Scabby rubs and randomly chipped-in crevices corrode the entire field of view because of improper over-zooming in the vast surface of vertical stone squares tiling the old blank wall.

Without ever looking back, he knew for sure there was a street behind him and, across the street on the other bank in its two-way traffic stream, the lengthy glass strip of the high windows in “Make Or Mar” along the opposite sidewalk. There it should be. As sure as he was standing there, his forehead leaned against the wall. You could just bet your farm on that...

The jagged, nervous noise of cars rushing behind him only confirmed such a conjecture, yet he still was withholding the turn about which would make it sure a hundred per cent, and instead raised his hands at shoulder-height and pressed the palms to the flat smooth surface of hewn stone.

As hard as you would expect, anyway.

The scrape exactly at the level of his pericardial sac served one more proof – it’s right here that he had given the slip to the chase. The bullet couldn’t follow, stopped by the stone.

Before or after the stone couldn’t stop him?

Did the bullet hit the wall thru him on the run or a sliver of a split sec later, as he had already dissolved in the barrier?

No way to punch into the matter deep enough for an articulate answer. Not without Isaac Newton and a bottle of vodka for the sake of clearer comprehension. But Isaac Newton replaced his flying colors with the standard of total abstinence though being a quite promising dude, at first, before that effing apple had domed him too severely. Since the accident the guy abandoned all crazy ideas and flopped over to horny materialism on whose behalf he got knighted, later on in his sober career.

Nothing doing but to strain your brain alone, without ‘the call to a friend’ or 'the prompt from the audience'.

"Hello! May I speak to Sir Isaac? This is the program Wanna Be a Millionaire? And you? Ah, the butler… And he? Ah, drinking coffee in his study... Okay, fine, we’ll recall a bit later."

"Uite, oameni buni. Este o oaie."

A pack of noisy kids surrounds him. Street Arabs. He let the wall go and turns about.

Yep, he was right – there looms "Make Or Mar", across the street.

From all the sides around him, big flashy eyes underneath the stomp-dance of greasy black strands curly, wavy, a-swinging. Everyone watches him closely gauging his high of intoxication. Swarthy hands, emaciated kids' hands jerk the skirts of his plain blue frock coat without epaulettes. The cloth is not in its prime yet holds on, withstands the pulls and yanks of the restless ants with their loudly importunate gibberish…

And here comes the queen of the anthill.

"Lashi bun, romale! Lashi bun!"

The Gypsy takes a crack at shooing their swarm off, at which movement the corner of her flowery shawl touches on the sly, caressingly and softly, his right wrist.

The kids recoil from the "sheep", retreat a step back yet never break the circle of their flicker of incessant shifting. Their voices never hush and only merge switching over to a chant in the rhythm of Hypnopedia.

"Aye-aye, Captain! You've seen a harsh spell! Vicious enemies tried hard to harm you, yet intact you stayed. Well, almost. And where it smarts the pain will cease and the long and winding road awaits ahead…" commences she her part in the usual score in the process of steeping the victim into mesmerized tetanus.

"Gimme your hand, Esma will read your fate. Esma does not cheat, Esma sees, Esma knows. Free palmistry for you, handsome. Gimme your hand."

The slightly puffed eyelids screening her eyes, which had seen anything there ever could be to see, went down slowly, suggesting the example to be followed:

"Everything will be all right, handsome, not at once though, gimme your hand, I’ll teach you all what’s to be done…"

"What was there I know, what is to come I don’t want to know. How about singing a song, Crisp-Curls?."

The backing chorus, at sea for absence of conducting signs from their coryphaeus, stumbles in their beef-about part, while she stays obviously stunned and dazed as if smitten by his clue, the half-forgotten keyword from the times at the dawn of her career but it suddenly sounded here, not eye-to-eye but in presence of the entire audience…

"The house’s sold today! Debates of the applicants to the position of the Resident in Indiscernible (Almost) Saturn! During the intermission, The Jolly Guys-Gagays-2 band perform their hottest hits! Soft drinks sale at 5.12 % discount! Only here! Just this only time!"

"Maybe you know but not all, handsome, though wildly will to know, huh?"

"Well, well, let’s cut out, honey, the useless polemics in the like effing sort of approach, and consider the issue from the standpoint of distilled experimentalism."

His hand dives in the blue depths of the double breast in his not fully buttoned frock coat to reappear balled and mysterious, with the glib skill of a professional pearl diver.

Esma’s eye instinctively blinked at his other hand to check if the wide-blade knife for shell-cracking is still there. Nope. And not a single hair in his beard got drenched. Some shifty bastard!

