Notes from Book of Faces By Anar Azimov Smashwords Edition © Anar Azimov 2012 Smashwords Edition, License Notes Thank you for downloading this free e-book. You are free to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. EXPOSITION ONSET OF A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A CANCELLED ROCK-CONCERT URBAN POEM ROCK-CONCERT FINALLY DONE FOURTH DIMENSION MONUMENTAL MEMORIES JAZZ LORRY IN MEMORIAM U-TURN SEA IN CITY SCRAPING THE SKY WINDY SUNSET NEW SCENERY NIGHT DUST PHILOSOPHIC HEAT USELESS SECRETS  SUDDEN DEATH OF BEING SOMETIMES NOSTALGIC TRUMAN SHOW ZOOM CHAOS THEATRE VIOLINIST SCULPTURE SEASIDE RESTAURANT SILENCE EVERYBODY'S GONE  CLASS OF PHYSICS NIGHT, STREET, LIGHT, AND WIND  CLASS OF PHYSICS NUMBER TWO QUITE LONG AGO GAPS SMOKE ON THE WATER MYTHOLOGY HOME VIDEO NOT TO ME WIND THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN BEHIND URBAN NOISE BOULEVARD COLOURMUSIC OF SUBLUNARY SEA END OF NIGHT IT'S GETTING LIGHT NIGHT TRAFFIC LIGHTS BREEZE ÉTUDE ZOOM-IN, ZOOM-OUT, AND EVEN CLOSER OPTICS STOPPING BY AN OLD YARD POETRY EVENING BIG CITY'S LIGHTS, OR PASTEL NIGHT DIMENSIONS DEEPLY BELOW WILL SAVE THE WORLD OF THINGS RAPID SUNSET BEFORE RESORT. NIGHT LIGHTS ON THAT SIDE OF THE BAY LIKE A WATERFALL UNDERGROUND THEATER IN MORNING SOMETHING ABOUT SUMMER FATE OR IRONY, OR ALMOST FORTY WRITER'S COPIES UNAVOIDABLE QUESTION You’re sitting on a riverbank and thinking on yourself. Pieces of strange lives and impressions are sailing by every second: photos and words, words, words. . . Sometimes, you throw a glance onto water and fish one’s impression you’ve found attractive, yet possibly letting dozens of higher attraction pass away. Or maybe dull ones. Whatever, the same Facebook can’t be entered twice. It’s me there, ARE swimming down the river, you see? EXPOSITION Standing on the hills, the city is painting a self-portrait. Climbing to hyper-realism, but falling into fashionable eclecticism quite often. Water-coloured clouds, oily sea, and multicolour-pencilled high-rises. Rooks come of a sudden. Or maybe not-rooks, doesn’t matter; it’s March anyway. Aerobatic manoeuvres by numerous black silhouettes seems bringing an encoded message.  Frequent ups and downs of the wings turn plus into minus and back. Just away from here and already reaching the seaside boulevard, is the city so small?  Or is the canvas? ONSET OF A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A CANCELLED ROCK-CONCERT Fade in: a city’s balconies and those of the venue: they will never meet. They are parallel, though curved lines can never be told about so. The floor is tiled, just like it is in local country houses. Hurtful to fall on, unless matted. Close-up: Director, House of Culture. Calling me onto his mat. His nose is right into the lens, while the remains of his hair are quite farther, mixed with lilac bushes. Yes, the close-up is calling me into his office with the record plan, but then seems to understand something (understand what?), and leaves disclosing the far-shot: a drummer on stage, single and doped. By the way on lilac: the venue is open-air. It’s still summer, but it’s already Indian one. Fan squaws; groupie squaws; musician squaws - much fewer.  No, he must be a bassist, just kicking the bass-drum. Yet he’s stopped torturing the four strings as well and left to the left. The stage is empty. I’m walking there: three ragged walls and the shelter are jerkily growing. Let’s cut out a time-and-space piece and glue the tape back: the room behind is full of musicians. The lens of my camera is re-bricking the mosaic of faces, hands and guitars - a panoramic illusion. I’m clapped on my back, and the mosaic momentarily forms into an ear-to-ear grin and tipsy eyes, a bit convex: the vocalist has had an encouraging drink. Let’s cut and glue back again: the sea is zooming out, slowly at first, and then much faster into a small still stain with buildings, buildings, and buildings in front. URBAN POEM The rain’s over. Skyscrapers are growing like mushrooms. ROCK-CONCERT FINALLY DONE Close-up: a flower in the wind, in a rundown outdoor vase. A six-pin neck is zooming out to show the varnished Spanish waist. The singer has the camera to follow him: smoking , sitting down, leaping, kneeling, and smoking again, from the previous butt. The drummer is