Читать книгу A little time to enjoy eternity - - Страница 3

As is often the case with teenagers, Lina

was sick of everything again. I got a school that didn’t have anything

interesting, I got a younger brother who always wanted something

,I got a mother who came home from work in the evening

and showered her with criticism and complaints. I forgot this, didn’t do that, didn’t think about it.

And so on, day after day,

really sick of it. With my friend Mara, of course, it was at-

Coldly, she couldn’t go out with her as often as

she used to. Strict parents, foreign language tutors

,music school and other «joys» of teenage

life left her too little free

time, and so Lina just went out alone in the evening

to wander around the neighborhood, to distract herself from her

thoughts, from noisy home and from endless school

lessons. Today, she decided that she would leave the house

earlier because Michael was due to arrive.

Michael was not her mother’s new husband, but he often

spent time with their family. This plump, red – faced man

with piggy eyes and a guilty smile made

Lina feel sorry for him. She couldn’t understand why her mother

had chosen such a ridiculous friend. He did not help

them materially, as he earned quite little,

and never bought them gifts or food. He was just lonely,

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just like their mother, and maybe that’s why they enjoyed

spending time together.

Lina didn’t want to have dinner in this

company tonight. They made her feel like a ten

– year-old girl again, being poked around and lectured.

So she called out that she wouldn’t be home for dinner and would spend the night

at Mara’s, she slammed the door and stormed out of the house.

My mother wasn’t up to it – my younger brother spent half the day crying

over a B in physics, and then to top it off

,he was bitten by a wasp. When his mother came home from work, she wiped away his snot

and tears, calmed him down as best she could, prepared dinner for meeting

Michael, and was generally tired after the day’s work, so she was

even glad that there would be no youthful

maximalism and arguments about nothing at the table.

They lived almost at the very edge of the village, two houses away from the fields and the road, then a thin forest.

Lina had explored the area up and down the rivers.

She liked the small hunting lodges

that kept coming across her way as she walked along the forest.

Cool but dry inside, they seemed very cozy —

you can lie down, listen to music, dream about your own things, and no

one will bother you.

Reaching one of them, the girl easily climbed

up the wooden steps and settled on the floor. She

pulled a thin blanket out of her backpack, wrapped

herself up, put her headphones in her ears, and lost herself in thought.

Finally, the long-awaited freedom! Brief as it was,

it made her feel like the queen of the world.

She wanted to breathe in that freedom and feel like she was on her own.

strong and confident. She enjoyed the fresh

air, the gusts of wind, the sky that peeked

through a crack in the roof, the music that made you feel like you

could do anything, and her fantasies about how she

would go to the city after graduation, to a model casting, how

she would be noticed by leading fashion designers, and her life would change, everything

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will it be cool or even cooler… Such average

dreams, but for Lina they were an outlet and the most favorite

pastime.

When it started to get dark, she dozed off. The music

was still playing in her headphones, but she couldn’t hear it anymore.

After sleeping for a few hours, she woke up

to another loud musical splash in her ears. Lina idly

scooped up the wireless headphones in her hand and emptied them

into the pocket of her backpack. She turned off the music and adjusted

her backpack under her head, making herself more comfortable so that she could sleep farther

away, but then through the cracks in the wall of the house she saw a light, some

lights about a hundred meters away, almost in the middle of a mown field.

Lina got up, crawled to the wall on her knees

,and peered through the crack. «Damn, is there a fire or something? The field is burning for ho-

do! «was her first thought. Then she looked closer

then she saw the man in black. She didn’t

even have time to get scared, it all happened so fast —

an incomprehensible creature crawled out of the burning pit and spoke to the stranger.

From this distance, she could barely hear them, and the language

seemed incomprehensible, some seething and hissing sounds,

unpleasant, blocking her ears, getting stuck in her head…

The girl stopped listening, but

she couldn’t take her eyes off it. I kept thinking, Am I dreaming? Is this movie being filmed

?The creature was half a meter taller,

thicker and more massive than a human, its tail was constantly hitting

the ground with small pellets, it was fascinating to look at, and Lina

first looked at this tail for a long time, silvery-blue,

with iridescence, but then she began to wonder what was going on there in

general. It looks like the odd couple was fighting.

Here the creature swung its heavy paw to

strike the man. The blow should have hit him on the head,

but he caught the paw in his hand and jerked it away. The

creature was supposed to swat him into a flatbread,

but he pushed it away as if it were made of cotton wool. And then

an even stranger thing happened: a shiny blue tail,

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and the paws, and the long ears – all this began to retract

in a monster, and here he is no longer a monster, but an intelligent

middle-aged man with glasses and a gray business suit. He

straightened his jacket, smoothed his hair, and continued to say

something. The man in black responded

by gesturing violently, showing his displeasure with

everything that was happening. Then the gray suit turned and walked toward

the road, and the other man, hands down, remained standing on the

floor. The grass and ground beneath him were almost extinguished, and it was dark again

,but he couldn’t see anything around him.

Lina backed away from the wall, her heart pounding.

She sat down in the corner, pulled the blanket up to her chin, and tried

to convince herself that this was a dream. She remembered that she and co —

boy had a smartphone, and she began to blame herself for stepping

out without filming the strange couple on it. «Yes, that would solve it

my problem, she thought. «Then it would be immediately

clear whether it was a dream or not.» With these thoughts, she

calmed down a little, reached into her backpack for her smartphone – just

in case, as if she really was recording

something on it, when suddenly she was blinded by an unexpected light – someone

was standing next to the entrance.

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