Astar T&A – Creative Duo

by Anna Astar, 2018, 2021

I have forgotten how it was.
My wife, as natural a thing for me to say
now
as is the scent of butter cake
at the pulsating spot beside your brow,
as is my breathing
mixed with yours.
So natural it feels that I forget to bother
still
that it might get up someone's nose
when I so simply say, my wife.

I have forgotten how it was.
My early ages' clumsy loves,
and lies.
The heart, a homeless hungry pup,
the dim horizon of a land unknown,
the trembling fingers on my forming curves
and, later on, the eyes
that yelled in blinding, existential fright,
"It can not be! Get lost!"

I have forgotten how it was.
The books that taught I was perverse
or cursed
The coming-outs
where every time's the first.
With every single person that I met,
I'd sweat and search for words,
like there was nothing else to fret about.
The thoughts that sickened
and exhausted my soul.
The fears I learnt to molt,
to grow the shell of "we."

I have forgotten how it was.
The funny things that we were told,
like, "I'm fine with this,
I just don't want to know…"
Or, better, "Why the fuss? 
You, after all, aren't being stoned!"
Perhaps
That was what made us flee.
Well, and the nasty smell of brown
around the country.
It didn't feel like home.
We just wished to be.

I have forgotten how it was.
The rush we did across the map,
not far, but very far, and step by step.
The grasp - at any rate.
The need to prove that we belonged right here
in spite of not belonging anywhere.
The feel of soaring as the atmosfear
of being de trop
evaporated from our veins.
The chilly standing by the Parliament,
the rainbow mittens on our locking hands,
the cheers and singing when they said it's "yes."
The piece of paper we'd been waiting for
for thirteen years.
Now, here I am, allowed to say, 
"my wife."
That's telling worlds.
Feels like it's always been this way,
because
I have forgotten how it was.

by Anna Astar, 2021

Was that the one original anthroposin,
when man shed off the forests, rivers, fields
and stepped out of his native skin,
like he could be reborn a god,
within the skin of stone and steel?
 
Have we become instead a plague,
a sort of anthroposinosis sprawled 
in the skin and lungs of land,
that sought and braved to rein the forces
more ancient than the world?
 
That sought and braved to put a hell
in concrete walls and human hands -
the hands that failed and couldn't hold.
As when the laughing fire stepped out of itself
and sent a billion ruthless devils 
that can't be seen, or touched, or sensed
to soak the very air with poison,
thus forcing everything away.
To soak the bodies, suddenly so small,
reduced to painful, dying cells:
the rotting flesh, the derm and hair shed…
 
And it was called
an accident.
 
But what is accidental then?
How much of time and home
have we to leave behind,
entombing sleeping toxic mines
deep in the skin of earth
and in our children's glands?
There is a line,
where life, as measured by half-lives, 
becomes half-death, becomes a shade,
devoiced, 
denamed
debodied
not even etched in stone...

by Anna Astar, 2018

I wished to kiss your toes, so charmed by you,
To wipe your snot, to play your little games.
I called you child, and you got quickly used
To thrusting toys and tantrums in my face.

I sighed, "oh Princess!", happy to revere
And please your Highness, giving what it takes.
Of all the fairy-tales, you picked the gear
Of Turandot: the riddles and the axe.

You were my god, the only one, I vowed,
Whose single word could raise me out of clay.
You swelled to rub your head against the clouds,
And thunderbolts were all you had to say.

I've lost you. You have lost you, too. A pain.
Should I have simply called you by your name?

by Anna Astar, 2019

It's sport: you're playing white, I'm playing black
and always seem to move one step behind.
The game's about who takes the checkered flag.

We race across the board and down the track.
Fate on the piano sets the tempo high,
his right hand playing white, left playing black.

Two lines now clash, now kiss, now throttle back.
Hands changed, this time it's I who's playing white,
but I don't care about the checkered flag.

I move and watch the patterns interact,
their smart confusion capturing my mind - 
all mixed: who's playing white, who's playing black…

And suddenly, our ways that zig and zag
from light to night, then back, get justified
and fill the matrix of the checkered flag.

And you, my darling. When you start to lag,
I slow my pace, to tango by your side.
You'll see: one playing white, the other black,
it takes us both to weave the checkered flag.

by Anna Astar, 2019

    - Do you know why are girls silent in sauna?
    - They sit on their lips.
    (A Swedish joke)


To the small, steaming island, tied
to the shore next to the city heart,
she comes when her day is nearly closed.
There she takes off all her clothes.
Hangs on a hook. To rest a short while.
 
She frees her shoulders, her feet, her thighs, 
taking off the grips of frigid streets;
the boring weather; perhaps her kids,
that she prefers to think of
as lovely - or necessitated.
 
She tucks away into a locker
her phone, together with the network
of social attributes; the job that
is, she feels, securing - or 
secured, with the career and colleagues.
 
She takes off tomorrow's meals, the shops,
the bills, the hairstyle, and made-up face, 
the artificial smiles and smells - and 
all the men... She hesitates
a bit before she locks the locker.

She puts on nudity: the naked
beauty of her age - in the innate
ornamentation of markings. Drapes
the skin the color of home
around her shoulders, her waist, her hips.

She robes herself into the nudeness
of the eyes, of the ears, of the hair.
Tries on the mind, stripped of all clothing,
and the nudity of voice.
She avoids looking in the mirror.

Her breasts, the fruits of her earthliness,
undulate like hope as she walks to
where she is not silent. Her body,
porous and heated, speaks of
her autonomy, speaks with the sweat,

squeezing the cold, alienation,
stickiness of the world out of her,
while the towel holds a gentle hand
against her softness. She lets
herself immerse into the ocean,
 
being both the fetus and the womb
borne by the undulating waters.
She blends the fluids of her nature
with the waves. She lets seaweeds
caress her skin. Walking out of them
 
salty and fertile as earth. And then, 
she opens up the locker.

by Anna Astar, 2020

2020. I beheld my world
squeeze down to thirty meters, more or less.
A vacuum of angst. A freezer, void,
it seemed, of any breathing, any 'next.'

