Another victory for violence.

Not for me bludgeoning the Marrops to death, no, but for me being cooped up in this house. For me trying to distract myself with these mind exercises. Me hiding away even though I want to go talk to my sister. No running, for me, from here to the abandoned factories and back, no skulking around the drug house for Lera or anything to steal. No chopping wood or keeping the pile topped up, no scouting out the school or Stosha and her friends. Just me waiting inside and doing scenario after scenario after scenario of image training until my nerve endings itch and my muscles twitch.

Calisthenics help, but with the days mounting they only treat the symptom, not the disease.

Procrastination, inaction…

Another unquestionable victory for violence.

The irony of the situation is that Radovan wants the exact opposite outcome. He wants to talk to me. He wants me to come outside so he can find me, but the threat of violence, intentional or not, works against him. Perhaps this should be called a misuse of violence, or maybe it’s just part of the deal when all the drugs in Toprak run through you.

But with perspective, it’s easy enough to realise that sooner or later I’ll have to talk to him; I’ll have to go outside. Sooner or later he’ll find me.

I open the fridge for the fiftieth time over the last week and stare down the bottom shelf where I discreetly placed a crumpled parcel wrapped in local intrigue and politics; The Workers Chronicle. The Marrop’s… Appendages? Tentacles? No, they’re more like the body of a snake. I haven’t eaten them, but I need to and soon. Mom’s been making off handed comments about the fridge needing to be cleaned out and I can’t disagree with her, not with the decidedly dank smell seeping through the newspaper wrapping. I wasn’t wrong about the swampy scent of the Marrop’s meat down in the tunnel.

But what I can’t figure out is how to cook them. Boiling a limb is a last resort, and would probably stink out the house. Cooking them over flame or coal outside would be ideal, but then I’m outside. I’ve never really paid attention to how food is cooked, or meat more specifically. It’s one of the more expensive food groups, and therefore rarer here. The tinned food I got from my part time job probably has horse meat in it, not that I can taste much of anything.

The butchered limbs are also a kind of proof, along with the pink nub in its tiny bottle. Proof that it was real, that it is real. I wasn’t hallucinating or going all delusional like people are saying. The tiny bottle is untouched in the top draw of my desk in my room. I was half prepared for it all to have… not been real. But the smell coming from the fridge, the butchered limbs, the tiny corked bottle, I can’t deny that. Delusion is as real as the Marrops seemed at the time.

A week will have passed tomorrow. I’ve made no decision on the neon pink nub, made no effort to dry it out and have put its raw state nowhere near the back of my ear to assimilate. I’m banking on climbing down into the tunnels tomorrow and replicating last week’s spawn. The Ambit, Delusion called it, try to spawn the Ambit.

“Fuck it.” I mutter under my breath, slamming the fridge closed.

He’s going to find me eventually. He is going to find me. I can’t stay inside forever. It looks suspicious and I’m meant to be convincing both him and Lera that it wasn’t me anyway.

I’ll go for a short run. Not to the factories and nowhere near the drug house. I’ll run to Памятник перемирию - The Armistice Monument. It’s at the edge of the central district so not too close to anything else.

I lace up my shoes, check the front door is locked, check all the windows are closed and exit through the back door, locking it behind me. I step outside into the housing district. It hugs the rest of Toprak from the outskirts in a kind of crescent or semi-circle, and luckily the drug house is on the edge of it at the far side. As I walk towards the compressed gravel road, I run a hand over my lips, wondering how the injury looks. The swelling has gone down through the week but I think anything more than a passing glance reveals the healing cuts which line up with my teeth. The cuts still hurt, but only when eating.

I start running up my street at a steady pace like I always do. The loose grit of the road grinds under my heel as I pass wooden houses bleached by the suns merger rays down to an ash grey, the only real change in the colour scheme a monochromatic darkening in places stained by wet. Tall concrete lintels line the road on both sides, staked into patches of mud and grass between dumps of materials or rubbish, it’s hard to tell which. The lintels carry both power and telephone lines out to the dilapidated neighbourhood in a network of suspended cables from tin roof to tall concrete lintel.

The dumping ground that is the raw shoulders of the road makes it so I always run on the grey gravel road to avoid the odd pile of stone, heap of metal or concrete slabs. Two words fight for supremacy over what the housing district really is. Bleak in its pale rundown state and Abandoned because there is hardly anyone here. The districts population drained away over the years, some escaping to a better life and others moving to better conditions than their houses; which were decomposing into shacks. Some move for the more affordable monthly prices of the apartments in the blocks, much less to maintain there to survive through winter months. But a larger part of the districts population simply had to leave to find work elsewhere. Toprak is a monotown centred around prefabricated concrete construction, only there is nothing to build and has been nothing for a while.

