced a smile when I remembered how narcissistic he was about his expensive collection of designer shoes. I began to skip in rising glee toward the closet, gathering his shoes and carrying them into the kitchen. I just had the craziest idea!

I laughed wickedly, as I opened the cans of tuna fish, draining the juice into a large bowl. (I’d save the tuna to eat later) Opening the cupboard, I saw the pastry brush which was an enormous part of my plan. I dipped the brush into the tuna juice and basted the insoles of his shoes copiously with generous amounts of the liquid. I was on a roll! Why stop here? I went into the bedroom that we once had shared and split the seams slightly on the underside of the mattress. I drizzled the remainder of the tuna fish juice into the cottony insides and sewed the opening shut. My endeavors had plenty of time to ripen before he arrived.

Next week came and I could see that he was shocked to see how happy I looked. He had so thoroughly torn me apart that he couldn’t believe that I would ever heal. But I was feeling wonderful, knowing what was in store for him. He didn’t notice the smell which was beginning to intensify. He gathered his clothes and dragged his mattress to his car to take back to his new apartment and his new lover.

A month later, I received a distressed call from my ex. The new flavor of the month had left him and he wanted me back. He lamented, “She said she couldn’t stand the smell of my feet and the stench of me on the mattress. She kept buying me soap, deodorants and detergents but she claimed it didn’t work. You don’t think I have a foul odor, do you?

“I think you stink in many ways,” I answered with a smug smile on my face, “and I will never allow your foulness in my life again.”

Revenge was sweet as I savored the outcome of my crazy idea. Or was it?

When I had been on Prose for a month, I wrote a thank-you note. Having now written 100 posts (which, admittedly, included a one-liner about Pinky and the Brain), I find I have more to be thankful for. (Be forewarned; there is much navel-gazing ahead).

My seven months and counting on Prose represent my most sustained effort to write. I wrote requisite bad poetry as an adolescent, and I tried my hand at some short stories as a college freshman. But I concluded that they were bad and stopped; I filled my schedule with as many lit classes as I could cram, but I never took a creative writing course after that freshman year. A few years after I finished my masters, I took it into my head to write a novel, which I worked on off-and-on for two years, based upon the dates displayed in Windows Explorer. I pulled up that file now and am surprised to see that I wrote nearly 38,000 words of it before I decided it, too, was bad. One day I reread a chapter I had felt good about; I saw only flaws, and I stopped.

Somewhere in there, I also wrote an essay that was my love letter to community theatre and Shakespeare. That one I spent a lot of time polishing, and I actually tried submitting it to a few publications, but it didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t really expect it to, but I had worked hard on it and had hoped it would get read somewhere by the wider world. There was something symbolic about making “Rude Mechanicals” my hundredth post on Prose, though I couldn’t quite tell you what it was.

And I went through a period where I wrote short plays and sent them to various contests, though they also went nowhere. And again, one day I reread something I created and thought, “Why did you ever like this? What quality did you see?”

And that’s pretty much where I was before Prose.

But I learned something on those steps of the road. The aborted novel taught me how to plot out a narrative and develop a character indirectly. The essay taught me what it looks like to work on a piece for real, and with the aid of a trusted friend and skilled editor. The plays taught me how to write dialogue and adapt voice. And since I’ve been writing for Prose – and real people! – I’ve gotten better at giving scenes a sense of place, and at least a little better at finding the sweet spot between obscure hints and beating my reader over the head. And I have learned the value of a community of writers, whose work can inspire me when my efforts feel lifeless and who can help me to feel my words are worthwhile.

For the first time in a long time, I feel a level of confidence in my writing. In times past, and when I first started on Prose, I’d read the work of a writer who had been chosen for publication or a contest victory, and I’d feel hopelessly outclassed. I’d think, “I could never approach that.” Commenters on Prose are kind, though – sometimes (often?) more kind than my work merits – and supportive in a way that prevented me from throwing in the towel and walking away for months or years, like I had always done before.

By the time I finished editing and posted “Rideshare,” I felt pretty good about the story, but the response genuinely overwhelmed me. I did not expect to win the challenge, but more importantly, I did not expect the sort of comments that some of you left. And the unexpected result of this unexpected response is that I feel… competent. I can read some of those works that before left me feeling hopeless and small, and I can think, “maybe.” Those past pieces of mine no longer seem “bad”; they seem immature.

I don’t know that my writing is “mature” yet, but I know I’m going to try again for publication. I’ll submit some short fiction to some publications; there will likely be a self-published short story collection on Amazon some distant day in the future. I’ve got at least one yet-unstarted story idea that I’m excited about like I was “Rideshare.” I don’t expect anything grand to come of it. I don’t know that I belong in the big leagues; I’m definitely not all-star caliber. But thanks to my time and friends on Prose, I feel like I could be a slap-hitting glove-first bench player who might collect a base hit or two with a little luck and a lot more work. It’s a new feeling. And I wanted to thank you all for that.

When I wrote that one-month thank-you I tagged literally everyone who had ever Liked a post I wrote. Not gonna try that now, but I want to tag those who commented on “Rideshare” and a couple others. No omission intentional

you are my cherry:

a sweet delicacy

among the glimmering sun,

a refreshing enchantment

among the buds of my tongue.

you send tingling

explosions through my soul

adding red-wine colour

and ripe honeyed citrus

to my sour lemon life.

my love,

i am bitter and cruel,

hardened by time

and roughened by heartbreak.

but your tangy taste has added

dimension

to who i am.

you have softened my harshness

and smoothed my tartness.

oh my little cherry,

we create flavours so

potent

and a love so

strong.

so,

let us stay as a perfect pair

living in infinite ecstasy

for i

am so much better with you.

(i don’t know if i could live without you).

I am useless

like a flower.

born to grow and die

only so that someone

can eye me like a prized possession.

I have no purpose

other than to look pretty

with my dainty petals

softly folding in

one another

in an endless maze of wonder.

I’ve been admired

and grazed,

it should make me happy,

to feel wanted,

but it makes me feel disgusted

that someone would only love me for my body.

I don’t want to just be beautiful.

(I don’t want to be weak)

I want to grow in the light

for the sake of growing,

I want to live

for the sake of living,

I want my colour to drain

for the sake of dying.

I don’t want to grow, live, and die

for someone else’s enjoyment.

I will not be used

like a flower

so stop staring at me

like I can be.

(I may be beautiful, but there is so much more to me than my flower persona).