But as I sat there, nursing my complaints,
I saw whole lives squeezed down to just a bed,
with tubes pushed through the throat, along the veins.
The lungs, flip-flapping useless rags - in red.

Apart from being filled with all that pain,
I'm thankful: I can breathe. I don't complain.

by Anna Astar, 2018

Why cry out to the skies?
To Him, who should be deemed
the reason for all woes?
The falling drops, so like 
the trickles from your eyes,
are nothing more than rain,
He will not shed a tear
for you, with you, on you.

Why hope for cheering smiles
among the pregnant clouds?
All smiles are born inside,
and there's no one to say,
it's gonna be alright.
…
It's gonna be alright
but
once the tears are dried.

by Anna Astar, 2018

The chair that touched the most desired part of you…
Its padding, beige and soft,
still keeps the warmth you brought,
still covets for the weight you took away.
You used to twine your legs around its wobbly legs,
and, laughing, you would hit its wooden three-stripped back
with roaring shakes.
I always envied
the way it trembled under you
and gave you that much of support and comfort that it could…
If I were it, I'd stick to you, I'd made you stay, I would…

by Anna Astar, 2019

1.
The lake at my feet,
nearest clouds two steps away
invite to dive in

2.
Whence comes the breathing
sending ripples through the gloss?
The mirror broken

3.
My paddle scatters pearls
ever stirring the surface
in search of calmness

by Anna Astar, 2018, 2019

Hey! Are you fine?
Can't figure why
today I seem to find
you - or my memory of you -
in every thing I meet:
the dullest work, the coolest book,
the sandwich that I eat,
the gray of skies
that makes me blue,
the piano's black and white...
Can't figure anything at all
through sudden tears that roll and roll...
_____________
Hi dear
Or… well… should I say "dear"
now that I'm putting down these lines…
We're over us, you see… I know you see…
We've been too fast, our minds too slow
or maybe simply it's the time that grows upon the thing.
You know?
Now… would I want to save? To go through it once more?
Past now, past what has been, just on and on…
I wish that I could answer yes
and just connect my hands with yours
in some eternal space where there's no no….
We're over us.
Please, don't reply.
It's just a line to say goodbye…
I've been my happiest with you. I hope you too…
Sincere.
Not yours. Not anymore.

