The evening is not there yet, however, the daylight has waned, grown softer, loosing its uncompromising brightness from an hour back, it does not flow in any more but keeps seeping imperceptibly thru the frame embounded glass dam in the balcony door.

Stretched supine, he props the sheer barrier up with his stare, not because of doubting the robustness of the structure or from a big-hearted tenor to back idly any contraption stability, just in case, but because you have to push your stare into something. Anything at all. That’s what a stare is for.

He blinks. Not often though.

No desires whatsoever.

And all his nagging, ever present thoughts are also not there. It does somehow not matter any more who he is, where from or what for. Who cares?

Look! There is the balcony door which you can push your stare into and this serene repose, and the caressing touch of the bed sheet fabric which coovered all of the body from the blue mark “UF-3” all the way down to his very toes.

And sees he then that it is good. That all and everything’s so muchly good.

Well, really good, huh?

‘Mm-hmm’, agrees a soft voice by his side.

His head rolls slowly over, from its back onto the left temple. The light by the wall is even more subdued and, a bit too close to him, on the coach pillow there, dark curls stuck to the forehead in the sleeping face.

The face has no stare. It’s hidden away behind the curtain of eyelids twitching so lightly and pretty rarely when bounced at with the eyeballs shifting to follow the turns of whimsy current in a going-on dream.

Maya. Snug curves in the delineations of her lips and nostrils rounded so sweetly. The silky skin in her cheek streams up the ramp of her high cheek-bone.

Chris called her ‘Mulatto’. Might very well be so. Chris was an old-timer who should know.

From over there…

The lids jumped up setting her stare free, abruptly. The eyebrows leapt to their get-together in a squeeze over the nose bridge yet, in a split second, the spiky look switched over to recognition.

"Mmm. Freaked out at you… where’s the beard, Nob…"

"I’m Inokenty!"

"Whoa, man! Pope without his ID… And tomorrow what? A try to pass for Francis?.

A stallion from Vatican that’s who you are!.

Gimme a cigarette… Check the jeans over there."

His head rolls over to its opposite, right temple, then leaves the coach surface to hover over the floor as far as the neck allows.

A crumpled bump leans onto the leg, within the reach. His fingers collect the jeans cloth into a tighter lump to clutch and raise up at the outstretched arm’s length.

He slowly returns to his stretched out posture, the ball of the blue luminary up in the zenith over the coach...

Meanwhile, she had raised herself to sitting up already, her back leaned on the wall, the legs folded into an ankle-over-ankle relaxed asana of no strain, and cover them with a bed-sheet skirt underneath her navel.

A little below the mildly rounded shoulders, two flawless replicas of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome stand out in soft, horizontal projection, but instead of those silly superfluous spires, the tiny cupola of tender brownness in her nipples, of course…

She angles a nearly new pack from the pocket in her jeans and drops them back to straddle where they were before...

On the bedside table next to the low coach head-side, an ashtray sits next to a lighter tumbled to idle flatly.

Maya grabs it, setting the domes a-swaying yet those do not lose the slightest tittle of their impeccable sphericity. Her lips part for the milky white teeth to pincer and draw out one of the cigarettes which she lights up before adding the pack to the lighter in her right hand, and setting both next to the ashtray restoring its company, doubled, by the move.

In lazily slow meandering, up flow the blueish-white wafts thinning in leisurely swerves and tumbles, turning a transparent haze under the low ceiling.

"Why do you smoke?"

"For the over-nosey pryers to sniff at. Are you from the order of white-robed preachers?"

"How do you mean?"

"A bunch of SOBs who substitute 'Hare, Krishna' chant with 'Who gives up drink-and-smoke will die twice healthier than a horse!'”

"They say women shouldn’t at all, it affects the baby."

"What baby? It’s just a delay by me!"

"Come on, cool off... I'm simply so… well… just…"

"Oh, yeah, the simplest simpleton ever, I’ve guessed it by now."

Two opaque jets of white draw a pair of slightly parting oblique lines sprung from the rounded nostrils, yet the drawing grew blurred and fuzzy around the splendid domes.

"And what of that funny tattoo you have here?"

"This? UF-3? Well, because I'm Aramis, you know."

"Damn! Some box of tricks you are, Inokenty!"

"Hey, May, do you happen to have a programmer relative?"

"Programmer is who announces programs on TV?"