looking for some variety within the same. The guitarist and bassist are bowing together to follow the drummer’s pattern. The bartender  is watching football on TV: another crowd on the green pitch. Back to the concert: the singer is throwing away an empty bottle of water: the death of his thirst has come and left, invisible. The song is over. FOURTH DIMENSION Even a thick novel of a large plot geography can easily fit into a small room: London, 1954, a village weekend, be my wife, the right corner of the desk, two steps to the right, the armchair, Berlin, forty years after, how are you, how are the kids? walking to the stadium, here it is, between the window and TV, or is it a computer? The room can swallow new and new thick novels about the strange life of the big world outside.  The room, which I hate. MONUMENTAL MEMORIES The Sea View high-rise has stolen the sea view right before him.  There is urban 2-D around with standard clouds along the horizon to the left and right from him. Anyway, the monument is looking down: the slope is too steep. JAZZ A piano introduction is quiet and thoughtful. The very first chords are rather cool. A right-hand crystal fragility is backed by three left-hand steps down. Broken rhythm, rustles over toms and careful hi-hats. Gentle bass nodding. White-black-white soft keying, down and up. Twine peaks of sloping triads are questioning each other. Finally, the promised explosion is coming up: the drums stop laming and powerfully pulse, chased by the bass rushing; the blacks-and-whites dubiously stand still at first, and then reply as nervous wide-spread ten-finger chords between feverish pauses. The drummer’s brass splashes raise the tempo even more; the acrobat bassist is jumping against the trampoline, placing fast finger chords between the open-string fade-outs. At last, another piano chord is blowing up into soft right arpeggio, and the music is suddenly over, fallen under the pressure. LORRY Showing through foliage gaps, a hairless head has rushed along the fence ridge. IN MEMORIAM The tea is steaming as an awkward illusion: grey locks are winding up as imitated evaporation, with virtual endlessness coming from and leaving to nowhere in a sunny stripe, among dust particles. U-TURN The sky is grey. The land just is. An engine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. A minute is over. An engine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. Another minute. An engine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. A bit more than a minute. An engine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. Some far away, behind thick bushes on the side, a door has squeaked, invisible. A boy of ten has come, his hands in the pockets of his dusty trousers. Kicking some pebbles and leaving back. Another door-squeak. SEA IN CITY Multi-coloured electrical makeup at night. Flowing  patterns in daytime, dark-blue-on-light-blue. An upset profile of buildings afar, softly filled-in grey -this is sunrise. SCRAPING THE SKY The mirror surface swallows the sky, clouds, and birds flying by. The wall stops suddenly as a theatre prop: no rooms behind, no lifts, no hundreds of people in those rooms and lifts of the ninety floors - just the sky, clouds and birds, again. WINDY SUNSET A shadow of underwear was dancing in the unreal 3D of a 2-D wall. Then, it suddenly squeezed, turned, jumped and disappeared. They closed the window again. NEW SCENERY The theatre backcloth (miraculous animation: blue through horizon, waves coming, all looks so real) gets convex with every step of mine on sand already wet and suddenly proves a true sea, or just salty liquid around you while the beach has substituted for it as “the other reality”: sand, another bus creeping away, and a crowd of bodies I suddenly recognize you in with a strange feeling as if it were a random documentary shot. NIGHT A tall stooping street light rod has silvered a tree crown. A black shy silhouette. DUST Cigar ash is lying on the very bottom, under some other junk. In the complete dark, it is spread across the black varnished surface, a bit concave and somewhere scratched. Seven paper pellets make hills and gorges on this crumbly plain, encircled into a black varnished wall. Random uneven vaults of carbon paper largely torn create the darkness, ash and paper