The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 77

When saying “goodbye”, she sobbed a little until Dad snarled: “Again? Started again!.”

Then she kissed all of us, her grandkids, and was gone from my life…

Across the road opposite the corner buildings of our Block, there was a grocery store and, after Grandma Martha had left, Mom was sending me there for small purchases, like, bread, matches, salt or vegetable oil. More important products she bought herself—meat, potatoes, sore cream or chocolate butter. For holiday celebrations, large-beaded red or smaller-beaded black caviar was also bought because the Object was well catered for. And only ice-cream appeared at the store no sooner than once a month and was immediately sold out. As for the tasty cornbread, I never saw it on sale there.

To the right from the store, near the bend in the road around the blocks, the wall of the forest was slightly cleft by a narrow glade, where the car repair ramp constructed of sturdy logs provided another gathering place for children to play.

“To the ramp!” called a familiar boy running by. “They’ve caught a hedgehog there!”

All the hedgehogs seen by me up to that moment were only met in the pictures, so I also hurried to the scream-and-shouting group of boys. With the sticks in their hands, they checked the animal’s attempts at fleeing to the forest, and when the hedgehog turned into a defensive ball of gray-brown needles, they rolled it pushing with the same sticks into a small brook. In the water, the hedgehog unfolded, stuck his sharp muzzle with the black blob of the nose out from under the needles, and tried to escape thru the grass on his short crooked legs. Yet, he was spread on the ground and firmly pressed across his belly with a stick to prevent his folding up again.

“Look!” shouted one of the boys. “He’s constipated! Cannot shit!” To prove the statement, the boy poked a stalk of some rank grass into a dark bulge between the animal’s hind legs.

“The turd is too hard. He needs help.”

I recollected how Grandma Martha saved me.

Someone in the company had pliers in his pocket, the patient was crucified on the earth with a couple of additional sticks and the self-proclaimed vet pulled the jammed turd with the pliers. The turd, however, did not end and turned out having a strange bluish-white color.

“Damn fool! You tore his guts out!” cried another boy.

The hedgehog was set free and once again made for the forest dragging behind the pulled out part of the intestine. All followed to see the outcome.

I didn’t want any more of all that and, fortunately, my sister came to the rescue running from the Block to say that Mom was calling me. Without the slightest delay, I left the party of boys and hurried after her to the Courtyard. There I talked to Mom, greeted neighbors, ran some errand and all the time was thinking one and the same thought formulated in an oddly crisp, not childish way, “How to live on now, after what I’ve just seen? How to live on?”