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

Stretched supine, he props the sheer barrier up with his stare, not because of doubts in the trustworthiness of the material in the structure or benevolent intentions to back its stability idly, 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 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 that’s wrapped his whole 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 good.

Well, really good, huh?

‘Mm-hmm’, agrees a soft voice on the left.

The head rotates slightly, from its back over onto the temple. The light under 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 stays behind the curtain of eyelids twitching so lightly and quite rarely when bounced with the eyeballs shifting to follow the turn of whims in the current dream.

Maya. Snug curves in the delineations of her lips and rounded nostrils, 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 started, set her stare free, abruptly. The eyebrows leapt to meet each other over the nose bridge yet the split second later the spiky look switched over to recognition.

"Mmm. You’ve scared me… 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 right temple than tears off 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 it into tighter lump to clutch and raise up at the outstretched arm 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 time to sit up already and tuck her legs in a relaxed yoga-type way of no straining, and cover them with a bed sheet skirt up to below her navel.

A little beneath the rounded shoulders, two flawless replicas of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in soft projection, horizontal, 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...

On the bedside table next to the coach head, an ashtray sits side by side with a lighter tumbled on its side.

Maya grabs it, setting the domes a-flutter 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 sets 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 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 slightly oblique opaque jets of white draw a pair of parallel sharp lines sprung from the rounded nostrils, however, the drawing grew fuzzily blurred on reaching 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."

"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 bitchy store. Now, tell me how surrealism is different from non-sur one?"

"Well, I'm serious. They blab about 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 that one hardly knows what’s 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 and left. It had some horse color 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 fingers of his left hand with those of the right, put the produced binding under his invariably misfortunate sufferer—back of the head—and fell silent with his stare pushed, thoughtfully, up into the ceiling through the indolent stir of the whitish gossamer veil pricked here and there, far and wide in between, with scintillant sparky studs which pierce the shimmer of an indistinct nature at certain spots in the irregular dispensation—

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 of his left thigh covered 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 pane, for support of her slender figure slightly slanted forward against the balcony door.

The entering light of the end of day softly outlined the ideally perfect circumference of her behind (well, almost perfect and ideal too, 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) 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 yelled in conclusion:

"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 jumped 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 swaying 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 it 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...

* * *