I turn onto another narrow gravel back-road - all the roads in the housing district are back-roads - and begin to speed up as I feel my muscles warm. This road has a concrete trench running parallel to it for water drainage or a stream, I don’t know which. As I pass each house, and its own dumping ground, the concrete trench changes. Sometimes covered with a rusted iron grid, sometimes concrete slabs with a few of them having fallen in. The places where the trench is exposed, that’s where Lera and I would play, sometimes, when we were small. We would set off to play outside the back of the house but every now and then we would find ourselves wandering down the street to play with the dying stream in the trench.

How I’m going to see Lera to talk to her, to making things better, I don’t know. She lives in the drug house. Not she stays there occasionally, no. She lives there. Thinking of Radovan I keep my eyes peeled as I run down the network of back-roads. He knows where I live so I’m probably just being paranoid.

I run under an old disconnected water-pipe system that crosses over roads and threads itself sporadically through the neighbourhood and between houses in undismantled bursts. It’s a sign I’ll be running past the edge of the apartment block district in another two blocks. Soon enough I put my foot down on actual tar road. All the infrastructure improves in micro-steps as you near the town centre.

Shops have wedged themselves in between the apartment block district and the outer central district. They try to catch your eye with their colours of red with white outlines or dual shades of blue, but they can’t. They are nearly indistinguishable to any other building in Toprak. It’s like the town has been smeared over with an ash tray.

I run along the concrete paving the shops put down to match the roads level. It’s quiet out here today. Probably because of the shortwave warning people to stay with family due to the minor-mass delusion.

The monument is coming up soon, a little way into the outer central district. Памятник перемирию - The Armistice Monument - isn’t really about peace. It marks the first ceding of Toprak between two powers and a long line of flip-flops as the town bounced back and forth. I pass the last of the shops and spot the large double story building of the Orphanage coming up on the left. It’s an old building, from a time when Toprak belonged to its own country before being swallowed by others. There are bars on the windows and somehow you never see the front doors open, but I know there are hundreds of children inside. Well, now, a lot of girls.

I run past a few more blocks and begin to slow down as the three-way roundabout where Stosha Avenue dead-ends into the outer central district’s roads. I’ve never been able to figure out why myself, but on the impressively large roundabout is an island of mud, grass, scattered concrete benches and the Armistice Monument. At the centre of the roundabout, on the large rectangular concrete block serving as a base, is the wide plaque displaying bold silver Cyrillic letters; Памятник перемирию 15 июля 1956 г.

I come to a stop next to a concrete slab of bench partway towards the monument but far away enough from the road that the smell of cars passage won’t bother me.

I sit down on the cold concrete and catch my breath.

Did violence fail today, is that why I’m outside instead of hiding at home? I don’t think what’s going on here, with Radovan, is violence exactly, more like foreboding or menacing. It’s a threat, a threat of violence. Did violence fail here today? No, the threat of violence failed, intentional or not. Violence does not fail, it erases you. And if someone close to you holds the idea of you tightly, flaunts you, believes in you, then violence erases them too. On and on it goes, until eventually, there is nothing left.

I’m drawn out of my rambling thoughts by the sound of shuffling grass. An old man is making his way over intent on the other side of the bench to seat himself on. There are quite a few benches, empty benches, littered across the roundabout, but this kind of thing doesn’t bother me. For all I know he comes to sit on this bench every few days and I’m the one out of place.

He looks to have a skinny frame under his clothes, as though he was once a bigger man but drink and age syphoned his flesh away, leaving only sinew and bone to keep his clothes draped over his frame. He moves like his body is marked with tender pain; bent knees, bent elbows and a back hunched by labour. Still, he dresses well and his clothes look clean. That’s one of the oddities I find with Toprak. Every day the town looks worse, every day the town is worse. But the people, mostly the older population, the ones who can’t escape and will be here until the day they die, they always dress their best, like every day is Sunday mass.

“Молодой человек, вы должны быть достаточно взрослыми, чтобы учиться в академии или институте?” he gets out in a voice with a slight wheeze. His accent is thick, embedded from tongue to tonsils.

Young man, you must be old enough to attend an academy, or institute?

I’m a slow conversationalist with the native language speakers, but the old man doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind.

I shake my head. “I’m sixteen, still in school.”

