Сергей Огольцов – The Tallest Story Ever (страница 5)

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Most Briton-Oxfordians use mostly “most” for the purpose…

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Yet, I was lucky, and the safety belt, already fastened for takeoff, withstood the crazy force of my involuntary jerk in an attempt to jet off to I don’t know where just to be away from that… well… ghoulie, shaitan, werewolf, troll or whatever the hell it was…

A barrel within a sweater was sitting next to me. The abundant stream of salt-and-pepper beard disappeared into the low-cut. However, not tacked in tight enough, it left a circular hair fold beneath his mug, a kinda nappy napkin or, sooner, a neglected Ruff collar around the neck of a bum aristocrat from the end of the Reconquista period. Which impression was immediately upheld by the flaming hew of alcoholic origin in his face.

In fact, of the whole face there remained only saggy-lidded eyes on the show framed with shaggy eyebrows and a gray tousled mane. The balaklava-hat-like opening in the hair around the bird’s eyes contained also a pug nose of a lively monochrome color.

As for the beard, it was obviously looking for adventures – the end, or rather the rest of it, sticking out from under the edge of his sweater stretched on the protrusion of his belly, crawled on between his jean-clad thighs to somewhere else under the seat. How does he tame it, when facing a urinal in the restroom, that jerk?!

‘Ghoulan Jerkych Uncleton-Blackseasky, an expert in Linguo-Mystics. I take the liberty of introducing myself, so as to avoid unnecessary irremedial cases.’

‘Nom de guerre, 0-… Ahem… that is… How have guessed I don’t know about the Great Shift?’

‘No sweat at all. Everything is written, Vassia, in your face. It wouldn't be a bad idea to somehow screen the stupid bazaar-rap within your head, so as not to traumatize the decent public with naked text. Why not to grow a beard, like a more intelligent sapiens’? I mean, if you’re not looking for extra problems and a bumper short circuit across a not too long lifespan, already. Here, take a look at your stark naked thought-texting!’

The thick blunt fingers dived into the hair-stream beneath the Ruff hair-collar. His move triggered off the reflexive stance of my body, trained to snap trap a pistol with a silencer pointed at my face. Come on, bastard! I’m ready!

However, from his hair-covered bosom, the fellow traveler jerked out a circular mirror, whose mercury gloss bore a sharp-angled zigzag crack, and thrust the whole contraption under my nose.

‘Easy, you kooky windmill… Wow! So that's me? Well, hello there, Vassilly,’ streamed down my reflected cheeks toward the hung jaw before flawing into my mouth open like widely amazed “O”.

Luckily, the textual flow did not glow in the manner of light-up running ads luring film-goers to a forthcoming blockbuster. The letters sooner resembled shadowy rows of insects, trotting, yet not breaking their formation, into the grotto… Oh, damn! I mean the mouth which I hurriedly slammed shut.

However, the shadow theater did not stop. The critters switched over to running over my cheeks in circles. While the most vulgar words floated leisurely across my forehead, from temple to temple. Like in the ribbon of a kamikaze on his last visit to a geisha’s house. It's free for him. Paid by the state at war. His last time on the dry land. The next orgasm against the starboard of an aircraft carrier…

‘See? Got it now, young man? Lucky you, it's written in Etruscan, which is unreadable to the untrained eye. Except for the swear words in the forehead, one's roots are sacred; they can't be masked.’

He grabbed the mirror back and drowned it under the waves in the streaming beard.

Full of dull disbelief, I once again ran thru the pockets in my jeans and jacket checked too many times for one day. They were as empty as expected.

Only the left inside pocket contained 2 items: the passport; the ticket. The rest of containers beggarly queuing in the dole line. Frantic plans of buying a nose-rag at the first antique shop I came across rode a jerky carousel in my head.

Oh, yes! Hiding the face! Like an under-liberated Orient woman. Beneath the burka or inside the anti-Covid muzzle propagated by WHO the prostitute (nothing in common with the famous band). Finding a hanky became as problematic as zeroing on holy grail these days. The global community has switched over to paper tissues; even the zoo inmate primates gave up blowing their noses into anything shorter than Scarlet and Cleopatra's Nest. For the wind to have something to blow playfully away…

Meanwhile, the rubber in the landing gear tires rattled dryly over the concrete runway, and the Airbus took off. There started the nastiest stage in any flight: the climb. A gigantic swing carried me forward and upward, irrevocably, to hurl into the following lap there ready for the next climb.

