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