A Book without Photographs by Sergei Shargunov

Author:Sergei Shargunov [Shargunov, Sergei]
Language: rus
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78267-053-7
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications

Afterwards

When I got home, I could hardly find the willpower to open the window, make the bed and get undressed.

I was thirsty, but powerlessness won, and I didn’t move. Outside the blinds, a train shunted along sleepily, and the pillow blended with my cheek into an airy pulsating fabric. My pulse was quiet, soon I felt a drop. I spun around, I writhed about, I turned into bubbles, which furiously and musically rose upwards. By the plastic neck we burst and disappeared. My dream didn’t end, and once more, there was prickly flight along transparent walls, again the coarse blue neck flashed by, but we fled once more, burst once more, and firm and light, we hurried upwards.

I woke up. My mouth was completely dry. Feeling around, I took my cell phone from the table, which showed me that it was 1 p.m. The eternal train was chugging past the building. How long had I been asleep?

For some reason, holding the cell phone in my right hand, by old habit, I crawled to the kitchen, with my left hand I raised the dumbbell of the kettle, poured a rough stream through my teeth, went back to the room, opened one blind, and left the other one sleeping, and looked into the murky window of the telephone. I threw it down, and with a dull thud it fell on the papers on the table, and I started dressing groggily. Clumsily dancing in my pants leg, with a T-shirt half over my head, I looked at this table. In the half-light, the papers were like shadows of papers. “Baper,” I said as a child instead of paper. I talked like this for a long time. Baper. Bapers, a huge amount of them, covered the table. Bold proclamations, which were scary to read again now, and their bold style was a nasty joke. Important projects that had to be torn up. An unneeded newspaper with my photograph. Business cards, a pile of them, squares with names and numbers. And there was the red-skinned, shiny exercise book. I started to keep a diary in it on the advice of the publisher, and had covered two pages with messy handwriting. Now I looked at it with disgust. To peel off the moist red cover, and there were flying letters. To read it, to force myself to read it to the last phrase, frozen over the void, and run. To the bathroom, of course. To drown in warm water.

The telephone was silent. Outside the window there was a new episode of a nature film. In black and white.

And then I remembered everything. Unexpectedly I remembered. I thought about nature, and the last chapter suddenly came to life in a second. My child was in the hospital. Yes! My son! And immediately, forgetting about my hostility towards the table, I lunged at it, pulled the telephone out of the papers and called my wife.

“Hi.”

“I’m listening! What do you want?” the thin sound multiplied in her voice with a set of razors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.