pellets are in. There is ash again on the sticky pieces with traces of a large-size awkward handwriting, this one from slim cigarettes. Only Mr. Sherlock Holmes could see the difference, yet there is no need of that. No butts. A half-crumpled paper sheet covers the black-and-grey piles. The same handwriting, twelve lines rhymed. Lines look into and add some blue lyrical hue to the sleepy whiteness of the ash-and-sheet aura. Yellowish broken logs with un-burnt brown heads are thrown over the paper. There is something written from the reverse as well: a table mirror reflects the last syllable, in somebody else’s hand. Higher is the chandelier. PHILOSOPHIC A chain of ships, from bigger to smaller, yet very alike, has been motionless in the bay for two days. As if someone were watching the sun through a film. Ghosts of the past, an evidence to support Zeno. Evenings’ lights on the rigs turn “Vessels’ Arrival” into “Immersing Picture Gallery”. Is the bay so shallow? HEAT Vertical fabric blinds move their shoulders with even coquetry as a female chorus from a Russian folklore village. Right before the air condition, the voiceless song gets as fast as a dance remix. USELESS SECRETS Two escalators going up - a false race. SUDDEN DEATH The opened door of the flat in front discloses strange lives, whose earlier times used to happily pass by, unnoticed year after year. The few meters between have proved a magic buffer. All is seen as through a well-washed glass. My brother has crossed to be found there as well, mixed with many people, silently crowding the lobby and a big far-shot room. Moving gaps are showing light wallpaper fragments, a heavily-framed portrait, and a plate on a table. Then the prospect is disguised by someone in a pink raincoat. The wife and daughter are standing in front, identically squeezing their heads in the silent anticipation of grief. OF BEING The sunset has upset into water  a gigantic tower on the other shore. It’s snaking on water. Endlessly sinking. The unbearable lightness. SOMETIMES Sometimes, all around feels so fit. That words are missing to express this feeling is a torture. All the details : streets, buildings, trees, people, and clouds - seem tailor-made, and so does my body. Body? NOSTALGIC I’ve come from the sea, falling into the dark slowly, but inevitably, down the strange-twilight whiteness of the sand. They’ve already switched on the veranda lights, still short-sighted, and the daytime piece of the film has been cut off for me to never see it. Crickets. A garden chair. September is coming soon, which is saddening. It’s already dark. An empty window frame places the electrically-silver garden into a strangely different dimension - it feels impossible to reach for the foliage. Yet how to catch and keep a feeling, which has momentarily rustled by as a blow from the past? All has been rebuilt, and the walls are invisible: here was I, sitting, and there was the neighbours’, or am I wrong? TRUMAN SHOW A fly has walked down the screen inside and, as it were suddenly falling into a sleeping abyss, flies by the talking head’s right ear and disappears into the studio deep, whose huge spaces inexplicably have fit into the TV set. It might also have flown through an open window into the outer world, an infinitely breeding crowd, more and more tensely filling the interior of the strongest plastic walls, hidden by this sky-blue upholstery. ZOOM CHAOS Zoom brings your watching eye down, first slowly, and then fast; quite far a moment ago, a house suddenly is standing still, few steps before you, and you see poplar foliage rustle. Zoom does bring your watching eye down, but generates chaos: flying in from somewhere, a pigeon distracts your attention,  and you can’t  find a way back; pieces of buildings and the sky twitch right or left trying to fall out of the lens as a photo out of its frame. Suddenly run into, the sea floods your last hope, and you move the picture away as if you were long-sighted: voiceless buildings and trees have quickly gathered to pose like conference participants, say cheese. Yet there are suddenly emerging gaps, relief tricks and sole morning walkers in this chaos. THEATRE The hall has dived into the dark with rapid smoothness, and the lighted stage depth has swallowed the audience looks. Here are people coming out, running in load steps and speaking in load voices. Spotlights catch their faces and eyes involuntarily screwed up. In the empty foyer, chandeliers are still bright, and mirrors reflect shining floor and each other.  