"Kidding aside, huh? He’s in software programming, see? Games and... well... all sorts of widgets."

"You’re such a crank. A normal person can get it only 50% of your gibberish.

I too, by the way, have picked a hell of a lot of knobby words at that nutjob store. Now, tell me how surrealistic pics are different from non-sur ones?"

"Well, I'm serious. The word of mouth have it they’ve rolled out a game branded with, like, your last name."

"I don't have any relatives. Once, there was an uncle before he slipped through the iron curtain, yet he hardly knew what writing is about. A complete wino, by him any day was the Friday night."

"An alky went overseas? They have enough bums of their own."

"I swear on a stack of Bibles. He hacked a form or card, or something and left. It had some horse hue in its name, the card."

"See? Your uncle was a hacker! But a hacker and alcoholism are miles apart! Things incompatible! Though… on the second thought…

And what’s his name?"

"Yegor. Waringov Yegor. And that of your game?"

"Warring Maya."

"Screw him! He used my name! But I thought they need a crowbar or at least a tire iron for hacking."

He laced the digits of his left hand with those of the right, put the produced binding under his invariably unfortunate sufferer—back of the head—and fell silent with his stare pushed, thoughtfully, up into the ceiling.

The stare, on the way, got wrapped with fluffy, indolent stir of the whitish gossamer veil pricked, here and there, far and wide in between, with scintillant sparky studs which pierced the shimmer of an indistinct nature, at certain spots in their irregular dispensation—

[...Ministry of Health warns! One drop of nicotine drops a horse dead on the spot!...

...Anonymous Equestrian Society awards $500,000 for MoH’s head...

...Download our newly pirated app PIZDETZ-TO-ADZZ free, without registration!... ]

Maya uplifted the ashtray (enlarged 1:2 replica of a leaf of Betula of Betulacea family in a spread-eagle position) so as to somewhat sadly squish her cigarette butt against the nebulous stains in the nicotine-yellowed veins bulging in the utensil's receptaculum.

...Protect the nature, your mother! Protect her loving lap! Protect it, effin' effers! You! Mother focal point disturbers!..

With a brief glance at Inokenty's sedate thoughtfulness, she unwrapped herself from the covering sheet and climbed over his introspective carcass so as to rise from the coach.

In the process, her shaggy pubis inadvertently rubbed, just so fleetingly, the quadriceps muscle in his left thigh under the layers of with his skin and her bed sheet, in turn, from inside out.

Awakening from a meditation that was not entirely clear even to Inokenty himself, he said:

"Eh?"

His stare, somehow of its own accord, clung to the nakedness, forthright and explicit, of the young form (rear view) approaching the door to the balcony with the deliberate steps of a stalking panther.

Her arms shot up as if mimicking the top of X and rested in the upper part of the frame around the glass as if to support her slender figure bent slightly forward onto the balcony door.

The entering light of the end of day softly outlined the ideally perfect circumference of her behind (well, almost perfect and pretty ideal, to some extent).

"Ah! Half-kingdom for a male!" sounded an unexpectedly deep in such a young creature soprano.

"A male? Fuck! No!" responded an unexpectedly hoarse (even to himself) whiskey voice from the coach. "You, unappeasable Fraulein Anhalt-Zerbskaya, would wear to tatters a company of grenadiers, I bet!"

"Shut up! Uncombed!" exclaimed she giving him a cheeky look over her perfectly perfect left shoulder and, in conclusion, yelled:

"Kenty’s a fool! Kenty’s a fool!"

"That’s your final twit, birdie! You’re for a load now in your catapult fork!"

"I’ll call young naturalists for help!"

He hopped up out from under the sheet with his synchronously jumped up dick (ha-ha! I'm the first! I'm the first! baa! bah!) stuck up in an arrogantly uptight sway as if it had just twirled or is about to start spinning some invisible mini hoop.

She squealed mischievously.

The the door bell buzzed.

"Who could that be?"

"I… I don’t know."

She pulled on jeans grabbed up from the floor, looked around for her T-shirt.

The bell buzzed again. More demanding, longer.

Maya went into the hallway, opened the door:

"Daddy-Pop? Why popping here?"

"For a chat with the boyfriend of yours," answered the bouncer of the bar “You’ll Get It” tapping one-kilogram hammer on his tight bulging biceps.

Behind him, there loomed figures in black...

* * *