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Literally a minute later, exactly according to the established Charter, Rond rang out, calling for a light dinner:
– Everything is ready! Welсome! You have not forgotten about me?! You will find tea and small goodies! Let’s get smart!
– Come on, come on, um! – Ave and Ski buzzed in one voice, glanced at each other, giggled ironically between themselves and headed toward the kitchen.
In the center of the cozy kitchen there was a small artsy triangular table with neatly rounded corners – designed just for all the inhabitants of a one-room apartment – an object of Avent-garde furniture. The frosted glass surface of his countertop was slightly highlighted by built-in soft green neon lamps, creating a homely warm cozy mood. In the evening it was possible not to turn on the overhead light, but to enjoy the illumination of the table, which made tea drinking a truly homely intimate tradition.
Tea was aromaticly smoking on the table, placidly filling the entire kitchen with sweet mint freshness. “In the same way, it was always pleasantly sung in our boarding school!” – said Ave to himself. Three bright green bells hung over a table with sulkons – a simple, uncomplicated lamp. One of the glass semiprecious flowers planted in a subdued light, dissolving evening gatherings. For what purpose Rond turned it on, although not at full capacity, but only by a third – it was unclear.
All three ants carefully, so as not to accidentally get burned, poured fragrant contents from one mug to another, in a “retirement method”, as Ski quipped. Silent silence. World silence. Perhaps a little sad… You can only hear the friendly murmur of chilled tea.
Not a single sound was heard from either the upper or the side apartments. In the neighboring apartments, in the entire huge building, these minutes also enjoyed traditional tea drinking. Yes, it is in the entire forty-story glass-concrete cube. In a multi-apartment building, which, however, belonged to dozens of others, of exactly the same buildings, was known not only in the city, but throughout the country to industrialist Theik Dee. To get a job at his radio parts factory, where Rond and Ave worked for life, and a little later, Ski appeared, or a well-known automobile giant, or one of the factories of the military-industrial complex, one was enough! Just one and only! You just had to be born lucky! His workers were provided with everything necessary for a comfortable existence: they were provided with paid living space and quite decent earnings! There was only one thing left – to work selflessly without stopping paws, without stopping for a minute. Work, work and work!
From early childhood, future workers of industrial giants of Theik Dee were conscientiously brought up in specialized boarding schools. For many years, yes, it can be said for sure that for many centuries of the development of ant society, a standard scheme of caring for those who have been raised, brought up, learned, “released into life” has itself built up – their complete and absolute dedication, their work, enduring conventions. They gave birth, raised, gave a little education, plus specialized for work on a farm or enterprise. None of the inmates of the institutions knew whether they had parents or not. It was in these widespread boarding schools that young ants were inculcated with work skills as a way of life-self-sacrifice, complete and unprincipled dedication: for several long hours (for a child’s fragile, sometimes sincerely-naive consciousness – just endless) hours a day, they tirelessly wielded harsh tools, at first with naive mistakes, then – gradually developing skills, and then – “on the machine”, quickly and with genuine enthusiasm spinning the little things incomprehensible to the childish mind; growing up a bit, ants spent almost all of their “free time” (the so-called “free from work”) on an assembly line in the shops of a factory that fulfills government orders for the defense industry, it was then that they first heard the incomprehensible word “weapons”, and began to to be proud (after all, they were just told: “Be proud, you are working for a great cause!”) that they help their valiant work to their beloved Motherland in an endless and everlasting war with a hostile aggressor that was boundlessly far! Farther than it seemed to many adults, and closer than perceived by children.
GREEN
Amina woke up and opened her eyes, deaf and hard sigh-null, absorbing imaginary freshness, and immediately, literally, in one marvelous moment, plunged headlong into the magical, enchanting fairy-tale-noisy world: here and there the sonorous pale lemon grasshoppers tirelessly, vying competed in the art of chirping, as if at an outlandish festival in the resort town; somewhere nearby, a restless river was pleasantly noisy, divinely playing with water musical busting on rocky rapids, like a harp, the warm south breeze was amusingly amusing itself with young foliage, stroking, tickling fragile twigs on only full-flowing fluffy leaves, steam very young dragonflies flew audibly in front of Amina’s very nose, catching up with each other. The sun’s rays, as if on a magic piano, wrote out a cheerful melody.