Doors for the stalls are locked. VIOLINIST SCULPTURE Night. Empty is the street. He stands within a white-stone circle.  What evil spirit does he hope to spell off, playing 4.33 again and again? SEASIDE RESTAURANT Waves are coming to become a white column to become waves to become another white column to become waves to become the balcony edge. SILENCE Small is the room, its narrow space reaching the window, almost half the wall. Strangely white, daylight is filling the room through the half-transparent curtain laces. The door is right in front: a rather deep split runs through the opal glass. Years’ black semicircle comes from left to right on the parquet. A cupboard and dresser are closed and mute, and so is the door. A sofa, two big armchairs, TV set and a coffee table almost fill in the space left. A bright-green portiere behind the sofa must be hiding another room. It’s quiet, it’s very quiet; cars’ sounds, hollow and muffled, are sometimes reaching in. A small alarm-clock on the coffee-table near the phone is tick-tick-ticking. It’s the ground floor: happy voices and laughter of few people passing have come from the right behind the window. Suddenly, something has been pulled along the curtain with load rustle: a spontaneous wind blow has hit the unlocked window to open it into the room. It’s not loud urban noise that entered the room, but boom, even and very low. The happy voices passing by on their way back are heard with no window buffer this time, but are still sinking into some invisible softness. No more car sounds. The heavy green cloth hardly hangs on two nails. It’s getting colder in the room. Evening has come. All things are getting quiet in the sleepy and indifferent darkness. It’s completely cold now. The sky seems still light blue from here.  White, yellow, and blue. White is the snow, backed by yellow stains of windows in the buildings across. The phone has rung out once in the dark, and the silence’s back now. Here dies the clock. EVERYBODY’S GONE Four lights along the landing stage, four moons in water, have died all in a row. The fifth one has flashed and died as a good-bye show: going home, the photographer has occasionally pushed the button. CLASS OF PHYSICS Driving by, he unwillingly called her - she turned back, and this turn on high-heels appeared slow because she was getting behind much faster, or he was, doesn’t matter. . . NIGHT, STREET, LIGHT, AND WIND No people. Flat when no wind, the wall paleness is floating. CLASS OF PHYSICS NUMBER TWO A car has passed by; a light, mirror, an elbow out, another window up, a dent in the trunk - have flown together to an invisible magnet and are quickly shrinking into a hardly visible point. There is the horizon. QUITE LONG AGO Regular and soft clicks had been falling into rapid rustle on the background of an even and light buzz, when sudden blackout stopped the cassette on rewound, covered fully written sheets on a desk and, swapping the street and room, off-whitened the two black squares. Tree silhouettes, sky pieces and black squares of the kind in a building in front - drew themselves with rapid smoothness. A light stripe, pierced, jumped from branch to branch, then, followed by its pale twin,  slid down the wall,  pricked the clock, and disappeared in the darkest corner a bit before an engine noise died in the hidden road perspective; the glass picture was again natural and motionless. Regular and soft clicks were falling into the emptiness, dividing it into seconds. Rhythmical rumble, whose strength couldn’t be hidden by the thick ground on, shook the walls, windows and twice invisible crystal in the dresser. Light brought back the furniture, chandelier and cassette buzz; a piece of time had been cut off, and the tape ends were glued together. The sky pieces outside flashed and disappeared behind green wallpaper, or rather its glass twin with the blackness coming through. Two voices are coming through the door from the staircase. GAPS Standing still, black wooden zigzag reaches down in a steep manner. Iron rods grow up from the wooden body and pierce stone put under. The stairway follows the zigzag, step after step, taking pauses on the square turns.  