by Anna Astar, 2018

    Did he need a lover at all, Vadim asked himself, quickly counting stairs with the accurate, accustomed steps of a former officer. He had a job, he had a car, he had a house in the suburbs of Saint Petersburg. He had a wife and a son, now a student. And he had Rex. Rex was the love, the thirty nine springy kilograms of love and loyalty, the color and smell of a sweet, fresh, slightly burnt pancake, with the attentive gable of eyebrows and a black grinning muzzle. Instead of spending the night here, in the awkwardness of stiff hugs and stiff conversations, it would have been wiser to go straight home yesterday and take Rex for a walk. They might have gone far into the woods where they could rustle the rusty leaves for as long as they wished, just the two of them, and have one of their unhurried, thoughtful talks. “Where do you think it all will lead us?” Vadim would ask. Rex would flicker his ears and sneeze, with a meaning.
A long walk was what he needed. He would do it now, Vadim thought, with a sunrise of happiness in his tummy, as he marched out of the stinky, scarcely lit staircase. The monotonous block of twelve-storey apartment buildings, a twin of many other blocks in the Nevsky District, was beginning to stir, hectically blinking its scattered yellow eyes in the dusk of an early October morning. Vadim’s Pajero Sport3, only two weeks from the dealer and only several hours from the carwash, gave him a merry orange wink from the row of dirty Ladas and Skodas. He was approaching the car, skillfully avoiding puddles, when his wife called, exactly the time his train was scheduled to arrive at Moskovskiy Vokzal. So typical. He wondered whether she could hear through his earphone the difference between the busy railway station and this sleepy neighborhood. What Olga said made the sunrise in him turn into the red coals of worry. “Rex is unwell,” she said, “since yesterday evening.”
He didn’t need a lover. He didn’t actually have time for one. To be honest, his libido credit wasn’t high enough so as to afford a lover. But he felt he ought to keep one, ever since that day some twenty years ago, soon after he had married Olga, when she said, “Dima is getting divorced.” Dima was her ex, a bedroom firework and a warm blanket of a man, if you take her word for it. She said it like it meant nothing, among a thousand other things she was prattling on about while they enjoyed a late Sunday morning in their bed. But Vadim heard her voice dim with wistful hesitation, and the sheets burnt his naked buttocks with an icy grip.
When he was ten years old, his parents enrolled him in a cadet corps. He remembered the long, empty corridor of the barracks, the dingy blue walls, the smell of discipline and violence sneaking from behind the closed doors. He remembered his mother’s heels echoing away, melting down the stairs. The simple words, “Dima is getting divorced,” struck him with the same feeling of being left in a barren corridor. Olga didn’t leave him, and he didn’t bother to know whether she had ever betrayed him. Only, since his son’s birth, he kept searching the boy’s features for a likeness, half subconsciously. And he made a habit of having some other woman in the rear pocket of his life. Once, he even fell in love for real, but didn’t do anything. “I’m too lazy to get divorced,” he explained to that woman. Having already a second family, it was boring to even think about going through another round of divorce, property division, child division…
Now, the family lived in a green, remote district, in the end of an uneven road lined with irregular shapes of private houses and tall, solid fences. The morning rush was not yet at its height, and it took Vadim just over an hour to get home via the Ring Road. When he arrived, Olga was waiting by the open gates, her round face a wordless alarm, her fat, pink knees strikingly nude above the high rubber boots. It took him five minutes, to see Rex, lying flat on his side in the chilly emptiness of the basement, his stomach swollen and hard, and to load the dog, with Olga’s help, on the back seat of his car, right on the luxury beige, smelling of new leather and comfort. “Wait a minute, I’ll come with you.” Olga made a movement toward the house, to change, but he said, “No need, thank you,” and drove off into the sludgy mess of their street, leaving the blot of her frustrated figure behind.
The three kilometers to the highway were ten minutes of slow rolling from one deep pothole into another. Pulkovskoye Shosse was standing still, eight kilometers from where he entered the hard asphalt and as far as he could see. It was the day when Putin was coming to St. Pete, Vadim recalled. It could take hours before the police would allow the traffic to move again. “Hold on, boy.” In the rearview mirror he could see Rex’s wet, silent eyes and a bit of his own brow crowned with a brush of white hair, a tired eye behind the thin eyeglasses. Everyone noticed how alike they were, both intelligent and dignified. “We’ll see what’s wrong with you, and you’ll be fit as a fiddle very soon, right? I’m sorry, I should have come yesterday. Now just hold on a bit... Next summer we’ll go fishing on Vuoksa again, right? Just you and me…” After about an hour, the traffic trembled and slowly moved forward. Putin’s cortège from the airport must have passed by. 
Vadim had met Putin a few times, coming to Moscow to make reports on the special government projects his institute was working on. He always had a hard time making himself look directly into the Botox-blown face of the short, shifty man. His eyes were those of a duck, his handshake a lukewarm fish. Vadim despised the man for what he was doing, for the shape the country was taking under him. Despised the traffic jams caused by the black cars of the kremliscum of all ranks. Despised the role he, Vadim, was playing in the foul play of fooling and ruling. Despised himself for always trying to look smaller in Putin’s presence, for the president was said to detest tall, handsome, clever males. He protested privately by always voting for someone else from the phantom list of candidates in the phantom elections.
Back in the nineties, the young and enthusiastic Vadim was involved in a research project on alternative methods of cancer diagnostics. He lived in a rented apartment with peeling ceilings, an endless bus and metro commute away from his laboratory. He had bad food and bad teeth then. The project was closed due to a lack of funding. Now Vadim’s work was to help spread the IT-metastases of Putin’s malignant growth around the globe. He had a new car every second year, a full mouth of good implants, and a custom-made house with the number of floors more than the number of people in the family. He could afford it all without having to steal or accept bribes. The price was a ban on travel abroad until resignation plus five years, and a nervous tic that made him shrug his shoulders slightly, as though always in doubt.
Vadim rushed the car through the streets, trying to make up for the hour lost in the gridlock, for the day wasted in someone’s else home, for the week spent on the damn work trip. For all the hours and months that he had been away during the nine years that had passed since the day when a needle-teethed lump of fur bit his ankle at a German Shepherd breeder’s. When he finally reached the vet, Rex was already gone. A thin, pale trickle of urine ran from under his belly. The vet could do nothing, and it was unclear whether anything could have been done, had he come earlier. “The dog was old,” said the vet. “Do you want to leave the body?” Vadim refused and was left alone in the blue walls of the clinic, full of droughts and reeking of angst and medicine. “Who will I talk with now?” he whispered into a big, pointed ear and cried, for the first time since that other corridor forty years ago.
He buried the dog on a little hill at their property, on the lawn where the young Rex had meticulously killed quite a few hedgehogs before the house was even erected. He placed a little bench by the grave, so that he could sit there and talk to his friend. He ordered a big head portrait of the dog from a fine artist. He set up a kind of shrine in his rooms, putting together all the prizes and diplomas Rex had ever got at dog shows, a hundred of his photos, his bowls and his toys. Once, Olga entered and stood there quietly for several minutes. “Would you do the same for me?” she asked, taking Rex’s collar from the shelf. Vadim shrugged involuntarily and was silent for a moment. Then he ripped the collar from her hands and said, “Never touch it again.” 

