Visions
A short story by Irina Tall
I often look out the window at the bluish clouds; my apartment is on the ninth floor. Not too high, considering the nearby houses, but what I sit on are reflections in the mirrors, my own ghosts, lost and unhappy—those who cry at night and laugh during the day.
Today, I found a dead crow—the second dead crow in a week—the first I saw near the river, right by the water, near a spreading willow with a broken dried branch on top. On July 7, there was a terrible hurricane. It passed across the whole earth in five hours from Alaska and America to Poland and Slovakia, having touched Finland, it dissolved. But those areas that had never seen a giant tornado—and instead only watched the news or simply read—felt the force of the wind. Many trees were broken; large ones were torn out by the roots and lay on the ground; somewhere, the roof was blown away; and pieces were found a block or two away.
And at the end of September, dead crows began to appear. Their bodies seemed undamaged, and children, seeing the gray carcasses, sometimes touched them with sticks. They tried to take pictures, but in general, they were not truly interested in birds.
The summer was warm, even hot. And all September, the summer grass was dried out and wild, like in the prairies. The clover dried up and looked like a charred candle stub accidentally dropped by someone. Sometimes stories grow fruits in our minds, but sometimes they hide, and it becomes unbearably wild and sad from the loss of that guiding star of Ariadne that would lead you out of the dark twilight into the light.
I remember how last year I flew on an airplane for the first time. It was an almost hard feeling of something alive under the seat as if a big blue elephant was hidden there.
And then the snowy clouds: sometimes they cried on the round windows. Someone covered their eyes, falling asleep for an hour, and someone stared with all their eyes, like me.
I was 36 years old when I first flew on an airplane. In the age of mechanisms and flights, it is too amazing and somehow wild.
Perhaps I am some kind of bird from the last century, descended from someone’s yellowed engraving. But the feeling of flight is probably worth the shouts of the guards and the fact that you can wait about an hour to board the plane. A thin girl in a blue uniform, a stewardess, showed some incredible wild signs as if she was communicating with the souls of deceased ancestors. It seemed to me similar to the shamanic ritual of Irkutsk sorcerers, only without a tambourine and bells.
Then I went almost out of town, to a green festival full of ripe blueberries and endless conversations. I couldn’t do much, and then I ended up in prison for two weeks, in a cell where sixteen people fit in ten meters. They fed me porridge and cutlets and almost didn’t give me anything to drink. The only drink was an old faucet that shook every time they turned on the water. Despite the fact that there were a lot of people in a room that looked yellow-orange in gray splashes of dead insects, it was cool.
And it is probably almost impossible to sleep. Sometimes I think more and more about those people who lived before us. Probably our ancestors living in the forest could be happy and free. But then invent happiness, and break the cage in which you placed it. Perhaps, if it gains wings, it will return to you later.
Sometimes I sleep with my eyes open after everything, but I do not dream of nightmares—only little people who keep a white fire similar to a syllabic bone.
Then I went out through the day. However, at that time, there in the darkness of yellow was something that you wanted to break without leaving a trace.