He cocks his head. “Шестнадцать? Нет, ты, должно быть, старше, уже закончил школу. Ой!” he chuckles “Это пьяный бред, из-за него закрыли школы. Если ты вернешься сюда через несколько лет, я заплачу тебе за выпивку.”

Sixteen? No, you must be older, out of school already. Oh!” he chuckles “It's the drunken delusions, they closed down the schools because of it. If you come back here in a few years I'll pay you to buy me booze.

He’s buttering me up, just wants me to try buy him hard spirits. I definitely look sixteen, maybe a little older.

The man’s old and he must have money if he wants to buy or even pay me.

Trying to make conversation I ask “Why can’t you buy for yourself, has your wife told the store not to sell to you?”

His tone turns sombre and he shakes his head at a tragedy I don’t quite understand. “Короткая волна. Сегодня утром они сказали, что магазины могут продавать только одну бутылку на человека. Нет, если бы меня остановила жена, я бы побил ее ее собственными горшками.” He says with a breath of humour

The shortwave. This morning they said stores could only sell one bottle per a person. No, if it was my wife stopping me I would beat her with her own pots.

A new measure for the minor-mass delusion.

We sit in, what I feel, is a comfortable silence for a while. The old man pulls off his Ivy Cap and dusts it, but after a while I start to tense. The tension in my body grows as my frustration mounts. Problems I don’t know how to solve. Sure, I braved going outside at risk of being hurt, but the solutions to my problems are still out of reach.

I’m procrastinating again is what it feels like. There’s nothing to do if I can’t figure out how to get to Lera to talk with her. How, how, how. My mind runs in a circle a few more times as I wrestle with the realities of Lera staying at the drug house and that being a place I should not be going. It’s so frustrating. So pointless. So pathetic.

I want to run myself ragged on the way back and do calisthenics until my body aches from exhaustion. Collapsing to sleep after that would be bliss; an escape from this impotent fucking problem.

My muscles are balled from borderline anger and I’m just about to get up and make true on my want, when I hear a set of voices spilling over from behind the rectangular concrete base of the Armistice Monument.

“I just want to dance, you know?” Sounds a little like Rurik. “We should go back to that dance hall in Chervoryska. You’ll be able to come this time, Grishka?”

“I think so. Isn’t much going on with everyone staying inside.” Grishka pedals alongside the group on his old silver bicycle. He’s always making deliveries on it for some part time job.

“Stosha, what do you think?” Rurik turns to her. “Could you ask your dad to book that dance hall for us again? The built in sound system was the best part. Here we have to use the tape player and the rooms all stink like public toilets.”

Stosha Dostoyevsky. She walks along slowly with her group of friends, the curls of her dark brown hair bouncing because of the treatment she gets at a hairstylist over in Chervoryska. I don’t think there’s much to her as a person. I’ve always had the impression that she’s like a plastic bottle, colourless, transparent and empty on the inside. I think she realises it too from the way she dresses, desperately wrapping shocking colours around herself in the form of skirts, dresses and coats, trying to hide her non-person existence.

Stosha shrugs her shoulders “He’s busy because of the stuff going on. I don’t think he wants me going anywhere until it’s over.”

“Oh come on, Stosha!” Rurik begs. “School’s closed and there is nothing to do here. We can only mess around in the blocks so many times. I’m already broke because it’s all we’ve done this week.”

Stosha waves her hand in a noncommittal motion “I’m serious. He was talking last night about me staying home until this was over. If I ask he will probably clear one of the rooms of furniture and bring in a small sound system-”

“Sounds good, better than dancing in the toilets.” Rurik responds sounding pleased.

“You think that, Rurik” Stosha says turning to him “but you don’t realise you can’t bring anything to drink to my house, nothing to smoke and nothing else either. Dad would probably try to move you to a different class or maybe even a different school if he found out.”

“That sounds fine. We can go out afterwards when we want. Come on, Timur, Alina, tell her.”

“He’s right, it’s better than anything else around here.” Alina pipes up from Stosha’s side.

“Much better.” Murmurs Timur.

The old man notices the voices too and looks like he’s about to get up and head over to them but I interrupt him.

“We go to the same school, the same class. They won’t be able to buy either.”

He nods his head in realisation and smooth’s out his Ivy Cap before putting it back on. “Ой. Друзья?”

Oh. Friends?

“No.”

He gets up anyway and waves feebly at me in parting, perhaps hampered by the tender pain of old age.

I look back over to Stosha and her group; they’ve noticed me as well and inevitably changed to the native language. They know it makes me slow.