by Anna Astar, 2021

   It was his first payday ever. Four banknotes, carefully smoothed out, grinned at him from the top of his bed, for once neatly done. Now, he was a man, really! Well, not quite really a man. Yet. But the first step was done – there it lay, the evidence of his manliness, the salary for the first two working weeks in his life. He will give three of the notes to mother. She’ll be so awful proud of him!
Hard weeks were those, too! Washing tank cars after they were emptied of chemicals. One should always be so much cautious inside those cisterns and not touch anything! The elder guys at work say the remaining chemicals would eat the protective clothes in a matter of minutes. You’ll have to replace even your boots in no time, you’ll see, they say. Then, the manholes were always so small! His first week at work was all knock-n-bruise, hundreds of knock-n-bruises. You are too long for the job, the other men laughed when he banged painfully on the hard metal. You are too long, Jonny, his mother, too, used to sigh when he was in his last two years of gymnasium, each time she saw his ankles emerge from under the second-hand jeans she had got him just two months earlier.
His height was still something new to him, who’d stood next to last in the PE class line throughout the long years of school. But after a week at the service station, he managed to discipline his knees and elbows into a streamlined missile. Now he was Spider-Man on a mission, and his body was as strong and agile as it was light and speedy. Jonny looked up from the sight of the money and winked to the blind gaze of Peter Parker, tensely frozen on a yellowed comic magazine spread above his bed, alongside a glossy poster of Elvis depicted in a somewhat similar acrobatic pose.
The three notes he’ll give mom. But this one, with a renaissance profile, is for him, for tonight. For Friday. And the coins too. As he was sitting on the floor, he wriggled his pale, rangy legs in sporadic curly growth out of his blue overall. Holding the trousers upright, he took out a handful of yellow coins from a side pocket and tinkled them down from his fist, next to the paper money. This should be enough for a few drinks – for himself and for… And maybe, if he’s lucky, it’ll do the trick? Maybe, maybe… he’ll be lucky tonight…
He pulled a wooden storage box from under his bed and found there a pair of fresh boxers, a white T-shirt, a mother-ironed grey-striped oversized shirt, and a pack of new white socks – a birthday present kept for a special day. He stood up and dressed with solemn gusto. The wide legs of jeans had to be rolled up two rolls exactly, just as the sleeves of the shirt. A long-sleeved shirt was perhaps, too much for such a rare tropical night, but it helped one feel more massive. He buttoned up, leaving out a white triangle of the T-shirt, and tucked the shirt into the jeans. It’s Friday night, boy! May you have luck tonight, boy!, he murmured to himself, whatever words came to his mind.
Just amazing what resonance those large metal tanks made! As he worked, he always belted out songs and yodels and nonsense warbling at the top of his lungs, so the cistern rang with sound like crazy. That was the super cool thing about the job! But beyond it, little was cool. You shouldn’t let the water drop on your head from the ceiling, when running the hose, his co-workers teased him. It’ll make your hair drop out – the hood is a piece of fake!.. Could it be true?..
He turned to look into a piece of mirror, not larger than a textbook page, fixed to a bookshelf above his desk in the corner, and studied his appearance. Everything was in place: the shock of thick dark hair, the sensitive lips, the nobleman’s nose, the dramatic eyebrows, the eyes like two dark laser shooters… The cheeks, a little too rosy and round… The jaw line, a little too soft, maybe… He felt his chin to see if it needed the razor, finally. It didn’t. He took a hairbrush from the shelf and started backcombing the front part of his hair. It’s Friday night, boy!, he improvised a tune, arching his eyebrow and holding the brush as a microphone. May you have luck! Tonight! May you have a good… He cut himself short of the unwelcome rhyme and saw his cheeks turn red.

