Black and white smoke

Black and white smoke rises up the street. Fills every corner, every room. A small children’s cradle, a cat bowl. The bottle of cola you bought yesterday, your dad’s office on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper. The cemetery by the lake, the one where we saw a hedgehog with a beautiful leaf on needles. A big truck, empty or full? I don’t know. The store where Aunt Larisa works, the one with dyed black braids and vulgar blood-red lipstick. Smoke creeps through the cracks of old houses, your grandmother is sitting there, watching a series about Turkish sultans. She shouts that she can’t see well, like always. Then he blows the ventilation and looks around in the bathroom, where your future wife is taking a shower and singing some gentle song. I think it’s in French. Smoke crawls and crawls, as if passing an obstacle course and one hundred percent in the lead. The girl who was your neighbor for a long time returns from music school with a huge cello behind her. The smoke catches her by surprise in the entrance thirteen steps to the apartment.

Finally, the smoke reaches the village where your grandfather lives, that is, your father’s father. You always liked to come to his place in the summer and fish at five in the morning. The smoke, like a whale’s jaw, engulfs the village in one second. He even sneaks into the cabin of a red Mazda that flies along the Odesa-Kyiv route. Your mother is driving, of course.

You wake up over the toilet, throwing up the last of what was in your stomach. The smoke affected the youngest brother the most, who was the first to see the source of its origin. He saw black and white smoke pouring out of your heart, almost dead.

But now you open your eyes and with every breath you take, the smoke leaves the occupied territories.