“Стоша, твой мобильный.” Grishka asks.

Stosha, your cell phone.

“Давайте посидим здесь немного.” Stosha says while handing Grishka her phone. “У меня до сих пор болит голова со вчерашнего вечера.”

Let’s sit here for a bit. Stosha says while handing Grishka her phone. I still have a headache from last night.

“Обед потом? Может быть, мы пойдем в Золотые Блины?” Alina pipes up again.

Lunch afterwards? Maybe we go to Gold Blinis?

Timur’s trying to give me a death stare. He’s the one I punched down last year. Must have really damaged his pride and ego because he’s still holding the grudge. It did happen in front of his friends.

The guys, all three of them, they don’t care. Well, they didn’t, not before last year. They were indifferent to me, not friends but not enemies either. But they did start to care when I replied to one of Stosha’s acidic outbursts. It was the first time I had replied in years. It was to do with my certainty that I would kill them. I felt invulnerable.

She must have said I was a eunuch by birth defect or that I was a failed abortion, she was using those kinds of insults at the time. I turned to her and the eye-contact seemed to make her angrier. My words were satisfying so I spoke them slowly.

“Take off those clothes and you’re hollow and empty, not a person inside you. Perfect for a rich whore.”

Alina and the others laughed at me, at first. They found my reply a desperate string of words like a child telling lies in an attempt to hurt. Until the last bit that is.

But Stosha’s reaction is what mattered. That anger and disgust on her face vanished as her eyes widened slightly, a new expression escaping her control and revealing slight surprise, slight shock. Such a small change but it mattered so much. It was like her secret, whether she knew of it or not, was on her face.

Rurik stood up and started demanding I apologise for calling Stosha a whore. They might have been, or be, dating. I don’t care.

I think I must have smiled because Timur stood up and charged over, taking a swing at my head. His fist glanced off the side of my skull and before I knew it I span around to him and clobbered him to the ground. My reaction was swift and there was no thought behind it.

God, it had felt good.

That feeling in my chest, the one that makes me think of a distant over the hills sound of the sea crashing into the shore, it reacted in pleasure, as though cantillating my deed. It rumbled through my chest expressing the need for more, promising contentment and satisfaction in violence. I imagine the feeling must be similar to a hungry hollow ache and restless muscles filled with sugar begging for excessive stress.

I stare Stosha and her group down for a few more minutes before getting up from the concrete slab of bench to leave. It isn’t the same anymore. I can’t just stare them down knowing I’m going to kill them. Before… Before it was a certainty. I knew I was going to kill them. I could sit all day right next to them feeling like it was the best day of the week because I knew they were going to die, I knew I was going to kill them. Their actions, their thoughts, their little mannerisms and words were pointless, childish even. They were pathetic. Because in the end I was going to kill them, and they would have no response to that.

I try to walk casually back across the street and towards the shopping district. I don’t run, no, like I’m running away from them. I walk. I’ll never show them weakness.

After I’m around a corner and out of sight I start running again. I pace down the street passing the orphanage and begin retracing my steps back home.

The threat of violence faced but no problems solved.

Alina, I revolt her for whatever reason. But Stosha, Stosha’s reaction goes past revulsion. Revulsion is the base, but Stosha built something on it, as though my presence at school through the years has empowered something more, a hate. A hate that kept on growing, revulsion stoking the hate sharper and blacker. A sharp, black, hate.

I need to forget about them for a while, Stosha and her friends. I need to forget about them and concentrate on Lera. Lera has a drug or alcohol problem no matter which way you look at it, maybe both. The ideal outcome would be to help her get out of that, to help her leave it behind. But first I need her to believe me, to trust me. First we need to start talking and talking more often.

If I can’t visit the drug house, maybe Lera leaves it at some point. But when does she leave and why does she leave?

If I think about everyone in the drug house, Radovan leaves all the time. I don’t know what he’s busy with, but he is often doing something else and only checks in on the drug house. Maybe he goes between the dealers in the blocks, checking on them. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to spend much time in a place that smells like vomit that’s been warming in the sun all afternoon.

Kostas guards the door and the floor. He decides which fiend can come in and which fiend has stayed for too long. But he doesn’t take the money, that’s one of the others. He leaves to…

He leaves to get food. They all do. Specifically at lunch time they take turns over the week leaving to fetch food from the cafe. That’s when Lera will leave. I can watch the cafe and see who comes on what day.

But not tomorrow. Tomorrow is the Ambit.