There was a single disco in Storheden, a single 18+ place called Dynamo that hypnotized the attention of all the under 18-s. It was there that Jonny headed that Friday night, meaning to blow the renaissance profile and the yellow coins. Precisely at ten, he was showing his ID to a chunk of boiled ham crammed into a black uniform, whose little suspicious eyes roamed Jonny’s face for a moment and then turned away indifferently. In he was allowed.
While in gymnasium, he tagged along with some other boys a few times to try a raid on the neon mecca, which never once succeeded. As his classmates came of age, one by one, they made a point in having birthday parties at Dynamo and the following morning appeared in class inevitably late and with an air of hangover and initiation about them. There were also gatherings in the boys’ bathroom aka saloon where guys told stories and jokes about girls. Jonny didn’t have much to contribute, but he lingered there, to listen and to chortle along. His own 18th birthday occurred amid the finals, that is, school’s final finals, so, beyond the mud cake his mother made for him, he didn’t have a party. Besides, it felt like goo-goo to celebrate the start of adult life at the parents’ expense.
In the depth of the club behind the guard’s stocky back, there was the wide sunken ring of a dance-floor with a few tables on its banks, and the welcoming gleaming of a bar to the right of it. Jonny sauntered to the bar, trying not to gape around and slightly swinging the upper part of his body, hands flat in the front pockets of his jeans, thumbs out. He asked for a pint from a lanky waistcoated type with a face of a bird, and stood leaning against the wall in a dark corner behind the dance-floor, scanning the place over the rim of his glass.
It was an early hour for night-clubbing, with most of the youngster gangs still bunching outside, pregaming on IPAs and mutual goading. It was quite tranquil yet in the club, except for the walls rumbling with amorphous heat-up tracks. Across the room, at a round table loaded with brandy glasses and smouldering ashtrays, a few men in their 30-s, in wide-shouldered summer blazers with rolled-up sleeves, loudly played cards in the eddying yellow light of a hanging lamp. Apart from them, there was a scattering of girls, sitting at the tables or kicking around in pairs or small groups. Some were already shuffling their feet on the periphery of the dance-floor, swaying drowsingly to the beat.
According to the stories Jonny had heard back then, in the acrid smell of urine and excited adolescence, Dynamo was a sex bonanza, teeming with young hottie-totties, most of whom were easy, or else easy after a drink. The word for them was goers, because they were supposed to always want sex, with any man caring to beckon. What do a woman and a hen have in common? – They cackle and like to sit on the rod in the night. 
The girls in the disco wore mini-skirts, leggings or jeans and an armoury of makeup, glitters on their cheekbones, their eyelids painted blue. Their hair-dos were larger, frizzier and stiffer than usual, but otherwise they looked quite normal. Some of the faces seemed familiar, from the school or elsewhere in the town, but no acquaintance to greet.
Would they go with any man? Would one of them go with him? Besides a random idle glance, the girls didn’t appear to pay much attention neither to Jonny nor to the elder men with the cards. They sipped on their cocktails and tried to chatter over the music. They would put soft hands onto one another’s shoulders. They would speak into one another’s ears, leaning very close, almost sweeping each other’s cheeks with their mouths. Then they would burst with laughter and lift their glasses.
Could they go? Could he bring one of them to his home, to his room, mom on the night shift and stuff… Like that one, with a puddle of cherry-red lips on her face and the bleached hair resembling the strands of mineral wool. Her boobs were definitely trying to escape her top. The dark crevice between them – does it feel wet if you poke your finger in?..
After a half an hour or so, it began to get buzzier. Jonny took another glass from the bird-like guy and returned to rub his back against the wall in his corner. A group of women pranced in, well-dressed, about the age of his mother. They were already quite merry and determined to rock the heck of it.
It had never occurred to him that women like his mother could also come to Dynamo to have fun. He’d never seen his mother wear makeup but a tinge of lipstick. He’d never seen her drunk but a little mellow at family gatherings. He tried to imagine her, those blue circles drawn round her eyes, conditioning herself with martini and a stupid talk with the bartender, then kicking her feet in the middle of the dance-floor...
The music suddenly felt too loud, the beer too boring. He put the glass onto the narrow ledge that ran along the wall, and focused on his white canvas sneakers. He’d spent an hour cleaning them the evening before. Mom’s gonna kill him when she sees he’s used up all the baking soda there was.
Alcohol was starting to make it into his head. It turned into an incandescent light bulb on his neck and emitted radiant waves, heating up the whole space around. It felt hot, wet and nice. When a guy gets sweaty in his crotch, it’s called sweaty balls. But what do you call it when a girl perspires down there? – Lip gloss! He chuckled to himself and looked up from his feet.
Then he saw her. A splinter of a girl had just detached herself from the bar counter and drifted tentatively amid the many busy bodies and the busy swirls of cigarette smoke. She wore a short dress in leopard print that clang to her subtle curves and cavities, leaving her shoulders and décolletage naked, apart from a pair of narrow straps. In the one hand, she had a cocktail glass with something bluish in it. The other she held pressed tightly across her ribs, as though half-embracing herself... that is, when she didn’t use it to fiddle with her hair or to pull down the hem of her dress, simultaneously catching the escaping strap of her handbag with a quick jerk of the shoulder.
The girl looked around and tripped on Jonny’s gaze. He blinked away and quickly turned to take his glass. When he glanced back, she was taking a cigarette out of a fresh pack. She dropped the pack into her bag and stood there contemplating, the cocktail glass and the cigarette in one hand, the other at the bag’s strap. Her eyes swept past Jonny, made the whole circle around the dance-floor, then turned back, and rested on Jonny again.
‘D’you have a light?’ she rather mimed than said, approaching him in a lazy stroll.
‘I don’t smoke,’ he gestured back.
‘Me too,’ she shouted up to him. ‘Hate the smell.’
She circled her hand with the cigarette in the fogged air. ‘I work at a shop… you know… For now…’ She made pauses, wedging short phrases into the booming space around them. ‘Everyone smoking… in the breaks… Better to smoke too.’
The girl put her glass on the ledge, next to an empty ashtray, and dived into her handbag. She rummaged there for much longer than the volume of the bag might suggest. Then she exclaimed O!, sounding very surprised, and produced a lighter of green transparent plastic. ‘Ta-dam!’ She lit the cigarette and drew in, crossing her eyes at the glowing tip. Her eyelashes, bulgy with mascara, flapped like the wings of a weird butterfly, resting on a sun-lit piece of white marble.
He bent towards her and caught the smell of her hair, the cheap tang of hairspray drenched in the cigarette stink, and a faint hint of warm toffee underneath. ‘Can I have­ one too?..’ He said into the hair. He hesitated whether he should add please, but didn’t. She nodded and offered him the pack and the lighter. Thanks god he knew how to light one! And how to puff on it without coughing. The cigarette tasted like cat’s litter box, but the girl was right – it was easier to stand the smoke around if you also smoked.
The warmth in his head got swirling about. The walls of his skull expanded to encircle a whirl of green jungle, with a little Tarzan swinging on intangible tendrils.
For half a cigarette they kept quiet. Jonny swigged his beer and sneak-glanced at the top of the girl’s head. Her hair, hanging loose down to her shoulder blades, could have been a camouflage cloak for some funny desert fairy. A lightweight silk cloak. He wanted to touch it. The girl half-hugged herself with the free hand and bobbed her head to the rhythm of music, so the hair moved up and down, opening and closing a narrow strip of skin on her back.
She turned her face up again. ‘What’s your name?’ she shouted. ‘I’m Mia.’
‘I’m Jonny,’ said Jonny.
She smiled at him. She seemed to have too many teeth in her mouth. They crowded at the entrance and made her smile look at the same time carnivorous and childish. Her features were small and a little odd, and she looked under-age. But how could she be allowed here then?
‘How old are you?’ he breathed into her hair.
‘Nineteen… You?’
He waved indefinitely, hoping she’d take it for a confirmation that he was the same age. She smiled again.
Then she stubbed the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray and finished her drink. ‘D’you dance, Jonny?’
He shrugged, but stubbed out his cigarette too. They went to the bar, and she allowed him to buy her a drink, but only if she would pay for his. They had quick shots and then infiltrated the dancing crowd, and had a lot of giggle there, jostling about in the crammed space. Then, there were more shots and more kicking, and then the DJ had a fit of melancholy and put on three ballads in a row.
Mia reached up to put her narrow palms on his shoulders. They swayed away to forever young, I want to be forever… Her face was level with the pit of Jonny’s stomach. The heat from his skull slid there, and the bulb of his head was now only light. And the light was singing to its own tune, she’s very small, he’s very tall… He stooped and held his arms encircled round her, only ever touching her so lightly. He’s very tall, she’s very small, and their embrace…
They exchanged phrases, not very successfully in the noise. Words don’t come easy to me, whined F.R. David, and the little Tarzan was swaying on lianas in the pit of Jonny’s stomach. And when it was Bonnie Tyler’s turn to cry out in lovelorn agony, and I need you now tonight, and I need you more than ever… they didn’t try to talk anymore. They just clang to each other and swayed away. He looked down at her, and she glanced up to him every now and then, and smiled.
She’s very small, he’s very tall, and their embrace, a question mark above her face…
He must have forgotten himself for a moment, lost in the green jungle of his dreams, and pressed Mia too tightly to his body.
They felt it almost simultaneously.
She stopped, drew herself a little away and looked strangely at his belt. Then up into his eyes.
The light bulb exploded in his head, leaving him half-blind and shell-shocked. Blood left his limbs and gushed into the face. He saw her lips move, asking him something. He didn’t understand.
‘What?’ he said, stupefied, doubling over, as the floor slipped apart beneath him.
‘Do you have a condom?’ she yelled into his ear.

