Free Butterfly Skin by Sergey Kuznetsov Page B

the cupboard and tell yourself that tomorrow after work you’ll definitely go visit someone, just in order not to stay home alone. Go visit someone, get drunk, come back home and fall asleep straight away.
    It would be good to visit Olya, you think, it would be good to sit in front of the TV with your arms round each other and watch
Love Actually
or some other romantic movie. Olya likes romantic movies the same way you like Italian horror movies. A good idea, but it won’t work – tomorrow’s Vlad’s birthday. Olya promised to help, cook, clean up, wash the dishes. A grown woman, and she still can’t say no to her brother, But then, you wouldn’t have said no to Lyova, if he asked you to do something for him. A pity, it’s hard to ask from America. Hey, Lyova. Would you like me to come over to New Jersey and wash the dishes?
    Yes, Lyova went away, Nikita went away, Vika went away, so many others disappeared off to God knows where, but Marinka’s still here. Ksenia’s on the point of recalling that old incident, the false rape, the childish sense of grievance. But you can’t stay annoyed with Marinka for long. When you get right down to it, some girls can’t say no to sex, others like to be beaten until they bleed – we all have our own strange tastes, it’s no big deal. So no more sitting here with your arms wrapped round your knees: pick up the phone and dial Marinka’s number. What are old friends for if you can’t go to see them when you feel totally wiped out?
    Hello, hello, says Ksenia, just you try telling me you’re busy tomorrow evening.

10
    “LOOK, IT’S REALLY LOVELY, ISN’T IT?” – AND MARINA slips the T-shirt off one shoulder.
    Marina has a beautiful T-shirt: her lover brought it from California. It’s handmade, he says, the old ex-hippies make them, that is, simply hippies, because the ex-hippies all became yuppies, they all became VIPs, and CEOs. The T-shirt is covered in bright swirls of color, acid style it’s called. As it happens, Ksenia has never tried acid, she doesn’t use drugs at all, if you don’t count coffee, grass and tea. She hasn’t tried acid, but she knows what the word “acid” means as an adjective, and she knows Marina is very fond of this word, although she thinks Marina hasn’t tried acid either, but then, you can never quite be sure of anything with Marina. There are acid drawings hanging on the wall, the computer monitor on the bar stool is displaying acid patterns that are almost the same as the hand-made T-shirt given to Marina by her Californian lover. “With patterns like that, who needs acid,” says Marina, breathing out the sweet smoke.
    The T-shirt really is beautiful. With a T-shirt like that getting high is easy, with a joint or without one. Only you couldn’t go to the office in a T-shirt like that, that’s for sure. But Marina doesn’t have to go to the office, she doesn’t have any subordinates or any bosses, but she does have a handmade T-shirt that her lover brought from California.
    And now she slips that T-shirt off one shoulder. “Look,” she says, “it’s really lovely, isn’t it, look, I can’t see for myself, tell me, how do you like my little darling?” It’s not really all that beautiful, to be honest: there’s a large blurred pink patch on her skin, like a cloud, overlying the tattooed outlines of a dragon.
    “Wow!” says Ksenia, “that’s really super. But you used to have a butterfly there, what did you do with it?”
    Marina hides her shoulder back under the beautiful T-shirt, shakes her straw-yellow hair and knocks off her ash –
oh, I haven’t smoked for so long
thinks Ksenia – and smiles:
    “I used to have a butterfly, but I covered it over with the dragon. He emerged from the butterfly, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, get it?”
    Of course, what’s not to get? Dragon emerges from butterfly, butterfly emerges from chrysalis, from the large blurred patch as pink as a Barbie doll