The beach in the Hydropark. Two kissing but non-overlapping multitudes. First, the small clerks jumped out of the subway to swim, dry out quickly, and continue to move into rented apartments on the Left Coast. People tired of buttons, shrivelled tie knots, «I’ll be soon.» The second is professional lanterns, brown as algae in the bottom of the pond, which guide the inner surface of their hands and feet through the sun all day, as if they were armpits and in the groin they had demanding flowers. So, for example, the gravel girl behind me exposed herself to my underwear and the river star put the body parts on two bedsiders. «We’ve got pay-as-you-gos,» says the lie-down salesman. «Yes? Sorry,» the girl groups up, dresses up from the Convention top to the bathing suit, and leaves. «We’ve got the bedsiders paid for,» says the lier salesman to a guy who bought himself and sat on a bed on my left to read the paper. «I know,» the guy answers and throws himself on the elbow. The salesman’s waiting, the guy’s shaking the paper more comfortable, the salesman’s leaving with nothing. Nothing to sell is my loss. The second girl and the first guy could have been a good friend, but they took the wrong chess order. We’ll be here later.
Seared rivers stuck in the city pipe and buried, Chortory, Clov, Bannay, Fleet, I thought the fountains were if the underground water came out in an unexpected place, and the city was already panicking at the borticians around the breakthrough. Otherwise, the illegal river would flood the area. The coins at the bottom of the fountains were excellent proof that they were put in the grave of a buried river so that it could pay when it crossed Haron. There’ll be a landing later in the river graveyard.
My friend lives at sea. From her house, a little bit in concrete, behind the crazy cows to the right, along the former owlyard, and the boys on the gate, give ten rivens — here’s the sea. The term «Kiev Sea» is used by a friend after which the philologists say «Kiev text». This is the mouth of the Pripyat River. The required seas do not flow where on the children’s fever card there is blue on it, and mom carries triangular milk with hot basils, and not where the rotten basils have spread, destroying the wavers, and not where we drowned, but where we almost escaped. The Ural Sea, the Altai Sea, the Saai Sea, the Sea of Sev Kave. It’s what they say about bad shoes. We were wearing protective cream on the best beaches of the Teterev, swimming with a mask off the coast of the Horror, and the fish were waiting for us at Pripyat’s mouth. The fishermen here wanted so little that the goldfish ate each other for the right to do someone else’s wish. There’ll be a landing at the dam later.
I didn’t see any women driving in Venice. The girls work as mowers on a public vaporetto (there are one ropes thicker than the three hands of these girls combined) and there is no driving. The horse monument on Zanipolo looks as comic as if the Condotier Colleoni had been put on a bike or skated. You can imagine a horse in a gondola — how else would a horseman travel across Venice? — you give the horses a hand, she sits on the velvet bench, pulls out the hoofs more comfortable, and the gondola rolls over. When we had a boat and we walked it in the big and small circle of Dniepra’s blood circulation, Dad sometimes allowed me to wave a white flag to mark overtakings and turns. That’s how I found out I’m confusing right and left. If you stand on the bridge above the Acheron River and take pictures of Haron from above, he won’t do anything to you. When the boat drowns, they say a guest will come. The boat should be parked upstairs, or the drowns would be turned face down. If the boat left unscathed at night, then you’re gonna die with your eyes open. The water from the well tied boats rolls the restless babies. If you don’t talk about someone else’s boat, you’ll grow algae in your mouth. The water on the Grand Canal crunches under the feet just like this Moscow snow, but Venice is quieter and better heard. He’ll come to Venice later.
The house was floating, so the neighbor’s herons could’ve been torturing a frog. Inflate it, puncture it, wear it in a matchbox, roast it at the stake. You didn’t eat. The poor, half — fished, fat, pumped night milk from a gypsy cow — across the road the settlement of settled gypsies — the frog smelled of night water. One time, you eat one of these, it’s gonna rain. It was two, there’s gonna be warts in your stomach, you’re gonna grow three, you’re gonna marry a toad, you’re gonna grow four, you’re gonna understand, Pharaoh’s army is gonna walk five through the waters of the Black Sea. In the lake, a fish institution was banned from swimming in a strict-intensity way. But everyone was swimming. I have a marked scar on my left foot from frog teeth. In the summer, the frog’s teeth grow, and in the winter, I fell out, and in the winter, I fell on skates, and in the spring, I was swimming on a log, in the fall, throwing wood crates in the back, and I got to the woods through a dead lake. My parents punished me for all this in the summer. How she screamed at night, frog, screaming and singing, eat me. Lick me, suck my skin, swallow my bones. I’m gonna blow your right sleeve for this — I’m gonna give you gold, I’m gonna give it to you, you’re gonna be happy. The only way to go to the seven-sea state with you is with the blood from the hooves. And then they started to find the drowned ones. And then it rained dirty. He’ll be there later.