Wherever he headed, it didn’t really matter. Behind him, hell was dancing to the drums of satyrs and sent out flames that scalded his neck and ears, spurring him faster and faster ahead. Soon enough, he found himself on the beach. The night was still and thick, and had a south-like feel to it, as though it was made of sponge. The low sky, packed with soft blackness, muffled any light and turned the sea water into a vast velvet bedspread, stitched with a few golden threads, coming from the unsleeping windows on the other side of the inlet.
Jonny raked his way across the gray pitch of gravelly sand, to where he could discern against the black water an even blacker strip of a long swimming pier. He walked to the very end of it and stood there, listening to the slow, rolling movement below, and trying to drive away the vision of Mia’s eyes, wide and glassy with shock, the last thing he saw as he tore himself from her – to rush out of the dance floor, out of the disco, out of the Friday that had so badly laughed at him...
The glistening depth was enticing. He undressed quickly and jumped, letting his heated body go underwater, deeper, deeper, as he let the air bubble out of his mouth and nose. When there was almost nothing left in his lungs, he propelled himself towards the surface and lay on his back, legs apart, as a strange sea star. It was like he was the only man under this low sky. The sea held him and caressed every inch of his skin.
Why don’t we always swim naked in the sea? A naked man is part of the sea, he is a mermaid… or is it merman?.. And the sea is part of him. The same salts, the same chemistry, the same past. It is freedom!
He swam in different strokes and went diving into the chilling gloom until he felt he was getting too cold. Then he got back and climbed onto the pier. There was a wooden bench there, and he sat on it, to dry off. Out of the water, he was back into the earthly world again, with its injustice, cigarette smoke, and stupid, wicked women. The nightly air, heaving with hot, swathing wafts, felt like mother’s lap. But there are times when you feel even lonelier in mother’s lap, for the comfort of it seems to whisper:  you’ve failed, you couldn’t make anyone else in the world love you…
Then he heard a soft rustling from the beach side, and someone stepped onto the pier. Jonny pushed his legs together and froze, trying to dissolve in the darkness. His clothes lay in heap at the other end of the bench. The steps lingered for a moment, then clip-clopped clumsily towards him. He flashed an arm to grasp his jeans and pulled the stiff, reluctant fabric onto his wet legs and buttocks, not daring to stand up. His trunks got jammed knee high in the left leg of the jeans. The steps didn’t seem to care about him. There was a gurgle of a bottle turned upside down, then the shuffling motion again, and in a few seconds the steps materialized from the murk in the form of Mia. She had a half-empty bottle of martini in her hand and was unstable on her feet. Her face was smudged all over with the ink of mascara.
She saw Jonny and stopped. For a few moments, she just stood there, wobbling and blinking at him. Then she made a bubbling sound and turned to go. Her kitten heels got between the planks of the pier and slipped from her feet like every second step. Three, four meters, and she lost her balance and landed on all four. She pulled herself back upright, took the shoes off and remained seating on her legs near the edge of the pier. Then she took another gargle of martini.
Jonny rolled his eyes and tugged angrily on the zipper of his jeans. The slider jerked and choked on a coil of hair on his groin. Sharp pain shot through him. Fucking dirty bitch, he mumbled, addressing the greyish blotch in the darkness. He fixed the zipper and fished the trunks out of the trousers. The silhouette of the girl took the bottle to its mouth again. Jonny got to his feet to dress up, and, his head midway through his T-shirt, heard the sound of vomiting. O hell! The next moment, there was a dull blorp, and when he emerged from the neck of the T-shirt, there was no one on the pier.
Mad with an instant suspicion, he flung himself to where Mia’s shoes still lay and saw the whitish hair in a rising of bubbles. He fell flat on the planks, reached his hand deep into the water and yanked the hair up. The girl’s head popped out and started to cough violently. He took her under the arms and got onto his knees, pulling the suddenly heavy, limp body onto the pier.
She crumpled on the planks, panting. Her dress had ridden up, revealing the white girlish briefs in a floral pattern. Then she jerked up, propped herself onto her arms, and a jet of watery vomit spurted out of her. She collapsed and nearly fell from the pier again. Jonny caught her and kept holding her under the ribs, while she shuddered with stomach cramps, again and again.
They spent what felt like an hour sprawled like this on the wooden planks. She sobbed and complained and threw up. In the minutes between the spasms, she stiffened in an uneasy tension and sat rocking back and forth like the paw of the Chinese lucky cat. He held her in his grip and tried to keep the dripping strands of her hair out of her face. His hands were so big against her body that his fingers almost met on her belly when he held her waist, and he could sense every painful convolution in her insides. He’s very tall, she’s very small…
Then the puking stopped. She slumped. He scooped some sea water to wash off the traces of puke, snot and mascara from her. He rubbed the bloodless triangle of her face with his palm carefully, as his mother did when he was small. Then he helped her stand up and brought her to the bench. She was weak and shivering.
‘You are cold. You need to change,’ he said, crouching in front of her and trying to catch her eyes. ‘Do you hear me?’
She nodded slightly, her eyes half-closed as though she was passing out.
‘Here’s a shirt,’ he said. ‘C’mon, take this dress off. It’s all wet.’ He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. It was cold and silky. ‘C’mon,’ he said again.
She moved obediently. Slowly pulled the hem of her dress up, showing the dark hole of her navel against the white skin. He looked away and went to rinse the pier planks where they had sat earlier. There were sounds of tired puffing and then a quiet whimpering behind his back. When he looked there, he saw the girl's arms up, cocooned in the tight leopard fabric, no way back or forth.
‘Help me!’ she whined. Just so pathetic.
He came and pulled on the fabric where her folded elbows made up a sort of a square sail. There was an ouch ouch! as he yanked her hair occasionally. The wet stocking of the elastic dress held fast and wouldn’t give. Then he attempted to pull on the lower end, trying to avoid her chest. There was another ouch ouch! as he touched her flanks with cautious fingers, and she jiggled on the bench from tickling, and giggled helplessly. He smiled, said sit still!, then made one big pull and released her. 
She didn’t wear a bra. Her breasts were small and round, with the little drops of nipples on them, and goosebumps all over. She pressed her arms across them quickly. He stopped smiling and shoved his dry shirt into her lap. She wrapped it around her body by way of a bathing robe that covered her almost down to the knees.
‘Your pants!’ he said, grinning, trying to make a joke, ‘I can offer you a change. Ta-dam!’ He lifted from the floor his own boxers and waved them in the air.
She squinted her eyes, contemplating. Then she stretched an arm and grasped the trunks. ‘I take ’em, thanks,’ she said in a voice still creaky from puking, and promptly wriggled out of her briefs. Then she bent forward to put on his boxers. As she did so, a little square of foil fell out of the breast pocket of the shirt. She pulled up the shorts and reached out to lift the thing from the floor. It was a condom.
For a few moments, they both looked blankly at the thing. Then she put it back into the breast pocket and said, ‘He-he.’ Then she looked up at him and said again, ‘He-he.’ And then they cracked open. He laughed like he had never had before. She doubled up and convulsed, half-choked, her head in her knees, holding herself across the belly. He fell onto the bench next to her, and it trembled like a tortured living being under their shaking bottoms. The sea water carried their mirth and sprinkled it among the islets of the archipelago, so the rocks returned their squeaks, grunts, oinks, gasps and wheezes tenfold. The entire universe rocked with laughter.
Then Mia caught her breath and moaned, ‘O, my head!’
He wrapped his arm across her shoulders and made her lie down, her head on his lap, and and held her so, slipping the fingers of his free hand into her hair. She’s very small, he’s very tall… 
She put a hand on his knee, took a deep breath and lay still. …and their embrace…
‘Thank you,’ she said and closed her eyes.
… an existential question mark above her lifted face… He sat stooping over her, trying not to move. He is a tree, the roots, the trickle on the bark… Her breath smelled of sour alcohol, her hair of sea weeds. She is a scream in forest depths, half eaten by the dark…