Above Amina’s head, somewhere on a branch, a gray-green bird flashed something quickly in her tongue loudly in her tongue, calling on the whole world to enjoy natural beauty. Either the multilayered drowsy blanket hid Amina and didn’t let go, or an impartial objective reality – everything spontaneously alternated in a restless and so seductive sea of consciousness: a titanic ball swept diagonally from the ants head and Amina from a frightening noise she closed her eyes, an imaginary ball desperately snapped “ooh”, and obediently returned to its original place, froze… Living reality confessed and, it seems, returned to the ant. The past was revived, or the future was growing with new sticky notes, uniting, flowing colorless from one to another, and freely giving birth to a synthesized new, unknown…
Here she is serene with Ave in front of each other, and he gently and so cordially holds her claws in his paws, and something endlessly, captivatingly speaks, and speaks, and speaks without end and edge, and she, blinded by desires obsessively looks into his perky eyes and swallows in measured portions his soft story. And then there was the artistic sincere whistling of a thrush, and mixed into one outlandish dish – the aroma of blossoming apple trees, lilacs and linden honeycombs, and again this unbearable stuffiness, and sparkling sunshine, and general whistling itch, and the murmur of an unknown mountain stream, and the rustle of a live spring grassy carpet, and the light buzzing of the May beetle, followed by a pair of dragonflies chasing each other, and the fall of a strange object to the ground (a cobblestone came from somewhere, it seems), and the sparkle in the sun is amazing of silver-thread kzotic patterns that spiders had made into oblivion from early morning – all this in one, common picture, pops up in consciousness, as if an abandoned spinning skillfully hooks in a stormy river and pulls out a trusting trout with a lightning jerk – all this returns Amina to the forest clearing…
Still not completely moving away from the restless half-nap, constantly interrupted by awakenings, the ant tried to look far, far ahead and saw only bright light and unclear outlines of brown spotted trees, she struggled to concentrate on the birch, on the pebble, which began to grow with moss, on the barrel that I decided to rest on this cobblestone, but, unfortunately, it didn’t really succeed – only phantom looms loomed nervously ahead, barely reduced to a single image, as they immediately mythically bifurcated, lined up and soullessly went into oblivion, into a translucent dusty heat. Amina continued to breathe deeply, reclining, near a sprawling birch, whose puffy buds were almost completely opened, and pleasantly scented with the freshness of the cleanest young leaves, but there was no possibility to move the fellow: vague internal forces harshly and uncompromisingly fettered her, as if hopeless paralysis, and never for a moment let go from the moment of awakening. Throughout the body – a lightning-fast growing, overwhelming feeling of anxiety and inexplicable panic, disarming fear. The blackening anxiety in the rattling air convulsively, with emphasized bitterness, plotted white gagged-wide strips of the crosshair, as if at a distance of several meters from Amina was an invisible ant and shamelessly with all his might painted lime on a transparent fence.
The naive ant from this unusual mirage vision threw into a light heat. The breeze suddenly changed and Amina smelled a sharp smell of a burnt tree directly in her nose, she instantly looked away, from where an unpleasant aroma had come, but she saw nothing and no one.
“Solid nasty things! We must survive this day, then it will be easier!”
The worried ant grunted a little in the womb once or twice, and it seemed to her that a bully bird, a mockingbird, mimicked her somewhere in the bushes, Amina made another effort and tried to say something, but an indistinct dry rattle scrambled out from a dry throat.. With a habitual movement, she carefully brought the foot up first to the petiol*, then to the swollen tummy, as if checking if her treasure was in place. The round, elastic body kept a new, infinitely dear to her life.
Amina recalled snatches of anxious and nervous sleep, which she had just dreamed of. For the last couple of hours she was dozing uneasily, constantly waking up and again crying and drowning in the same dream that she had before, and this continued until she finally woke up.