A fragment of black-and-white tiled floor in the frame cancels the handrails running and doesn’t let them contract into a grey dot in an invisible perspective. The three walls grow up by the stairway and join as the white ceiling. A short and silent ring has come from behind, and so has the even sound of doors moving apart. The lit yellow circle jumps from number to number; the short and silent ring; the even sound of the door halves moving apart. People enter as if commanded, with the awkward synchronism of extras hired for a crowd scene. Leaving behind pieces of walls, handrails, dustbins, plants in pots and bodies in clothes, the halves of the mechanical curtain come together to change the scene in few seconds. The walls and handrails are still the same while bins and pots change their positions or just disappear; the stage depth starts seeming just a 3D-picture, and next crowd actors appear coming right from the screen and turning the lift into another film-shooting place. The door is closed again, and memory wastes time trying to join the things and keep them together. They take turns falling into the dark, and the left ones, excessively bright, make it even darker. P. S. There is a tree crown behind the window, in the middle of a white wall. Golden foliage tremble discloses a weak wind and a sunset. The wooden window cross divides the foliage into four unequal parts. SMOKE ON THE WATER Yesterday, fog was strangely white in the dark, and in the morning, port cranes at the horizon appeared the shadows of those piercing the emptiness some closer to me.  It looked like a crowd of pre-historical monsters, coming out of smoky scarlet non-existence. MYTHOLOGY Two old houses in the low place, putting out the iron shields of their roofs, hide the street between. The nearest one is one floor shorter; the windows are curtained, and the brick wall is reddish in the bright street lights. A visible echo of the wind, tree shadows look like gigantic hands keeping swords. The fight is hidden. HOME VIDEO The rug’s got convex, an endless field cut to the screen. A camera lens can’t watch askance. NOT TO ME A white-capped head is over you, having left the light and a ceiling fragment in another world. -The nerve must be removed. WIND The foliage from behind the roof is like a sinking one’s hands. THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN Dimming as many tiny dark dents, the steel-grey surface sometimes blows up a white stream, no local skyscraper has grown as high as. If negative, it looks like oil, backed by suddenly pale hills. Yachts’ sails also get black. However, the coming sun burns the blackness, and the fountain starts resembling an equalizer while triangular stains, animated by a wind blow, are moving as ghosts from a thriller screen-written by Pythagoras. The over-exposed sky carries edge-burnt clouds in the same direction. The blue shining surface is soaring as hundreds of invisible water towers. BEHIND URBAN NOISE Far and close, the sky triangle is clearly cut by poplar crowns with deceitful cloud 3D inside; the air is green and fresh. BOULEVARD It’s early twilight. A pale-blue monkey on the bench seems a bit drunk. It’s little again that the photographer has earned: cheese-smiling walkers are standing for their own snapshot cameras. Dolphin-show waves splash up against the pier. Summer-evening music is soft-echoed. A rare case of an irreplaceable truism, buildings and trees are diving into the dark, their colours getting denser and denser. COLOURMUSIC OF SUBLUNARY SEA is silent. END OF NIGHT It’s getting light. IT’S GETTING LIGHT It’s getting light. NIGHT TRAFFIC LIGHTS It’s graphics of branches; the trunk is bloody red and deep black wrinkled. BREEZE It’s sunny; trembling light and shadow in the foliage play green hues; soft clouds are featherbeds for feathered angels. ÉTUDE The street is full of facades and faces: pieces of talks seem making up a modernist symphony, or is it just an orchestra tuning? ZOOM-IN, ZOOM-OUT, AND EVEN CLOSER It’s a red curtain; it’s a red transparent curtain; it’s a red transparent curtain with a stain; a sparrow’s landed on a bench. Flown away; the red transparent curtain with a stain; the red transparent curtain; the