Прохор Озорнин - On the Wings of Hope - Prose

Years took their toll, you say? As a matter of fact, by rabbit standards, Aristarchus was still young enough – and stupid enough to once openly doze on the edge of the forest only to fall into the hands of the ill-fated farmer. To be honest, the farmer cured him and his wounded in the course of the last rescue from fox's paws leg but didn’t deserve Aristarchus’s love for that act of kindness anyway. “Such is my fate, probably,” Aristarchus bitterly sighed when the farmer gave him to the circus, “and there is no point in jumping against the fate.”

“You cannot escape the fate, Mary!” he loved to philosophize in front of the pig once in a while. “For she is like a fox – sooner or later she will catch you and eat in a flash of time!”

“You are silly, Kosoy, to tell such fairy tales,” Mary replied to him, while herself thinking in those moments: “Maybe, there is truly no escape?” And in such moments her hooves became weak, and she plopped down into the mud once again and bathed in it until the exhaustion until she was as dumb as a sheep.

Aristarchus also wanted to fall down together with her in the mud, or to drink water from puddles, but Mary repeatedly tried to dissuade him: “Don’t ever drink from there, Ari! You will either become a goat or will turn into a sheep! A drinking rabbit is a woe of the family!”

“I’ve had enough of your lamentations, sheep!” sheep Innocentus, or shortly Inoc, often interrupted their mutual spiritual outpourings. “Shut up, or I will gore that bullshit out of you!”

The prospect of being gored to the death by this mad horned beast has always frightened both Mary and Aristarchus and during such moments they reduced the degree of own lamentations and complaints, though not for too long. Unlike cats, they had only one life – and when one can curse own fate if not in this one?

“And I could already have a family right now…” Aristarchus thought in such days. “Cute wife and pretty small rabbits… What was I thinking about? I was the first guy in the underbrush, girls were checking me out while I was turning my face away from all of them… No, that’s bullshit, it’s simply my fate!” he repeatedly reassured that nagging inner feeling of lost alternative opportunities. And time and again was effectively appearing out of the circus magician’s hat, and jumping over the rope, and running marathons around the circle of life with pigs, and trying not to hob-nob with the sheep. Circus, in a word.

But the fate of Aristarchus was still not so hot. Five years later, he was noticeably older and could no longer run – only to lie and wail, for the most part. Pig Mary also disappeared somewhere one Sunday evening, and since then there was no one to swim in the local mud puddles and to eat slops. Sheep Inoc broke his two horns when during another fit of rage at those infuriating him once tried to butt the cable column. Well, and the owners of the traveling circus could barely make ends meet. So one day they simply let Aristarchus go – took him out of the cage and let him out into the nearest undergrowth. Enough of moaning, they say. Better run to… all four sides! But by that time Aristarchus could no longer run – the load of his years and opening alluring forest prospects, where you had to take care of yourself, pressed so heavily on the whole essence of Aristarchus, so that his soul – if, well, rabbits have it – almost literally went into his heels, so he could barely drag his feet. And on the third day of his wanderings through the deserted forests came, in fact, that very hour X.

***

“You shouldn’t be sleeping on the flank, my friend. That way we may have never met!” the wolf chuckled while holding Aristarchus in his paw and looking around.

“Do your dirty thing, gray one,” bitterly croaked squeezed by mighty paws Aristarchus. “Don’t you spit in my soul or pull my ears! One cannot escape from his fate…”

“My, just look at that weak-willed philosophical specimen I’ve got today!” grinned the wolf. “Perhaps, I will even leave a foot from you as a warning for future generations. Rabbit’s foot, you know, is a symbol of good luck!” he laughed.

“Don’t you torture my ears,” Aristarchus groaned. “My soul ashes anyway.”

“And do you know why I’ve got you, oh my mentally lame friend, aye?” the wolf blinked with his two eyes that were burning with a fire of malice. “How does it go… you cannot escape your fate. You are not gonna out of this life alive, Kosoy!”

“No fate…” obediently agreed with him Aristarchus.

03.03.2019

Once upon a time, someone knocked at a door of human's Soul. The Happiness was standing behind a threshold, having come from unknown edges of the world. A true Happiness always comes unexpectedly.

“And who might you be?” the surprised man asked it, for he has been living alone with Sadness for a long time.

“I am your most real, long-awaited Happiness!” it said with a joy.

“You lie!” grinned the man. “This world has no happiness to be found!”

“But I am already standing here, don't I?” the Happiness was surprised. “How can't I exist if I have finally found you as well?”

“No, you cannot be my long-awaited Happiness,” the man began to doubt. “My Happiness should look and feel differently, I feel it.”

“I am just tired from a long journey to you,” the Happiness smiled in reply. “I have been searching for you in these swamps of Grief and steppes of Loneliness for so long! Allow me now to enter a home of your soul – and I shall help you bring it to an order.”

I already have all things in full order, just like everyone else,” the man frowned.

“That's why you look so sad?” asked the Happiness.

“I am just normal,” replied the man. “Not like some others.”

“Like who?” questioned the Happiness. “Ah, you were speaking of those ones whom I have already managed to find?” it guessed.

“They are cranky!” sniffed the man. “And you are crazy as well!” he became angry.

“But I am your dear Happiness!” and the Happiness beggarly gave hands to the man.

“Leave me be!” snapped he and pushed the Happiness sideways. “I no longer believe in you!”

“…All right,” answered the Happiness, “I will do as you ask of me. But maybe even the memory of my short intervention will manage to warm you in upcoming cold nights of Sadness…”

And, having that said, the Happiness turned back and walked away through the doors. The man sniffed once again and, continuing grumbling something about totally ridiculous and untimely guests, went back to his sleeping rooms.

And the Happiness, who has made such a long and dangerous journey, sat down on a porch of a home of human's soul and, having become silent, started to wait patiently without drawing too much attention. It hoped so much that the man will once start believing in his own Happiness.

17.04.2014

“Good evening!” roared the TV. “What are we going to watch today? Porno, seamy side, domestic squabbles, LOL, gangster romanticism, soap operas, endless politics? Your choice, sir, lies on a finger-tip, pushing the button on a remote TV set. There is nothing more primitive than that!”

“Can this be called a choice at all?” the man sighed wearily.

“Take what we give, make yourself deaf!” TV bellowed with rage.

“And what if I am not a part of that all-watching crowd?” asked the man. “Then what?”

“Oh, surely, you are not ‘them’! You are simply my old admirer. My toy. My endlessly watching contemplator. My beloved seeker. My switcher and gazing-one. To put it briefly, my slave. Yes, slave?”