Прохор Озорнин - On the Wings of Hope - Prose

“Fuck you, freaks!” Tommy swore under his nose, throwing TV remote aside, “there is nothing good to watch at all. Where does America slide? By the name of Mila, that’s ain’t right!”

“What did you say, daddy?” Mila slightly opened a door of his room. “Did you call for me?”

***

Next morning Tommy’s bandaged leg reminded of itself again with a sharp pain, once it’s owner stood up from his bed and proceeded on own feet into a bathroom.

“Oh, God, how great I am!” some male voice spoke over his ear all of a sudden.

“Who’s there?” Tommy took alarm, promptly looking around. “It’s a private property, what’s the hell are you doing here?! Show yourself!”

“Oh, my Lord, I am simply magnificent!” the voice of invisible interlocutor continued, paying not even a slightest attention to unsuccessful Tommy’s attempt to establish a contact. “Hell, I am the most beautiful man in this damned world!” the voice assured himself and suddenly calmed down at the same moment.

“Hell, I am going crazy with this trauma already,” Tommy thought to himself. “Some kind of hallucinations are starting already. At first yesterday’s dealer, now some kind of voices. It’s all the nerves, probably… perhaps I should start buying antidepressants,” he was thinking while shaving own cheeks. “What my poor wife would only think of that…”

“We love you!” two unknown girls, whose faces and other body parts Tommy didn’t see at all, suddenly sang directly into his ears.

“Do you even exist?” some person of very and very uncertain gender asked a question in a very and very uncertain voice.

“You are just a jerk!” admitted a man of average years in a fit tempter.

“Go away from me!” some woman sent Tommy in an unspecified direction.

“Thank you! Thank you!” child sobbed in a crying voice.

“Are you a fool or what? Don’t you see what you are doing? What have I asked of you in a church yesterday? That’s not what I wanted at all!” one more unknown subject as if slapped Tommy in a face.

“One thousand of imps!” thought scared Tommy. “What, have I gone totally nuts? I definitely need some rest!” he assured himself. “I will surely issue a working holiday on Monday if I don’t go mad before that day already.”

***

This Sunday trip to a supermarket helped Tommy to learn a lot of new about his personality.

“Fool! Jerk! Genius! Rascal! Wise man! Savior! Torturer!” voices have been tirelessly shouting inside his head. His wife cautiously glanced at her husband, who was hardly driving the car and continually crying out in the air: “You are a fool yourself! Thanks! It’s you who is a rascal! No need for gratitude! No problems at all!”

His neighbor didn’t even start to be too soft at all and without a search for roundabout ways called Tommy as the loser in response to Tommy’s comment in the spirit of “you have become too choosy from riches!”

The police officer on the road named him precisely as “the weird loony who drives faster than a hundred kilometers per hour and doesn’t look at road signs at all!”

The cashier in a shop, having silently looked at the check, called him “cheapskate”, and his own wife as “my poor darling” by the end of that day.

His daughter Mila called him “my sick daddy”, son Gregory as “raunchy ancestor”, and Jess-the-cat didn’t even go into unnecessary details and just said “Meow!”

Having accurately bypassed a cat in the evening, Tommy flopped down on a bed, even finding no time to take off his boots, and started snoring in some five minutes. His loving wife silently sat down near him, put her hand on a forehead of a sleeping Tommy and sadly shaken her head.

And he dreamed this Sunday night of a huge garden with a set of beds, which Tommy saw only at familiar farmers who were living outside the city, – and these beds were all except for only one filled with a horse-radish.

***

Tommy’s boss decided to organize a meeting, of which necessity the labor union hinted him a long time ago, and in very plain terms declared, that wages for previous two work months won’t be paid in this one, because, we quote, – “these damned Chinese communists have seized a substantial share of our market and we, proud and freedom-loving Americans have to do a lot to kick their lean yellow asses!”

And that’s where Tommy’s patience finally failed him. Having proudly straightened his shoulders as would be done by any freedom-loving carrier of democratic values and the far descendant of the first immigrants-convicts from the Old World to the New one, he grasped air in his mighty breast and, using a very primordially American speech, explained to his chief to what point in this endless space he can start moving right now without postponing this procedure in a milk bottle, and what kind of starry-eyed person his boss is in general, even though with a few inclusions in his ideal character of some truly bestial human qualities. And all that would be just nothing, but being urged by approving shouts and looks of his colleagues, Tommy agitated himself so much that in the end, he climbed to the eminence from which his undersized boss was speaking, and kicked him with all his force in his primordially American ugly face. This face reddened at first, then turned blue, and then uttered that he, Tommy, can go off from here to there where the sun never shines and that he doesn’t work here anymore from now on.

And on his way back from nowadays former work some truck crashed at the intersection of roads into the ugly face of Tommy’s car, which caused another sad sight of his wife and ill-concealed giggling of his neighbor and by coincidence owner of a brand new and undamaged Porsche.

***

What sort of occurrences the visitor of a club of anonymous losers Tommy had to experience for these three months, which have passed since his first meeting with that strange agent from LLC “Center of Desires Fulfillment”.

There were falling into manholes after foul language speaking with the head of a local church; broken fingers, which have already tired from showing this infamous American “fuck you” sign; torn sinews of legs, which excessively sharply kicked from own rage homeless dogs and cats; and a wide variety of other ways of interaction between the physical Universe and not less physically existing inside it Tommy. And to the voices, who have been persistently either demanding something from him, or flatteringly expressing their sincere devotion, or questioning some next nonsense, Tommy ceased to pay attention at all.

Valencia, looking at her unfortunate husband, only looked away in times – and more and more frequently her eyes filled with tears during evenings. His daughter Mila started calling him “the sick daddy” on a constant basis, and son Gregory was proud before his school teammates of how crack headed and raunchy his ancestor is.

…And it all has come to an end when a truck, carrying filled with milk canisters from that dairy factory, which honorable wage-less member Tommy has recently been, run over him on the road.

***

“Do you understand now, dear mister Tommy, how important it is to formulate your desires correctly?” the young man in a white jacket with red bow tie inclined over Tommy and searchingly looked him in the eyes. “A desire is – how to express it more clearly – a door in a window of opportunities. Allow me to be curious – how is the life of God’s deputy for you?”

“Not… very… lively,” with hardly obeying lips and somehow unexpectedly quite said Tommy.

“It’s quite obvious that it’s a hard life. You are not even inside so habitual for your body right now. Here you are lying in a coma in the surgery, and your wife keeps praying for you behind that door. Do you know, what kind of desires is overcoming her now? I shall tell you, even though you don’t ask for it. Her only most powerful and overflowing desire at this moment is your life, Tommy. She wants that you keep living, do you understand that? She is asking not of perfection or divinity, but of a preservation of your life – which you, it should be noted, didn’t value too much.”