OTHERWORLDLY ESSENCES
 
                                    Dedicated to my mom Elena and her famous theory
 
Story#72
 
“How was your night?” Alyonka asked with sympathy.

In the gardens behind the houses there was a fire, a child died. Burned alive in the fire. Two other boys, a Russian and a Chechen, locked him in a shed, set the shed on fire, and ran away, for fun. The wooden building went up in flames instantly. And help came too late.

“Oh,” I sighed and hugged my friend, “it was so scary! I had nightmares all night.”

Indeed, dreams in our house were special: they were either about the past, taking us to medieval jousting tournaments, or they warned us of a future when laser swords would be a weapon of choice.

“Mom ran her hand across her chest and couldn’t breathe – a house ghost was choking her! We gave him a mug of milk and put a piece of bread under the stove,” Alyonka shared her impressions of the past day.

“Do you believe in goblins?” I asked, because I did not think that a house ghost lived in our apartment, too.

“I do!” Alyonka sounded surprised. “A house ghost* is a small evil spirit of the apartment which must be placated, so he would not cause trouble!”

“Do you think he will calm down?”

“We’ll see!” Alyonka said hopefully. She sat a little longer with me, and then left.

Alone, I began to think that house spirits were much more dangerous than houses. House ghosts howl, wander around, and crave sweets.

The apartment we lived in was so haunted that it was impossible not to believe in otherworldliness.

One day my mother bought some custard cakes and warned me sternly:

“Don’t touch them until lunchtime!”

Obviously, I was very eager to try the cakes.

But I knew my mom’s temper. So I just walked around the table, sniffing the air, and telling myself that the last time I saw this kind of splendor was a year ago.

A terrible rumble in the room distracted me from sad thoughts. It sounded as though something heavy had fallen, and when I ran in to see what it was, I saw that the door of our chiffonier had opened and hit the bed. I began to look for our cats, as they were the usual suspects when it came to silliness. After all, they were so fond of jumping from closet to closet.

Mom came back from the yard and put the pasta on.

And then I noticed that one brownie had been bitten off! The horror of it took my breath away. I hadn’t touched it, and Mom wasn’t there, so who, other than a house ghost, could have done this?

“Gotcha!” Mom noticed the uneven edge too. – If you disobeyed my orders, forget about the cake!

And she took a bite of it, and then the whole thing, into her mouth.

“It’s… it’s the house ghosts…” I could only say.

“Sure, tell me tall tales!” Mom grinned. “I won’t buy any more cakes for another year!”

Macaroni were slightly burned, they were sticking to the bottom of the pot, and I envied Alyonka and Aunt Vale. They had a house ghost that ate only bread and didn’t go for anything else.

* * *

A THOUGHT
 
Story #74
 

Sometimes, lying in the dark and looking at the myriads of luminous points in space, I was visited by mysterious thoughts.

“Mom, do you see galaxies flying around us?” I asked from my bed, as if from a hammock, falling into the middle of its iron mesh.

“What are you talking about?” Mom was surprised, falling asleep on our soft sofa upholstered in red velour.

“Look around you! Look around!” I persisted, restlessly. “If you look closely, there are billions of blue, red, gold, green, orange, and purple dots all around us! They’re swirling in the dark.”

“That’s just the twinkling in your eyes coming from the lamp.”

“Not, it’s nothing like that! When the chandelier was on, I could see an aura-like light around it. Everyone can see that. But now, in the darkness, it’s like the northern lights.”

Mom pulled the blanket over her head and mumbled sleepily:

“And do you see Babaika there?”

Grandma Galya used to scare me with this terrible creature of unknown breed, and now my mother began to say it, too.

“No!” I shrieked angrily. “I don’t see it!”

The points of light in space flickered, dissipated, and I felt cold. It was fear.

“Why did you say that?” I had to jump out of bed and go to my mom. “Now everything’s different and I can’t sleep alone.”

“Yes, you can!” Mom said. “You are an adult and you know very well that this scarecrow is used to scare silly little children. There is no Babaika!”

Standing in the middle of the room in indecision, I realized that after my mother’s words, the darkness had brightened and the golden lights inside it had become much larger. It was safe to go back to bed.

“Mom will probably say goodnight to me now,” I thought.

“Good night!” Mom said.

I couldn’t sleep for another hour or two: I wanted to know what surrounds us in the dark and why words could be guessed.

In the morning, we drank tea from bowls hand-painted with lotus leaves, and I asked:

“Mom, what is a thought?”

“A thought?” Mom thought for a split second and replied, “It’s energy! They say that a thought floats in the air. Whoever catches it is illuminated by an idea.”

“Are all thoughts good?”

“There are all kinds of thoughts. There are bad thoughts. They are, of course, necessary for robbers and bandits, swindlers and swindlers. Good thoughts, on the contrary, come to good and merciful people.”

“I see,” I answered. “Thank you!”

Now it was clear to me that a person’s head was as empty as an inflated balloon, and thoughts flew in from the outside like moths.

I began to suspect that the glowing dots in the dark space were thoughts. Sonnets of thoughts that belong to no one until one day a skillful hunter pulls out his wonderful catch.

Going for a walk once, I decided to test my theory. The theory was that a thought that already belongs to someone, for example, to me, can move independently in space. If you let a thought go for two or three seconds, it will most likely get into someone else’s head.

Just then, Alyonka walked by.

“Yesterday I saw a funny cartoon called ‘Well, Just You Wait!’*,” I thought and jumped over my jump rope.

“Let’s go visit Sasha!” Alyonka called to me.

That wasn’t quite the response I wanted to hear at all.

I tried to think my thought about the cartoon again. And again. It turned out that the problem for me was to instantly forget my thought.

After all, that’s exactly what I should have done in order to get it into my friend’s head: a thought needs to be let go and forgotten.

“Why are you jumping?!” Alyonka sounded indignant. “So are you coming or not? There will be bagels! I promise!”

Realizing how fragile was my judgment of the universe, I frantically searched for a way to let go of my thought: after all, Alyonka was the one closest to me, which meant that a thought could move quite quickly in the air.

I put my jumping rope on a bench and removed the silver ring from my ring finger. It was given to me by Aunt Maryam. I swung around and threw it away.

“What are you doing?! What the hell are you doing?!” Alyonka clutched her cheeks in indignation.

“It’s a game! Whoever finds the ring first will be the one to take it,” I explained.

As soon as the ring tinkled on the asphalt, we began our search. Five minutes passed, ten, fifteen, and we still couldn’t find it. To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting this, and I was really scared, because I threw the ring not in the grass but on the asphalt at the entrance, yet it seemed to vanish into thin air.

“It’s gone!” Alyonka was just as upset as I was.

“You go ahead with your visit, and I will look for it until I find it!” My voice trembled with tears.

Now that I had lost the object that was important to me, I forgot about my theories.

“Don’t worry,” Alyonka said supportively. She added: “Yesterday there was a funny cartoon on TV. It’s called “Well, Just You Wait!”. Having said this, she went over to Sashka’s.

The ring gleamed near a stone that lay next to the maple tree.

Picking it up, I realized an ancient truth: a thought can travel anywhere, like a camel caravan through the desert.

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“Donkey Breed” is a book about childhood in Soviet Chechnya. It contains 101 stories by Polina Zherebtsova.
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NOTES

* The word used in the original is “domovoi” (literally: “a house spirit”).