A good writer should not tell the reader some things directly. «Don’t write that the character is sad, describe it in such a way that the readers draw that conclusion themselves,» a good writer sternly points out a typical rookie mistake. With that in mind, I shudder to think what the reputable writers would say on what I’m about to do.

Anyway, I ask honourable writers, if any of them happen to be reading this book, to understand and forgive me in advance. I, unlike many authors, do not have enough patience. The description of an oak leaf flying in the wind for two and a half chapters is beyond me so far.

Nevertheless, getting to know our main characters is not just a whim, but an absolute necessity.

And here, it would seem, what could be better than looking into a person’s past and living through a few fascinating stories side by side to get to know them better?

But a couple of stories, even the most fascinating ones, cannot paint the full picture of someone’s life. A few of their decisions don’t help to get inside a person’s head and soul, to really understand them.

We will definitely come to decisions, but by then I would definitely like you to understand our heroes. Maybe not completely, but at least as a whole. Understand their way of thinking, understand what stands behind their actions. It is necessary so that at the right moment you would feel if not as a part of their family, but at least as good friends or at the very least as acquaintances.

After all, even the most hardcore mathematicians and philosophers would not, in fact, want their readers to come to despair in a vain attempt to get to the bottom of the books written by them.

Unfortunately, we cannot afford to live next to our characters for their entire lives as well, either in the book or in reality. So we should at least try to make it as easy for you as possible.

Moreover, I would like to save my readers from a situation where, in the middle of the book, the author for the first time mentions the colour of the character’s eyes and the world, already built in someone’s imagination, begins to crumble. We are here to create worlds, not the other way around.

And how much an out-of-nowhere unnecessary description of «his hair, black as a crow’s wing and stiff as straw inside a scarecrow standing in a nearby field, was so beautifully set off by the eyes of the steel and cherry blossom colour he got from his grandmother» can be omitted! It looks too promising, too tempting!

That’s why, once again, please don’t scold me too much for cutting corners so insidiously, treacherously and not at all like a good writer. And I also ask you to notice how, in accordance with the instructions of good writers, I haven’t spoken directly for a long time about how I can upset those same good writers.

Also, please note, that not a single word has been said about Clio in the chapter that is supposed to be about her. Of course, it’s not an oak leaf leisurely twirling in a steamy dance with the air currents for ten pages in a row yet, but who knows what the future holds for me. Someday.

Moreover, I know that people don’t read prefaces. And if even one of those rational guys bought the fact that it was the first chapter and ended up reading the whole thing, that’s a small (but very gloating!) victory for me.1

In the meantime, welcome to a CV that any employer would read with rapt attention. But on the other hand, no employer would ever find such a CV on his desk.

About Clio

● Appearance:

Eyes: Brown-green, squinting

As much as Clio would like to believe that her eyes change colour according to her mood, the fact is that most of the time they look brown with some greenery. Only those closest and most attentive to details can see specks of yellow and even occasional flashes of grey and blue in them.

Hair: Colour light green, pastel; hair cut just above the shoulders

The awe some ladies feel over their kilometre-long braids brings a condescending smile to Clio’s face. She herself had long ago decided that hair is not the same with hands – it would grow back. Although, daring to cut off a metre of her hair for the first time was also rather scary. And the decision to be a full-head greenery came to her one new strand at a time.

Skin: Pale

Clio is sometimes sad that even in the height of summer she can’t be as tanned as the many lucky people whose pictures she sees in the newsfeed from time to time. However, this quickly passes. Especially quickly, when she reminds herself that that’s not what makes her sad. More likely, what saddens her is that they have the opportunity to go to the seashore for a month and live the fuller lives than she can afford.

However, she likes her aristocratic pallor. At least, that was the conclusion she drew after an incident with one of her former colleagues. She only clenched her teeth tightly, and with great difficulty resisted an urge to punch the one who asked her so aggressively caring: «Why are you so pale? You don’t leave the house at all, do you?»

Height: 165 cm

Style of clothing: Varied – the main idea is to wear something interesting

She doesn’t like the basic things. Clio is always looking for something unique, something interesting, something that others don’t have. There is only a handful of plain T-shirts in her wardrobe; mostly all of her clothes are covered in prints of different characters or have some kind of interesting story behind them.