red curtain; a wall clock to the left from the room entrance. OPTICS The hills on a side of the bay and a factory across - this still picture suddenly decomposed as the sea, hills and factory, seemingly reachable by hand - and the all came together again, and went apart, and came together, andwentapartandcametogetherandwent. . . . STOPPING BY AN OLD YARD Framed by a stone semicircle of the entrance, there is bit of sunny optimism over ivy over windows over somebody’s life  watching all the changes from the past point of view, cut into this half-round. Yet the old car can take away by the garbage cans into the crowd of floors rising. POETRY EVENING Three or four upholstered steps quietly lead through an invisible wall. Blinking in red, the hall goes upstairs to crest as the balcony. A look at oneself is split into hundreds from there and proves nothing. People thrown onto the stage only feel each other and listen to the boom behind the spotlights. That’s why the sudden occasional rustle of pages sounds so strangely soft behind. Black on white, rows of signs are blindly facing each other in the deaf dark, soon to be disclosed. BIG CITY’S LIGHTS, OR PASTEL NIGHT The moon is smiling black, accompanied by red-circled light holes, hundreds of lights, thrown across this milky-white field, hiding the dark. DIMENSIONS Clouds are again white, light and inaccessible, but wires over the street are still sagging after the load of yesterday’s. DEEPLY BELOW Pieces of foliage and asphalt are puzzle-fit to each other. WILL SAVE THE WORLD Motionless in the sky, they sway, crowning plastic sticks in hawkers’ hands. Dimming phosphorus waves of many toy stars have crowded a piece of the dark. OF THINGS Pale-blue oilcloth hills have distorted squares with eight-petal flowers. A dark-blue pen cap, tablespoon with fat drops,  empty sugar can, green cup, metal teapot, and a red deodorant have added some occasional and temporary shades to the neat picture. The cap shows the entering piece of its black tunnel. The spoon bridge discloses the underneath. White powder has stuck to the glass within the limited atmosphere, its sky screwed tight. The can shadow climbs down into an invisible abyss and up by a fully steep side: the table isn’t touching the wall. A couple of round holes and a screw in the middle: a socket. The bottom and top of the cup have painted crimson the combination of the two circles. A tea petal is wrinkled on the pot spout, watching the corner. The corner climbs up as a run-down stripe to expand on the ceiling. The slow yellow wave, descending to touch the pale-blue squares, hides the cold, windy, black and abyss-like window rectangle. Keeping a pen, my hand comes from the non-existence in slow jerky moves within the red shining cylinder, touches one-and-half letters of an English word and, rising somewhere, disappears almost momentarily. The white, convex-curved cone of the paper sheet climbs under the blind plastic of the high cap. The oil-cloth hills hide old childish pictures on the uneven wood. If hand-pressed, other parts will rise. RAPID SUNSET Fire has flown across windows on that side of the bay. BEFORE Step after step, the pier has led me into strange marine silence, backed by urban noise, into a mise-an-scene of three kissing couples, suddenly showing behind the rusty remains of a cafe. Coming back has again cut the bay’s half-sphere through. Wind has turned the fountain fan towards the shore and woven a rippled TV tower from vertical water threads, whose slow and measured motions resemble screen interference, a sudden development of the theme. Pushed forward by my steps, the tower has come out from behind the water. The silhouette is blurred and softened by the sunshine.  