The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 107
Fifteen are not a single one and there is a definite deadline when distaff clan members will come to pluck the initially processed products clean of their feathers. But each of the would-be products, while alive, has its own coloring and age, its personal point of view on what is happening, its individual reserve of energy, which determines the loudness of protestations as well as the protraction of the flutter with the already chopped off head.
You can’t do such a job without being methodical. So I turned into a robot methodically repeating a set of the same movements… fifteen times…
Sometimes, I looked thru the window-opening, still lacking its frame, at a white fluffy cloud high in the blue sky… So clean… Immaculate cumulous curls…
Just so a robot with a kinda sentimental wrinkle in its program.
Since that time, my attitude to executioners has somehow changed. Probably, I understood that nothing in their nature was outside me…
Well, in a nutshell, at that wedding I was a vegetarian.
Coming back to the assertion that in the case of the Fir-tree killing the weight of guilt was on the ax, who pressed me into the destruction of the innocent plant, then there’s nothing new about it, “I was carrying out the orders…”
A commonplace low-grade zombie-simulation…)
~ ~ ~
In the fifth grade, instead of just one Mistress, we had separate teachers for different subjects because our elementary education was over.
The new Class Mistress' name was Makarenko Lyubov … er… Alexeevna?…Antonovna?…I don’t remember her patronymic. Between us, we called her just “Makar”, yes, checks with the handle of the most popular army pistol of 12 charges.
“Atas! Makar is coming!” (In the school lingo "atas!" meant “beware!”)
But all that came later, and for the first time, I met the would-be Class Mistress the day before school, when Mom brought me there to copy the curriculum and get acquainted with my new Class Mistress.
Makarenko asked me to help her about the class wall newspaper on a big sheet of Whatman paper, which had to be adorned with a frame for which there already was the mark of a pencil line five-centimeter offset from the edges. She gave me a brush and a box of watercolors and warned to use only the blue one before going out together with my Mom to further improve on their acquaintance.
Proud of being trusted with so important a job, I started immediately, dipped the brush in the glass of water, dampened the blue and began to paint the strip of the Whatman paper between its edge and the pencil mark, trying not to trespass it. The job turned out an up-hill one – you paint, and paint, and paint but there still remains so much to paint yet. The main problem though was that each watercolor stroke differed from others by its shade of blue, making it hard to keep the uniformly. I persevered in earnest because not every day a boy gets a chance of making frames on a sheet of Whatman. However, by the return of Mom and Mistress, I had only finished about a quarter of the frame.
The teacher said at once that was enough, even more than that because all she had wanted of me was just passing the brush along the pencil line, but now it’s too late. Mom promised to bring a sheet of Whatman paper from her work, but the teacher said “no-no!” Then I came up with a proposal to mount strips of paper on glue over the superfluously painted areas, but the idea was also turned down, I didn’t know why.