He wished he could sit like this forever in the hot, soft void, but the night’s sponge had already started to absorb the bluish water of the Nordic dawn. It was Saturday.

by Anna Astar, 2020

    – When in the woods, have a bear bell on you that warns a bear of your presence. And avoid walking on bear trails.
    – But how to know it’s a bear trail? – By bear poop. 
    – And how to know it’s bear poop? – By the bear bells in it! 
           (A hikers’ joke.)

Everything was bright on that late-July morning. A heat wave, a rare and welcome guest in the northern parts of Finland, had not yet departed, and held the world in a tight, melting embrace. Oulujärvi stretched its refreshing blueness as far as the paddle could reach, luring into a meditative glide in the wet, wide wild. The sun was giggling carelessly in the folds of a slightest ripple, promising another day of 30+. And nothing told that crap was about to occur.
We were equipped for three full days outdoors, and our good old canoe was pumped up to a taut gloss on its cheeks for this occasion, because there were three of us—my wife, my brother and I—in the two seater inflatable. We only had two life-jackets with us, too, – but who counts!
There is a weird mixture of insecurity and fatalistic satisfaction about running a flimsy “ducky” out in the open water, which in this case feels to be anything further than 100 to 500 meters from the shore, depending on the water temperature and the waves’ height. Such a vessel—if rather self-willed about choosing the direction—is very stable and almost impossible to overturn. At the same time, the feeling that the dark, killing depth is separated from your butt only by three measures of air squeezed into thin, flexible containers—this feeling gives a certain edge to the experience. 
It is hard to compare with anything the sense of quietness and open space when you are out in the middle of the waters in a tiny, agile thingy. The freedom of being able to reach and have in your possession, if only for a night, a whole island, complete with the trees, the cosy fire, the smoke-smelling blueberry tea—and a myriad of insects, of course. We spent our first night on a small woody island, the only peculiar thing about which was a total lack of blueberries in the dense shrubbery around the place. Birds, we thought. Or a bad year, maybe. Strange, we though, and moved on the next day, finally reaching an islet that could easily be called a hiker’s dream: a rough piece of granite, arising from the water, part bold, part foaming with white, dry moss. A flat rock for a pier, a makeshift fireplace, the pines sending about wafts of heated resin, a lot of hot sun… A dream. 
It is when we had unloaded and left the canoe to dry on the flat rock, and busied ourselves with pitching camp that the crap occurred. A high, whistling sound pierced the heat-exhausted air making our napes freeze. Then there was a quiet sigh—and one side of our nice, hard-working canoe sank down, its upper seal being unglued by the fierce sun. The other side gave up too before we had a chance to release the overpressure. This left us boatless, with the closest mainland shore about 1.5 km away. Not good, we thought, and tried to glue the seam up as well as we could, and then let it harden for the night. Who knows, it might work. Good that it didn’t happen while we were afloat. Anyway, we had to think about our dinner—with a fruit dessert maybe, to get some solace.
This island lacked blueberries too, however. It is when we went to the thicket, to search the shrubbery for berries, that we saw the other crap. A lot of it, both fresh and old, all over the place. That it was bear poop, we somehow fathomed at once. No, there were no visible bear bells in it, but the size of the heaps—and the remains of blueberry shrubs in them… 
If you think that bears can’t swim long distances and you are safe on an island—you should know better. Brown bears are keen swimmers and can easily cover large stretches of water—with swiftness that even a bear’s presence cannot communicate to us humans, unless aided by a good motor. They often search for food on lake islands, in particular, blueberries being their yummy. Oh! Google knows a lot about it, and you’d rather enjoy the reading in the comfort of your couch and not one chilly night sitting on a rock in the middle of a large, cold lake, after your boat has said you adieu. It is a tough question, whether you are ready, potentially, to become a fancy embellishment in a bear’s poop or not, and this is a matter you better come to terms with—in a solitary discussion with your consciousness—before you set off.
Speaking of embellishments, we didn’t happen to have the bells. We hadn’t meant to meet a bear, naturally. What we did was to hang whatever metal utensils we had around our camp. By the night, the wind started in earnest, making our improvised wind chimes cling and clang optimistically. Needless to say, we couldn’t sleep. It seemed impossible to get into the tent and listen blindly to the squeaks and howling in the trees, waiting with a chill for some dreadful claws to tear the insubstantial walls. 
And so we kept feeding the wind the thin smoke of our fire and watched the moon rise, a most unusual one. The red-coloured enormous, rugged ball hovered over the forest, a super power, forcing the wind to rage about and mess with the waves. The blue darkness swallowed the ball slowly and then expelled it again, rugged and triumphant as before. That was the blood moon eclipse of 2018.
What for the bear, no one joined us. There was a splash somewhere on another side of the island, and a family of ducks came running on the water as if they had seen the devil. But no one joined us that night—except for the red moon. 
Do we go canoe camping after that?
Does a bear crap in the woods?