Gloomily clear shapes and colours of buildings are to the right,  a fragile and brief whim of the cloudy sunset. RESORT. NIGHT The black abyss is the booming sea. A dead light is off-white. A double yellow light with a low engine sound has slid over a hovering row of black windows and caught a piece of a blind wall with a red garbage can and a green bench. Some later, something will knock and give out a long squeak in an invisible perspective. Somebody has forgotten a towel on the green bench. A window must have been opened - a piece of talk as a short chord - and closed again somewhere. It’s silence again. No glass in the windows, two unfinished cottages blindly face each other. LIGHTS ON THAT SIDE OF THE BAY Long thin legs shake glossy, both gliding on the surface and sinking into the dark emptiness, unexplainable simultaneity. LIKE A WATERFALL The foliage appears descending from the sky as a shining waterfall, but the sun fails hiding the role of flora in the gentle tremble created. The modest support of the show, the trunk does its best to keep the crown in focus for the low-pixel cell-phone camera. Dust, dirt and scaffold are behind me. UNDERGROUND THEATER A swing is hanging down from the ceiling centre. Right under, a tank-top boy is climbing up out of a thick rug. A naked woman in a far corner is sitting on her legs in front of a mirror. The swing is shaking. In another corner, a man with an alabaster cry on his alabaster face is breaking out of a boa’s hug. Three live women are fast walking from corner to corner, now speaking loudly and nervously, and now keeping mum. The watchers are following on the squeaky parquet. Some after everyone’s gone, the swing finally stops. Moved by an occasional weak kick, the shoulders, head, and strangely happy smile from an unknown light material are still reaching up with the same frozen stubbornness. IN Lack of daylight makes night time the only reality, and the difference between is a dying habit of the recent past. Colours of the imagined day are static; darkness conceals the white cloth of the low sky getting rugged. MORNING The mirror changes its facial expression in momentary jester mimic: stretching lips in the same smile as frowning, wrinkling and mine. The mirror keeps the wrinkles as the last variant when only an empty peg and a fragment of the entry door are in front of it. SOMETHING ABOUT SUMMER All’s become a bit older for the few seconds between the two pictures: the tree, wine in the glasses, musicians, Summer Time, me, and even you. Times fail branch-weaving and disappear into each other through the edges cut. FATE OR IRONY, OR ALMOST FORTY Drops are falling onto the parquet. A meeting has taken place between. The wooden back is showing from behind the terry red-and-white-and-blue. Steam is rising over an empty glass. A new lot of subway cars has been delivered to. A yellow-and-green curtain is covering another gloomy morning. A steamy mirror is hardly mimicking  a piece of screen and a car key on a shelf. A little pool on the tiled floor. Between seventeen countries’ delegates. The terry white-and-blue pile has fully hidden the red plastic circle. The wet flap is angle-down. Steam is rising over an half-empty cup. And will soon start running on the lines. A name on the window must have been left by a left-hand point-finger. An umbrella case. Thirty-nine meters and forty two centimetres between dry marble and wet asphalt muffle the rattle of trains and rustle of tires. WRITER’S COPIES One hundred and ninety glossy rectangles are watching the ceiling with the same look of the same black eyes from a thick rug fully covered. The parquet is marching under, in the emotionless dark.  The mosaic is gradually losing its homogeneity, proving more and more different in the looks and smiles. The rug is laughing as almost two hundred laughers, tearing it into almost two hundred pieces; splits are running through the hidden ceiling mirror. Six thousand and ten copies are watching the same number of strange ceilings.  The polished surface of coffee-tables preserves their immaculate paper smoothness, yet even an occasional facedown fall into a rug ornament doesn’t change the look and smile. The glossy rectangle has been recovered on its proper coffee-table position; one’s slippery steps sound sleepy behind the wall, but the close-up face is still looking somewhere up, away from the invisible camera, and still ignoring the night beyond, and still living on that guillotined sunny day. Seven thousand quasi-copies. UNAVOIDABLE QUESTION Keys stick to my fingers spelling the left. The cursor pulls the Ariadne thread, often dives into the screen, to the hungry guests, and comes back to the kitchen to check the cake for the right time to cream-paint these sweet words, THE END. Thank you for reading this book. If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact me (anarazimov@me.com).