by Iryna Somkina
I need to pee ASAP! The after-lecture beer is ready to burst out without permission. I’ve just got back to the dorm and didn’t even change. I sit on the toilet in my puffer jacket, the bag in my arms. My business is handled. I enter the room.
I still come back earlier than my neighbors and have some “me” time even at the dorm. I throw my bag on the floor, unzip my jacket. My bed is the only unmade in the room. I lie on it with my clothes on, open my laptop and start writing:
And then I thought that soon I’ll be twenty-five, and I still paint my nails sloppily, over the skin, and I can’t tie my shoelaces. I dream when I walk. If I have children, they’ll be just as useless as me, they’ll believe in lucky tickets and love raspberry jam.
Suddenly I understood that my calling is commenting on adverts. The same clip in different words, in the blocks that keep coming round and round. It’s a game. And I’m nearly twenty-five…
I go running in the mornings, you know, and I don’t eat sweets or bread or anything fried. I destroy valeriana pack by pack. I fill my head with nonsense. Just the way of the world. And above me — an enormous sky. Multicoloured. Magical. It shakes its imaginary finger at me and says: “Oi, you, don’t sulk. You’ll get a smack. Soon there’ll be sunshine, thaw, warmth.” I smile somehow crookedly and look for my sunglasses.
Soon I’ll be twenty-five and I still dream of untold mountains of sneakers and a good home bar. So you come in, lie down on the bed with your shoes on and drink something suitable straight from the bottle. You scratch your knee and think: “Shouldn’t I go to the chemist’s for a hematogen bar?” The imaginary finger straightens into a thumbs up.
So I’ll go in the light rain in my untied sneakers to the chemist’s for a hematogen bar. With a bottle of something suitable in my hand. For some reason it’ll feel easy and joyful, like the First of May.
Happiness is not when you are understood. Enough of this outrageous anthropocentrism. Happiness is when you understand and value others. And I’ll be twenty-five in seven and a half years, with a talent for commenting on adverts and French at the level of “even the skirting board is taller than me.” Maybe nothing decent will come of me and maybe I’ll never learn to tie my shoelaces, but seeing as I’ve ended up here, tomorrow I’ll go and buy a pack of hematogen bars.
Just in case.
I tap “Publish” and turn on the music. My neighbors will come back soon, I need to get my shit up. I make my bed while lunch is in the microwave. Mike Patton is barking from the cheapest laptop you even seen. Quiche with broccoli is still incredibly delicious, though it’s already Wednesday.
Ding-dong. Yarik D. liked your note.
Yarik D. left a comment: Are you goin’ to join 27 club? I fuckin understand nothing. Is that a cry for help?
You: lol no
I bited my quiche. Ding-dong.
Lara R. liked your note.
Lara R. left a comment: You always take the props for a confession. It’s metonymy used here. Jakobson would be delighted.
Yarik D. left a comment: you’ve never enjoyed anything without explaining it first.
Lara R. left a comment: There is a sky, shoelaces, nails, but you saw the bottle. Interesting.
Yarik D. left a comment: say it
Lara R. left a comment: The story ends when he lies down. Mine went on till morning. Coffee, rassolnik, the works.
My coffee is ready. I continue my preparstions for tomorrow’s lecture.
I note down: Foucault – the author is not the person, it’s a function.
Yarik D. left a comment: two years? you counted? cool. did you count how many times i asked you to stop waiting up. nobody asked for the fucking rassolnik lara. you just needed somebody to save so you could tell people about it later. and here you are. telling people. under someone else’s story. Classy
Lara R. left a comment: I asked you to stop drinking. You asked me to stop waiting. One of us was easier to please.
Yarik D. left a comment: right. and now everybody knows. Congratulations
Lara R. left a comment: Nobody reads this, Yarik.
Yarik D. left a comment: why then u showed up
Bart – the birth of the reader is paid by the death of an author.
Iryna Somkina is a Kyiv-based writer and occasional translator. She is a Best Small Fictions and Best of The Net nominee. She is a one of the prose editors of Michigan City Review of Books’ amazing team and founding editor of Sunday Morning Magazine.