“Oh, oh, what kind of strangeness of our body? The riddles are solid… the same dream, the same plot scrolls more than once? Are we doing something underreporting somewhere, or what? Or do you need to change the tactics of behavior? Something useful to learn from this dream? Several times – is it like a reminder or what? Mysteries of the mind… Maybe, a reminder that we went the wrong way, and we must return to the beginning of the labyrinth of our destiny. Well, what if it’s too late and nothing can be changed? There are different situations in life… Sometimes it seems that each of us periodically returns to the beginning of this very labyrinth, which… No, perhaps you can’t return to the beginning! Of course you can’t! Each of us returns to a certain point where he already passed, where he was already… and, now, we stand and think: ‘Well, oh, after all, the last time I went this way, and came back here again, and where do i go now Where to? It’s a vicious circle?’ There are two or three more turns… it happens that there is… and we set off again with the naive hope of overcoming this damn thing, and it tempts us to express ourselves curiously-abusively, but, okay, just – damn maze with the help of higher forces, go-go, but, in the end, we return for the third, and fourth, and twenty-fourth times to the same intersection. The question is, well, why? Yes-ah… it is asked, but no answers have been given… we need to get up and go, planting hope and relying only on our own strength… who else would answer our questions. And who will answer them, if not ourselves… means, the conclusion is that we get up, no matter how hard it is, and set off again on the road in search of truth, happiness, dreams and everything else!”
In a failed, crumpled dream, the ant sat quietly, lounging in a soft leather chair, near the tinted oval window in a new, sparkling every detail, car of a high-speed train, confidently flying through an endless wheat field. Somewhere in the distance, the gloomy outlines of the city were visible: black factory chimneys blew out puffs of smoke, it seemed, never fading, rare multi-storey buildings stuck out with bristling needles-giants against the background of other cubes-houses. With each second, the metropolis was moving more and more away from the train.
“We, like, should approach the city, go to it, and not go somewhere to distant lands, away from it…” – Amina tried to rationally think in a dream, but the composition, the gentleman swaying gently swaying, everything went away and left from an alien settlement with a pretty decent speed. – “How so?” Well, how so?” – with an upset spontaneous hopelessness sighed an ant.
The pale, soullessly sad sun disc barely peeped out from behind the swollen rain clouds, surprisingly reminiscent of a pockmarked udder cow, ready for milking, and which were so full that they conscientiously waited for only one thing – the slightest signal of divine thunder to liberally give birth to a merciless, tropical rain. Either from the fact that the glasses in the impeccably new-baked carriage were carefully covered with a reflective gray-blue film, which was applied so that the bright sunshine did not interfere with the soft-armored passengers, or from the impending hard marbling of the weather, or something else, the gloomy landscape, which was slipping measuredly beyond the borders of another world, seemed even more depressingly gloomy.
A puffy toy – a funny little elephant – a hero from a well-known old animated film – a whitish-pink color: a soft proboscis, uncompromisingly bent upward by an arc-shaped pipe, innocently called for a cheerful mood, bulging over a funny freckled blue-eyed blue in Amina’s velvet doll legs. With a cap mounted on a puffy head, the blinded-oval, insanely huge ears seemed to serve the elephant so that he could easily overcome distances, flying from place to place. At first he sat quietly and with dignity, and was the size of a militus, tiny kitten, and after a minute or two indecently inflated into the pre-business of a giant pillow. The half-asleep ant, smiling a little noticeably at the very edges of the mouth, hugged the southern fat man tightly, like the most dear and beloved animal, and, sentimentally clinging to the plush, soft, angelic, almost half-dead creature, because it swayed measuredly in time with the train, flashing hilariously strange artificial buttons of his eyes, captivating with a sparkling light, and indistinctly ambiguously mumbled under his nose, – at least, it seemed to Amina, she felt much easier, trying not to think at all about the crazy speed the tee with which the train was whistling, neither about cloudy, prickly, depressing weather, nor about what is happening outside the bad window, nor about what is somewhere out there, its incomplete report about boarding schools and even not about what awaits her ahead.
The bright, spacious car was full of passengers, everyone was sitting in the same comfortable seats as she was. Someone was dozing uneasily, sniffing nervously and loudly, whistling through the sugar holes of the little mustaches, and at the same time, anxiously moving his upper pair of paws – it seems that in ephemeral oblivion, the helpless ant tried to crawl out, climb out of some incredible blockage, subtracting his path and getting out on a saving surface; someone calmly spoke in an undertone on philosophical topics with a neighbor on the road; a pretty well-dressed elderly ant, so crimson-gently sitting in the chair opposite Amina, having buried her face in the book with her muzzle, neatly mastered a thick historical novel; two mock soldier ants in full marching uniforms, somehow strangely falling into the “business class” completely unformatted for ordinary military men, settled down comfortably, turning almost close to each other, and talked about something, actively gesticulating paws. From the side, their lively dialogue seemed rather amusing, and Amina, looking at this scene, smiled broadly.