by Anna Astar, 2020

That was how I killed him.
After an eternity of angst, a lifetime of torture and strangling apprehension—I finally disposed of him. 
There were no particular emotions about it. Even the sense of liberation I felt was less intense than I would have expected. But there was a little pity, maybe. We had been living side by side for a while, after all. He was in my blood, after all. My blood was in him—giving the sickening colour to his cheeks, making him look more threatening and round.
Some relationships are blood poisoning. Unhealthy attachments, where one is sucking the other’s sap without as much as asking or giving anything back. Anything—but malady.
Such was ours. 
The moment I first noticed him, the shroud of foreboding swathed my reasoning capacity, rendering me a helpless and doomed victim. He did not just penetrate my body with the thirst of an alcohol virgin on his 18th birthday. He penetrated my whole being. He instilled his liquids inside me, mixing them with my own liquids, infiltrating my systems, paralyzing my thinking. 
Our contact was short. Probably, too short to cause any dangerous contagion. But you never know how it works. The time that he was attached to me was enough for his voracious jaws to swallow the whole world around me for many days to come.
I tore him from myself. I severed him off with the hands cold from fear and determination. And the cold stayed with me, as though it was I who was put into the fridge, neatly packed away by some chill, meticulous hands.
That served him right—being put in the fridge, as it were. He sucked my blood, he sucked my blood—the thought was throbbing in my brain as an inflamed laceration. He has been chewing on my flesh.
I unscrewed him out of my body. Unscrewing him out of my mind took much longer.
He stayed there for a whole month, before I knew what to do with it. A dormant horror of my days and nights—not for a moment could I forget that he was there. Opening the fridge would shock me each time with terrible visions and terrible premonitions. 
Am I going to live through it at all? Even if I do, what is my life going to be like? Will I lose myself in the short circuits of excruciating pain? Will I disintegrate little by little under invisible toxins, killing my nerves, twisting my limbs, distorting my smile forever? 
Soon, the fridge itself became a tormenting sight. I nearly stopped eating.
When I first saw him, I didn’t doubt I would kill him, eventually. It was only a matter of weeks. I was at once a victim and an implacable executor. I had to do it regardless of what was going to happen to me. Regardless of whose fault it was—what was going to happen to me. 
Because I could not be sure if there was any guilt on him for what had happened. I let him penetrate me. I had not been careful enough. 
It is funny to think how your whole life can go wrong by reason of one minor mistake, one fleeting act of neglect. Had I been a little more watchful, had I bothered to check things twice, I would be spared the whole trouble. I would not be facing all those questions. I would be free to go and enjoy my summer.
Though I might still have been his executor. Despite there might be no his fault in our encounter. Despite what was happening and what was going to happen to me might be just my imagination—and not his fault at all.
Now, I don’t really know if it was he. I somehow had come to think of it as him. And so it lingered. Had it ensued from a pre-perception of anything evil as male? Anything male as evil, perhaps? Was I subconsciously imposing on the other sex all the guilt for penetrations and perpetrations ever performed—in an act of self-victimization and linguistic prosecution prior to any formal examination?
A formal examination was eventually done, however. After a month that seemed like an eternity of seconds, each counted and check-marked for symptoms.
The test didn’t reveal whether it was he. But it showed that I was clean—and free to get rid of the haunting presence. It was a sensible—and safe—thing to do. No borrelia, no encephalitis—and no need to keep it by my side anymore.
So, I lifted the lid of the toilet, opened, with all precautions, the tiny jar and took out of it a wet shred of paper towel. There it was—a minuscule, flat, brown drop with eight hardly recognizable threads of legs, with a black dot for a head. 
It started to stir its extremities, slowly coming back to life. And my hand jerked convulsively, thrusting the paper into the water. Lest it jumps up and bites me again! Or else escapes somehow and gets lost on the floor, effectively preventing me from using the bathroom for ages and turning my life into a parade of paranoia. 
Goodbye, ticky. I sent it spinning in the whirling water, the poison seeping out from my cerebrum and dissolving in the whirl. 
That was how I killed it—my tiny pet from the fridge. With a little pity. For its guilt was only willing to live. 
A ridiculous reason to die for. But that’s what life is. 
And I will not miss him.