The dark waters of the lightly salted sea bring the shards of the Moon ashore: their soft silver contours caress the cornea, the back of the head, tickle the vertex. “Yeah, now it would be a bit painful for me to look at her full, although a couple of minutes ago it was easy.” The breeze lifted the smell of damask violets with quiet dixièmes. After a couple of seconds or minutes, all of it – this picture lost its definition and became as if through a rude glass - the many-bearded sea, out of habit, grumbled at the stubborn shore with obscure phrases. “When diving, the surface layer becomes completely blurred...”. “Tum-dum-dum!” – someone knocked the hell out of his heavy shoes next to the window and forced Emil to emerge in bewilderment. “Dream” – he thought. “Dirt” – thought the man outside. After a few breaths, Emil got up from the table where he had not worked for half an hour, got out of his small room and headed towards the kitchen along the not-even corridor. The table remained motionless, with a visible layer of dust on the corners: there, the exhausted elbow atlases tried not to lean on their legs. The neatly made bed also stood silently, opposing the anxious carpet with gradually unfolding scabrous-fractal patterns hanging on the wall; several old books laid by the bed and on the shelves above the table, many of them cramping bookmarks inside. In the middle of the room stood a simple wooden chair with an iron frame, which had once lost the stub of its back in the half-light of riot. Strong and caring in his discomfort, he united the objects of this room, so disparate in nature. In general, the furnishings of this room seemed so independent, willful, that it would be difficult to deduce anything clear about who lived in it. Besides, it seemed that this local “beast” did not spend much time here. While he was rustling with something in the kitchen, streams of heavy air slowly filled the room with a weighty abundance that blew this moment into eternity. Warm dust rose in spirals through the disembodied ceiling, drawing with it the echoes of the violets’ melodies.
Having returned to the room filled by one third with the freshness of the street, Emil held a vastness in his mouth and a glass of water in his paws that had unhealthy thick tips. He washed down the vastness and got ready to go outside. “Day by day it gets more boring here, I’ll have a walk - I’ll have a look...” – Emil said through his stupor in the direction of the carpet on the wall. - AAAAAAAAA! – with aggressive compassion, horror and then despair, the carpet screamed back as loudly as it could. Emil did not notice this answer, or, rather, decided not to notice. He looked at the dust flying away, at the cold light from the window, at the sloppy strokes of paint on the wall - “A year ago, when I moved here, this window and walls were completely unwelcoming: I wouldn’t be able to last even a day here…” - wet mice whispered in a dark corner of a damp and frosty barracks; the ceiling dripped. A series of images floated before Emil’s eyes: a modest, well-kept hotel in an autumn metropolis, folding camp beds in a children’s camp lined up in a row, and a thin window in an old sanatorium through which the drunken frost fell face first into the bed. Emil defocused his gaze, moving away from the present, he looked at all his conscious years: clouds of mice suddenly poured along the walls and ceiling of the barracks - even the seemingly cozy beds with tall legs turned out to be chock-full of moving fur shiny from the water. “I pass through everywhere. It’s all just a habit...” Emil blinked. Maybe thirty breaths passed.
- He walked slowly, examining the inexplicable entourage around him: of course, all the buildings, trees, even the people were the same as usual, it’s just that this evening Emil’s gaze was able to penetrate through some layer separating him and the objects around: this layer, like a transparent protective membrane, had grown over life, muffling sounds and colors. There was only a very short distance left to his habitual park when he noticed how unusual some Gothic figure looked on the gate to some half-abandoned ancient building, similar to an estate or school. This figure pretended to be a vase by virtue of stone; surrounded by green leaves, it was slightly overgrown with emerald moss and seemed to glow against the background of a dark-sapphire, almost nocturnal sky. Emil stopped to take a closer look and heard the music in his headphones: the track “the last beginning” from some calming playlist was playing. “One can climb up and down using this lighting like steps” – Emil determined, but abandoned this idea and left. For an hour or two this place remained unchanged until the cat, that was ordinarily walking along its evening route, caressed the vase with her body-with-tail: as if hopelessly trying to hopelessly wake up its hopelessly loved one. Then, a ded walked heavily past this figure, as if he had lost his face and gaze – Emil would have thought that all this was not lost, but deliberately hidden at the bottom of the bottle; he would also have thought that these orange, almost golden rough hands looked very calm. Then, after forty breaths, a completely different ded passed by, looking over the flow of paving stones under him with a blue smile on his face. It became completely dark, and it was unlikely that anyone would be able to climb using the local lighting.
“Up this street and then to the left... to the left... there I’ll pass by a bookstore, a grocery store, and then an old coffee shop. I’ll get there... I’ll get to the park and sit... I could grab a coffee on the way, but there are too many people in line now, and then, it’s dinner time” – our Emil was clogging the motorway south with a traffic jam. “The silhouette of one of its fragments is smoothly distorted by the waves: there, in the sand on the left, you have to dive down and get it” – massive trucks were bursting into that stream every now and then, as if deliberately smeared in mud. Their straightforwardness and persistence created cover for them, so that Emil did not notice. Another moment and he would have begun to ponder about them too, but reality, with a hissing red flash, evaporated the trucks, the traffic jam and the motorway. On the way between the grocery store and the coffee shop, a small but very lush Christmas store appeared; Emil could not have noticed it earlier. Such shops can sometimes be found in festival cities (and he knew this), but still, the existence of such a thing in mid-June cut into perception. From the outside, Emil could see many figurines depicting angels, various animals, characters from the winter folklore: all of them were manifesting charged colors, roundness, and shine. A little further into the depths of this vast store hung and stood forms of a more abstract nature: delicate patterns reminiscent of snowflakes, frost, aurora borealis, and so on. Emil's legs headed inside on their own.
About 18,810 breaths passed. Marsupial wolves (also known as Tasmanian tigers) went extinct in 1936. Those animals looked like several different species at once; their long “faces” were alike to that of foxes, deer, kangaroos or even monitor lizards, while their bodies were closer to that of wolves or dogs, except for the tail: in that, they, again, resembled kangaroos or something cold-blooded. Although sometimes they would be referred to as "tigers" due to the dark stripes on their backs, the nature of those stripes was more reminiscent of mongooses than of tigers – so, this nickname did not particularly suit this species. The mouth of a marsupial wolf could open very wide, but, unfortunately, there are no recordings of the sounds that such a mouth could make. Apart from that, as is often the case with mammals, females were smaller in size than males, although both had pouches on their bellies – and that, on contrary, is rare. From the name one can guess where the Tasmanian “tigers” lived once, but telling where out loud seems a little pointless because now, if we are to travel to that place, we would not be able to discover even one representative of this species. Where, then, do we need to travel to see these creatures now? "Nowhere"? – alright, got it. (Thinking about all that seems criminal: right, I’m sure, if you try really. really hard, then, with such thoughts one can tear all, right, I’m sure, if you try really. really…)
Emil gets to his feet and sees all around him languidly bright blue. blue snow covered an endless palely golden field with no trees or bushes; in the sky, the light with no luminary shines almost purple, sometimes yellow-orange stains; the air moves at the speed of the sky; dots sparkle in random places strictly on the horizon line.