The car door rattled loudly and drowned without a trace somewhere in the wall, plastic profile slides indifferently captured her A comedic teen ant almost flew into the carriage, dressed in a fresh, clean, as if dry-cleaned, costume of a funny doggie: a cocker spaniel muzzle curiously rose on his head, shaggy velor ears drooped limply to the mesonotum (middle back) *, upper and the lower legs reliably moved, repeating the movements of the pet. A well-dressed suit looked great on the newcomer, and if it had not been for the lie-codegter finishing element – the doll’s face above the artist’s head, then everything would have looked just fine, without any flaws. Perhaps it was necessary to think of it in some other way: to reflect and adapt so that the terry mask of the good-natured dog would be worn directly on the muzzle by the ant artist. Following the funny cocker, he literally crawled on all fours, a gingerbread man rolled in a little gingerbread man, dressed in a colorful, multi-colored suit, either a soldier or a fireman from the last century, with delicately embroidered round shoulder straps, hanging (obviously with overkill) from all sides with sparkling elaborate accelerant, like a serpentine Christmas tree, he instantly rose and straightened. The belligerent stamped sprout came out small, rather even small, it barely reached just the cocker’s bushy ears. Energetic music sounded from the small sports backpack, deftly attached with bound ribbons to the back of the* spaniel, two artists hovered in an icy pose, mimicking the famous mythical sculptural sculpture, and even having time to sing along some text unknown to the audience. Amina was so carried away by the unexpected concert spectacle that she felt with her whole gut, felt how good she was, how pleasant it was to enjoy a simple circus number performed by ordinary train artists. She wanted to get a coin and toss a bucket into a poisonously reptilian color, but, actively rummaging through her broad pockets, she found nothing at all and decided to continue to enjoy the performance further. Here the first coin tinkled silver, – Amina’s neighbor deftly threw it in favor of the artists, he put aside his historical Talmud for a moment and, smiling unusually wide, so sweet that even honey drooling ran from the left edge of the muscular lips*, kindly carefully examined the wandering circus performers. Amina, again in earnest, was somehow uncomfortable, and she again nervously fidgeted, stirred, started to scour pockets for the umpteenth time, but they were all completely empty, but now – a real miracle – I stumbled upon saving silver shabby quarter, and immediately decided that he was much more needed by these amusing guys than she, she, embarrassed, quite awkwardly rose from her place, not letting go of her mother’s elephant, she stepped once or twice and somehow awkwardly the movement of the paws endowed with its generosity in stepping. The amusing cocker caught the corner of her eye that Amina threw a voiced coin, fervently nodded her double head and continued to dance. The soldier was already in earnest: he was growing upward, more, more sophisticated and more furious, and his legs, as if wound up, easily and simply made incredible pretzels, which could only be envied, and voted, voted, holo-forces’ throughout Ivanovo, ‘which somehow… somehow began to annoy many passengers. The protesting procession began to move unconstrained further along the spacious carriage, successfully collecting food for itself. Someone readily parted with their people in blood, while others simply stared indifferently, yawning at the performance, and sat motionless, as if nothing special had happened, but there were those who, in time with the energetic melody, gave in amicably paws, than the duet was even more paused by the most. But, as the holiday arrived on Amina’s car, he left, disappeared: unexpectedly, spontaneously, unpredictably. The sounds died down and abruptly broke, not reaching the end of the composition.
At that time, two double whistles hissed hoarsely, deafeningly, lingeringly outside the window, on that side of the windowless surreal world: “Lice-lice-and-and, lice-lice-and-and!” – as it used to be, on old, time-worn, loud-breathing train monsters, and, as if upset that he could not win the racing competitions, sullenly trudged along in a quiet, lazy move.
