Free Crematorium for Phoenixes by Nikola Yanchovichin

object to him, like the scepter that the time
travelers had given him to rule over the Aegean. He lifted it and
took a bead on the Minotaur.
    His eyes filled with tears that were
accumulating one after another. Seemingly identical, they contained
thousands of shades of sorrow, all rolled up insanely as rain and
tapping on the window of a diseased one.
    “Goodbye, Everett,” he said.
    There was a shot that echoed like muffled
thunder in summertime corridors.
    The monster was dead.
    Merging again with the mined darkness, Minos
disappeared.
    There was the clatter of footsteps, perhaps
even a muffled shot, and then all was quiet, as if a curtain had
been lowered.
    Chapter
Twelve
    The boat was elongated and had a tapered
waterline imitating wood. Its fiberglass seemed to glide over the
waves like a swan.
    Several men were scrambling and rigging
things as agile as monkeys, walking up and down the ropes,
stretching the winches and pulleys. They shouted to each other in
the morning twilight.
    At the end rudder at the bottom part of the
quarter deck, with his hands leaning on it and dressed in a gray
winding robe, stood Takeshi. From time to time, he adjusted the
course.
    A hundred feet in front of him, on the keel,
which was cutting through the foamy water, leaned Akuma. He had
braced himself on the railing.
    Thus, in the Western Pacific, in the stream
of the warm Kuroshio Current, in the Sea of Japan, as a precious
metal melted among others, these men had started a curious journey
that had something to tell.
    How could it be any other way?
    If God is a puzzle that leaves bits of
itself on every piece of land and people on the globe, He had put
the most into the Pacific and had left in its heritage His
eyes.
    From north to south this ocean drags its
waters, colored as fermented beer in rotten yellow, while the smoky
hues of God’s pupils spread across the canvas like a blue carpet
that has no memory, only infinite love.
    And between it, arranged in irregular cilia,
rose and pushed the imagination the islands that were frozen as a
flock of whales splashing the water with their bodies and
tails.
    Before them was not only the bracelet land
of Japan, the backbone of Hokkaido to Okinawa, but also the entire
Pacific, which contained a dozen other lands and pieces of
paradise.
    It is therefore incomprehensible how in
these lands that stretch to the astronomical dimensions in reality,
or even in dreams, we can have something that is evil.
    But, unfortunately, dear reader, we both
know that among the furlongs of gaps, often separated by doors,
pain is hiding. So it would be a lie in this unskilled history to
say that in these dimensions evil didn’t exist.
    Because it does.
    Often, life’s narrative grinds a barrier
over dreams. Evil is for that.
    But behind the disappointment that upon a
few white sheets can be read, “I am terribly sorry,” there is
none.
    And after you leave that behind, you will
gradually get to what matters.
    Because each story is a ticket through which
we can sneak away from the problems. And no matter whether it will
be told in the red slums of Cairo by a half-blind beggar or in a
stained glass room in the fog of Copenhagen by a poor shoemaker’s
boy, this is the only patented dream machine. Everything good in
this world operates only with a pure heart.
    And while listening to such stories beating
in the thick darkness, we are still pacing.
    Therefore, allow me like a fixative solution
to be applied on photographic plates to before our eyes again pop
up the view of a ship in full sail in the cigarette-gray water that
hides a coin sliced from heaven with His eternal splendor.
    The company piloted the vessel beside the
stretching mountain ranges of Japan that curved like knocking mill
wheels and fused with their mirror images in the water along with
that speed only a sailor could understand.
    And the island of Hokkaido, with its touch
of northern chill, came into sight. It materialized like an angel
with open