bad

That sound, rhythmic and insistent like an inquisitor's interrogation, long ago became my inner metronome, beating the beat not of prayer but of decay. A drop. Silence. A drop. The faucet of the washroom at the end of the corridor, broken maybe since the spring, during the dead of night drove a nail into the coffin of infinity, into that God-given ocean, which the brothers so persistently tried to contain in a bucket full of reproaches and dogmas. They thought they would keep the heat in by closing the windows, but the rooms only smelled of mold and unfulfilled prayers. Their anger coming from beyond the door was not holy. It was just masonry mortar hastily applied to...

The glass wall between me and them, or maybe between me and everything, is thin, barely perceptible, but insurmountable like the flow of time. I sit in a shabby waiting room chair, the leather of which is cracked like hardened earth, and I watch their silent, water-filled life. A slow, choreographed dance without sound, only bubbles rising up like unfulfilled prayers. The shirt collar, which seems to have shrunk an inch overnight, tightens around my neck, a tiny, insistent reminder of my own body's limits. One, the biggest one, with a torn tail fin, freezes in the middle of the road, as if she remembered a long-forgotten,...

A body heavy as if drenched in cement dust climbed into the bowels of the double-decker bus, each step a separate burst of pain through the knees and hips, as if someone were turning rusty screws in the joints of the body. The upper floor reeked, as always, of wet wool and cheap perfume, the aroma of everyday England. Through the dirty glass stained with the gray weariness of the city, identical houses rolled by, their chimneys smoking into the colorless sky. I was just another alien in this organism, petrified in fatigue, waiting for my stop as salvation. Suddenly, a new wave of passengers burst into the bus....

I The past is an abandoned railway cut into the outskirts of the city. The tracks, two rusted scars, are still there, but the trains no longer run on them. I walk them slowly, carefully, as if afraid of slipping into time. The rubble creaks underfoot, and the old wooden sleepers, rotted and blackened, lie among the luxuriant weeds. It is those weeds, those wild flowers, persistently climbing through the rotten wood, that are the real memory - not the event itself, but what covered it. I have one perfectly polished memory in my head. A summer day, so clear that even the eyes hurt. Your laugh bouncing off the pines...

The drum of the washing machine spun its silent, mechanical ritual, and I watched it as if hypnotized, sitting on the cold bathroom tiles. A world reduced to soapy water and spinning tissues. Sodden, tangled forms—like drowned hopes—beat against the glass, rising and falling in a rhythm that had no beginning and no end, only a monotonous, humming eternity. The green icons on the panel glowed like hieroglyphs from a world where everything still made sense: drilling, rinsing, softener. At least the machine knew what it was doing. She was more honest than me. On the tongue...

We do not go to war over abstract concepts like justice, freedom, or gods. These are just signs that politicians, self-important versions of better suits, cover up a much older, dirty impulse. With a hiss, I put my foot down on the first step of the cement basement, and the moldy and damp earth of an eternity came crashing down on my face. This descent into the dungeons of the apartment building, into the shared territory that never was and never will be shared, is a small, domestic war. There was not only moisture in the air, but also decades of accumulated, unspoken corrosion - old tires pushed too wide behind the neighbor, behind...

The heat above the square quivered like a transparent shiver, absorbing the reflections of the buildings and turning them into quivering mirages. In the very center, like an altar to a pagan deity, gushed a fountain, its streams, like the petrified backs of snakes, shot into the sky and fell down in thousands of needles, which instantly evaporated on the heated tiles. Children swirled and squealed around him, a barefoot, wet, sun-kissed tribe performing their incomprehensible summer ritual. They screamed. Splashed. It collapsed. Their laughter, sharp as shards of glass, pierced the air, but for some reason it did not harm it, but only filled it with life,...

It was raining. No, this was not the calm, pattering rain from the old books. Here the sky vomited bile, and the wipers, like two hysterical preachers, waved desperately in front of their eyes, trying to clean the world, but only smearing it into blurry spots of light. The road, glistening like a freshly shed snakeskin, wound its way through the darkness, and my lights were just two timid fingers trying to grope my way to nowhere. I ran. What a grand and deceptive phrase. I was running away from missed calls and from that thick silence that settles in the house when everything has been said but nothing has been resolved. I imagined myself…

The city breathed in the monotony of wet asphalt, and I, another erythrocyte moving through its veins, swam the usual route - from door to door, from one duty to another. There were no thoughts in my head, but a thick, murky and shapeless mess, settling somewhere on the back of my head. But then, at the turn to a more noisy street, I saw it out of the corner of my eye - an abandoned flower garden, forgotten by the municipality, wedged between the wall of a crumbling building and the sidewalk. It was not neat beauty. It was a rebellion of an anarchist color. From the ground, scarred like an old man's forehead, wild animals rushed...

At first it only threatened, the sky darkening to the color of wet asphalt and the air filled with damp dust and the smell of anticipation. Then the first drop fell. Heavy, lonely, leaving a dark, quickly disappearing coin on the hot pavement. After him - second, third. And then the sky cracked. It didn't rain. It fell with long, glassy fingers tapping on roofs, windowsills and car tins, creating a thousand different rhythms. The city, which was gray and tired a moment ago, turned into a giant watercolor. The traffic lights melted into the wet asphalt, leaving red and green blood...

The sun, cut by the blade of the horizon, slowly bled into the cool bath of the sea, and that blood painted the underbelly of the clouds with such banally dramatic color that one wanted to light another, even though the first one had not yet been smoked. It was between our fingers, the only thing warm in the cold, seeping through the thin jacket. She inhaled the smoke. Slowly, as if weighing each molecule. Her cheeks dimmed just a little, and then she released a gray, fragile soul thread straight into the body of the descending sky. It was silent. I was silent too. The Grand Finale of Silent Film, where two failed actors try to…

Maybe it's just that kind of day. One of those when the city, usually gray and wrinkled like an old man under the pressure of boots, suddenly sheds several decades and for a moment feels young again. The sun, as if it accidentally found a crack between the clouds-rags, poured viscous, honey-like gold onto the sidewalks. And then I saw her. She did not walk, but swam through that thick light, and the air around her seemed to quiver, refracted in a thousand rainbows. Hair - a river of molten copper, eyes - a lake after a storm, in which lightning still reflects. And in my mind, in that abandoned farmhouse, where usually only drafts blow...