Resting Amina glanced anxiously at the illusory surface of a window glass gently browned by sunset, but was not tuned for a romantic contemplation of all the beauty of the natural picture, all the more so after a couple of seconds the conductor ant burst into the carriage, looked around nervously, took a step back, but immediately returned, grumbled displeasedly to someone standing in a gray vestibule, sharply pushed the door open, and politely, with a powerful, rolling baritone, politely asked the passengers to present their travel documents.
Sometimes it happens that you swim indifferently on a pathetic boat on a drowsy and capricious river of your confused thoughts, either flying swiftly, sometimes phlegmatically falling flat, then inspired by beautiful, crazy exploits, or sometimes pessimistically resting on the coldest day, completely without strength and without the slightest a ghostly desire to rise, and, surprisingly, you do not notice the landscape surrounding you at all, reality skips a gray, monotonous, indifferent background, and neither color paints, nor images, nor sounds, nor smells, nothing… Solid gray.
Exhausted by the monotonous, debilitating, lulling road, the ant anemically noted to herself that the live picture outside the artificial carriage, tirelessly streaming with a continuous conveyor belt, radically changed to a more joyful life: threatening enemy clouds, something, apparently, having scared, they have already fan-scattered, but the mean, pale, waxy sun, almost completely colorless, so huge and oblique, still remained behind the pink feather, as if torn to shreds, by soft cotton wool of clouds, and not far, just a few hundred meters from the railway flaunted low emerald green undulating hills, sometimes in places with blossomed pearly tankers stars-flowers.
Slowly turning toward the passengers, Amina unexpectedly found that she no longer had a soft toy in her paws, she simply irretrievably and suddenly disappeared into the transcendent parallelism of being. It just was, and already it is – no…
“Well, well, no, no! And this happens, sometimes… An unpleasant, so to speak, surprise…” – with even calmness digested the disappearance of the ant. She lazily, drawn, slowly, like a winter sleepy fly, pulled out a slightly rumpled ticket from a simple lady’s handbag, tried to straighten it, but she didn’t succeed, and she hastily handed it to an approaching railway worker. He was in no hurry to take the provided coupon. Then, with a prickly coolness, Amina raised her eyes to the conductor opposite, and what was her surprise when she saw Ave in front of her in the form of a railway inspector. He froze rosy and smiled the whole width of his face. Its icy state melted in one second, as if a drifting iceberg had been driven to the equator line, and in a matter of seconds it disappeared into the oceans, becoming a part of the world water kingdom.
– Ah-ha-ha! Happy birthday, my dear Amina! – Ave shone, sparkled, flickered with energy ephemeral stars of joy and love, which seemed to become visible around him. Amina could not believe if he was in front of her. – Happy birthday to you! Happy e-day of your great birth! How are you, at five, I hope? I certainly know that everything is fine with you! – He said it so juicy, so loudly that all the passengers in the carriage died down and looked in their direction.
– Yes-ah-ah, mood so-so-e-e-e… – the ant was drawn out protractedly. – Yesterday, it seemed, it was “five”, or even all “five plus”, and today – even… – Amina sighed, took a breath and continued, – I don’t even know what to say… Everything seems to be complete okay, all is well! And how are you? – dumbfounded by an unexpected meeting, Amina looked in love at the mysterious Ave, and still could not, well, could not understand where he had come from.
– Well, you’re the girl with us – wow-wow-smart enough, you know how to count perfectly! You know how, huh? I know for sure – you know how! Once, ye-e-es-s-sterday the mood was at “five”, which means that today – already at “six”, and tomorrow – will be at all “seven”! Aah? So, and only so be it! I’m telling you exactly, don’t even doubt for a minute! Everything is fine, count: from one to five! No, better – up to ten! And just business! Why are you frozen? Smile, come on! Well, smile, my sun! Listen to me and everything will be super!
– Mmm, interestingly you say, Ave! Is this possible? – Amina, often-often blinking from a fallen surprise, finally began to come to life and regain consciousness, and slyly squinted her eyes, mercilessly staring through the stunned Ave with a look.
– Still asking? Of course, pos-s-s-s-sible. Everything is pos-s-s-s-sible! – Ave exclaimed solemnly, clapping his hands energetically, playfully turned around him, standing on one foot. “There is nothing impossible in our world, as you already know!” Generally no im-pos-si-bi-li-ti-es!