It’s when the body's memory went loose in unwelcome recollections. How motion-sick it had been in my early childhood. Just an hour's train ride along the smooth iron rails was enough to turn it into a non-transportable sack of sickness.

Dry land rats are not denied a chance to get see-sick too.

Antihistamines and anticholinergics don't work on me. Yes, I could fly in synchronous autonomy mode, plunged in a flight of my own, strapped to my seat just to conform to the environs, because of my inborn politeness. Yet, the Center got into a mean habit of having express blood tests zeroed in on substances in the inner world of the special employees.

The dearest care, of course, for those who managed to come back alive after a field job. Or from a vacation.

Only total wankers could come up with such a mean thing.

For that reason I ward off the nausea with a remedy demanding a bit of individual customization. My home-made invention substitutes for imported analogue goods. Keeps you afloat, when overseas buccaneers brandish their cutlasses of sanctions at this here side stiletto sporting pirates… The objective is not to let the bitchy nausea realize I even feel it.

Through the entire relay race of climbs replacing each other after the takeoff of flying machine, I sit keeping a blank kisser referred to among professional preference players as “frying-pan”.

Even when your ears feel plugged no one would guess about your current state. A nice side effect bonus for your gambling addiction. After learn to sit tight and keep the appearance of a dead insect letting no one know what a crappy hand was dealt to you.

Now, coming back to the bloody body memory, I block it out with a fixed gaze at anything in the surroundings. Anything at all. That black dot on the endless ceiling light stretched endlessly tail-to-nose in the airliner’s passenger cabin above the travelers’ heads, would also do.

The engine hum floats following a sine wave shape: from infra-roar to ultra-squeal in the half-plugged ears. At any rate, the dammed off hearing average is not above 92 %. That doesn’t matter much when having this here pretty dot, which I’m staring at to keep on the safe side.

Gimme me a single dot plus a foothold, and all the world wouldn’t turn my stomach. Go fly a kite, nausea-bringing climbs and swings! I hold on bravely, like Icarus in his famous test flight…

For Petyikka’s sake! But that's not cricket. No! It’s a darn mean low blow. My supporter dot moved suddenly and went into crawling spirals. Oh, dang it! That was a fly all the way! Son of a bitch fly… Freak you! Freak you! Cheater fly!

Without the dot to fix my stare at, I'm forced to change the strategy, to retreat and take defense position in a deep trench of meditations on the unloyal dot, aka fly.

The trick isn't new, but it just works. And I don't know why. I haven't yet Googled properly to get a clearer idea – what the heck meditation is. Still, I've cutely noticed that anchoring your thoughts to some object helps. Even if you concentrate on a spiraling travel fellow fly, though in essence it’s a stowaway, more of a jumper than a fly.

Without a ticket, ignoring any registration, it trots the globe, from one end of the world to the other. Today it's buzzing by the heap of melon rinds in an Oriental bazaar, tomorrow enjoying the cool breeze from Scandinavian fjords. On Wednesday, it’s on a date with the Times Square flies in New York, then off it is to the straight-jacketed, toeing the orthodox line Talibanstan to lay there its godless eggs on the sly.

Along the way, it pulls off any prank popping to its mini brains. Right now, if you please, the cocky fly switched over to flying in circles within the straight-line-moving airliner. And that presents such a mess of relativity that Einstein himself would hardly puzzle it out. The fly’s aerobatics combined with the plane’s zipping thru the skies…

Shplumbzz!

All of a sudden, like jack-in-the-box, an old hag from across the aisle darted up in the manner of a surface-to-air missile. Her uniform – a gray, straight-cut, sleeveless dress (!) – modeled to increase the range of missiles effective radius.

My meditation crashed into pieces, the deep trenched defense’s gone. Just a single slap, and the hit fly corkscrews downwards under the heart-rending howl of the fly’s engines. Here you are – another Junkers downed by a Spitfire machine guns,