How come the city of Smorodina ignores its river? It’s like Smorodine sat down to pee, spread a wide circle, and makes her face «I’m researching herbary herbs.» Smorodina-rek, wide and curled up, according to the maps, in the life of Smordine-City, it doesn’t flow anywhere. She’s not a road, she’s not a fish bazaar, she’s not a beach, she’s not a river life. Dirty nets, crushed floats, sand in shoes, old ladies in ridiculous underwear, tea piercing, sharp shells, wet bridges, and bad kids jumping off them, where’s all this? The river Smorodine doesn’t smell or sound like a river, it doesn’t throw shame on the shore, it doesn’t flood, it doesn’t splash, it’s not what. I didn’t like it when I was rejected, but I didn’t like it. There’s no Smorodina-reki myth, she’s not painted or photographed, she’s not written poems about. They don’t walk along, both of its banks are left, but they don’t call them what they don’t call the edges of a high-end inflatable pool. From all the current of the Smorodina Reki, you can only see the unsustained photo slits on the Cruschie and the re-lighted photo-funds on the day of the WFD, the calendar puncture. And they don’t kill themselves in it. There is, of course, the Crimean Bridge, but the main hero of this story is a bridge, not a river. People don’t jump out of it into the water, they jump out into an unclear void, in some «Cry.» And in most cases, people climb the Crimean Bridge to scream from above, ask for a cold debt or a wife husband to pay back. They’re being filmed by lifeguards. In 1973, when the Golden Gate in San Francisco peaked at 499 participants, the police reinforced their arms and legs and stopped 13 people, including a guy in a 500 T-shirt. In the 500th year of Christmas of the first year, Smorodina-rek will rise and go, drags the whole town along like a newlywed cat with a bunch of empty cans. And then he’s gonna fly into town.
On Ilin Day, Elijah’s grandmother tells us what big karates they caught on the weekend and how they were hit on the head with a jar of boiled crumbs. Delicious. The problem with fish is always the same: to get on the news, fish must increase their size. Fish, squid, octopus — it is important that the animal stay as far away as possible from the countpoint in the table of the domesticated (there is a simple linguistic way of placing: the first ones who speak (meow-meow, crumbling…), then those who are undifferentiated roaring and singing or buzzing (ditch) and the last in line are silent). We have a legend in the bureau that the Earth’s ocean is now researched 7% of how space is being explored. Sea oysters, submersibles, coastal currents. In the duck year, a nine-metre-long herring king was introduced to the court. The herring king is a flat, living, blood — coloured belt with a buckle on the top of his head, swimming vertically, making sense inside the herring pond, feeding on herring. I want to draw your attention to the fact that no one will ever notice an adult herring king half a meter long, he just slips through a fishing cell or goes after a herring in a hydro report, and half a meter is a much more precious rare thing in a world of herring kings than eleven. It’s the opposite with dwarf seahorses — the lower they are in the holocaust, the more amused they are. And with love, the further the animal that goes into the food, from the domesticated, from the speech, the wider the spread of your hands. Like a fisherman in a water intake. The herring king is untasty. The herring king is a sure sign that he’ll come here.
In modern folk stories about a meeting between a man and a woman destined for each other, water often acts as a mediator. Well, guessing on a narrow water, just getting to know each other on the beach, saving a drowning, an unintended push into the water from the bridges during the laundry, heavy buckets of water, an umbrella discovered during the rain. Wet clothing must be removed from the shore — taken away. In Kiev, at the nearest bouvet, youths began to gather in early twilight and sat around the pump until dark. It was called «go splashing.» Many of them later got married. The fiancée’s encounter with the bride at a fire in the hydroarchy falls out of the canon. He’ll come back to the bouquet later.
We had a girl, bigger dolls, but smaller water towers. Her name was Dodol because she was carrying rain behind her bosom. I came from other people’s boring backyards to swing on our swings. Whenever we look out the window, it’s always there on the swing with the same amplitude. Long hair ran away from her like ants from a drowned pile. The hands were swollen with raw whips, and the legs were doing their return work plowing the puddle under the swings, never tired. Dodol sat face-to-face in my window, but her faces couldn’t be seen behind her hair. When it was raining, it was coming into force, and it turned into a cosop, and Dodola jumped off the swings and left. Everything in the yard is rusty and rotten, except for her stubborn swings. We’d put salt under the swing, and we’d rub it with the rotten egg of the chain, and we’d want those swings all the way out of the ground, and suddenly she’d come up with a short cut, and she’d sit still, and she’d dry, and she’d disappear like a rain blister. So there’s no more rain in our yard, the bucket until the end of time. There’ll be a flight to the yard later.
Hammerfish, swordfish, sawfish, moonfish, spider fish, clown fish, rock fish, blood fish, love fish, all fish, all fish, all fish, tomorrow fish (fish later)