The magician’s fingers moved to bloom snakily out, slow like the long petals of a sea anemone actinia. Smack-bang in the middle of the palm of the voracious predator, a kinda lure in the set up trap, flashed a silver circle.

"Piastres! Piastres!" Without any rehearsal screamed the back-up chorus in unison. With a noteworthy burr as if at the casting for the Lenin In The Leap Year flick.

"Dong-dong, darling! An unalloyed piece of eight! The prize to them who unprepared guesses my name."

"Ptooey!" spat the clairvoyant in disgust. "Looting the drowned!"

Yet, he was quick to withdraw his moccasin of possum skin, obviously handmade, with a buckle of also Spanish silver before the monetary reform of 1497.

"None of us, fair lady, is without flaws, as was postulated in the original work by Mr. Charles Darwin and stays prominently backed and confirmed by steady gross income of suppliers of banana related products, currently."

Shrill whistles of Gypsy kids in the bleachers, booing, ejaculations “enough of fucking confab!”, “give us a zap!”

The Unseizable Revengers carry out the assembly of a machine gun Maxim on their cart. Post-haste.

Yashka Tsigankov uncivilly unharnesses from out the cart's shafts the horses, completely fucked up, who drop dead at once.

The Colosseum stage workers drag the animals away, by the tails in their grabs, along the sand in the arena, crooning under their Roman noses, “You’re sweet as the horseweed from Canada…”, for the solidarity’s sake.

Lech Valenca, movie director Keosaian (not from Hollywood yet), and Levantine usurers…

However, back to the epicenter!

"Touching allowed?"

"Be my guest, Carmen Pansovna, but within the limits of 12+, I do not need to be rubbed off by hands of the Chechnya archimandrites."

The carelessly polished nails served the pincer to lift the coin off the crossroads of the Line of Fate and the Cross Mystique responsible for the cleverness (who’s, as always, on fucking AWOL), it gets rubbed against the above-mentioned shawl’s corner (knitted in the village of Melenky before its incorporation into the Pavlov Posad conglomeration), bitten with chippy plastic in the false jaws after which action Esma clearly wanted to spit, however, held it back and swallowed, for the sake of appropriateness and decency in manners.

There followed a short pause, which period she stood with her tongue stuck out to the utmost, its tip almost vibrating from the strain, the trade-mark of aspiring stand-up comedians in a desperate endeavor to win the public’s sympathy by demonstrating the surest way to eat thru to the show business by means of Russian cunnilingus, and (her eyes half-closed) listening to something heard only by her, she nodded her head and repeated ‘ohoo!’, ‘even so?’ and suchlike nonsense, but at last exhausted the stock of psychotropic tricks in her fucking passive aggression and—breaking the deafening silence of the audience frozen in anticipation—she dealt the final puñalada of Jose from the opera by Bizet:

"Kenty’s a fool! Kenty’s a fool!" (Without any burr traceable).

Her opponent went groggy after that brief but too overwhelming series:

"Yok!" eructed he from the depth of his very spleen. "The prize is yours – take it."

"Honest deals are my soft spot!" commented the eager matadoress wrapping her trophy tight, as well as the title of the World Champion, in that same shawl, but this time it was another corner, produced in the village of Usovo of the same and also mentioned Pavlov Posad conglomeration.

Midst the whirling twists and enthusiastic hops of her loyal fans and juvenile hands, she leaves the ring while the fucked up… ahem!. that is, stunned and effed up opponent, forgotten already even by his seconds, leans his ass against the wall he was pressing with his hands so recently if not with some other part in his anatomy…

"Yep! Ladies an' Gentlemen! Even in our over-advanced world, Experience still splashes the brains out of Upstart Aficionados! Overtly and straight from the shoulder!

See you at upcoming confluxes in the outflows of ectoplasm! For you commented Vasyok de Vasuky! Sign up for our channel!"

Sounds of a hasty trot grew nearer. A black-haired kid ran up to the lonely figure leaned groggily against the wall.

A small hand in a long-standing need of a good wash-and-rub pulled the wide pant leg above his curly head.

"Unclie, eh?" and, turning his face up to the not yet quite there stare of the routed, reported:

"Esma told to say you that Maya waits, don’t waste time or you’ll get it!"

His jaw began to move like Peccy’s valve, not up though but down, after the running away, in the bossa nova rhythm,—hop-and-hop yep, hop-and-hop yep...

Ah, por que estou tão sozinho?.

—errand-boy…

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