Clio doesn’t shy away from running through thrift shops to find something you can’t find in the nearest mall.

● Age: 29 years

Our heroine does not look or feel her age. She is frightened by the big and inescapable approaching three-oh-zero. Clio remembers all too well not believing that there is life after thirty. However, when her back starts to seize up or she gets a headache from a sudden change of the weather, Clio feels being at least seventy-three.

Birthday: 1 February

Being born in the harshest month of the year is not the most fortunate thing. All the more so because, as luck would have it, this is the day on which her city has been experiencing severe frosts for years. Not just «the perfect time to go to the cottage, take a jacuzzi and jump in the snow afterwards» frosts, but «no sane person would go out today» frosts.

Zodiac sign: Aquarius

Some people believe in horoscopes, some don’t, and that’s ok. But it just so happens that Clio’s traits largely match the description of a typical Aquarius.

Education: Higher education, humanities (major not specified)

Why tell what your degree was in if your job has nothing to do with it? It wasn’t that Clio didn’t like her major – she’d honed her skills in masterful cheating and covering up cutting classes, learned a couple of new and interesting things and met a lot of cool people.

But she didn’t enter the university because she wanted to dedicate her life to this unspecified profession.

Work: In the office, call centre

Clio has a hard time talking to people all day long. So the call centre is clearly not her dream job, but we have what we have.

If you still don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, it’s hard to go into some narrow field. Because to be really successful at something, you have to put your whole life into it. And you don’t want to put it into something that is not you.

And yet you still want to put food on your plate.

Body build: Average – not skinny, but not chubby either

At this point, you’re probably getting a rough idea of what kind of person Clio is. But you don’t know about her laziness yet. And what lazy person wouldn’t prefer ordering pizza and watching a new episode of a great show to cooking a complicated meal?

Besides, it’s a great pleasure to eat, and a hedonist can’t do without it.

She also cannot run, squat or lift enough to transform all those unhealthy meals into abs, because she is so lazy (or, as Clio calls it, «self-caring») and extremely convincing when it comes to it.

Additional skills: Partially music, dance, painting, almost any creative activity

Clio is a creative person, who as a child has studied dance, singing, clay modelling and musical instruments, but gave it all up when she got bored. She is talented and, despite not completing all her classes, she can draw, sing and dance quite well.

Ironically, unlike the ancient Greek muse she is named after, she has a big problem with history. Names, dates and events desperately resist being juxtaposed with each other. They are getting mixed up and are refusing to line up in the right order.

Hobbies: Watching movies/TV-series/cartoons, playing games

Movies, TV-series and other visual content are worlds that Clio has always escaped to from ours. There are a lot of these worlds, and in almost every one of them there are characters who are like family to her. She cares about each of them as if they were as real as you and me, and she is more often seen in tears because of what happens in a film or a book rather than because of the real-life problems.

● Notable personal qualities:

Intelligence: Thanks to her intelligence and wit, she could afford to skip school and university for many years and still graduate without any bad marks.

Lazy: So lazy that she even puts on make-up quite rarely. Between having extra-time to sleep and preening her feathers, she always chooses sleep. As you can imagine, doing laundry/cleaning/dishwashing/anything else that needs to be done with any kind of consistency is torture for such a person.

Hedonism: After years of philosophical research, Clio has decided that the meaning of life is in the pleasure. Or, to put it another way, hedonism.

Selfishness: For some reason, this word is perceived as a swear word, but Clio considers it a normal self-care. As one example, she doesn’t quite understand when people talk about a job they love – is that even possible?

If they do, they must be the energizer activists who are ready to give up their last shirt «for the common good». But Clio doesn’t want to «give back to the society», she wants to be paid and to buy stuff she wants.

Ok, maybe, her favourite job would be the one where with a minimum of effort she could get the most for herself.

Adaptability: With this set of traits, a person has no choice but to learn to adapt. This includes the ability to mimic the surrounding people, to find a way out of tricky situations, and to fit her behaviours into what the situation demands.

Belief in Miracle: Despite the many times life has tripped Clio up, despite the many times she has vowed to stop believing in the supernatural, it seems to be impossible to squeeze out the magic fairytale of her by any means. Naturally, she is fascinated by witchcraft and sorcery, which makes life in a world without magic a wildly depressing experience.

The torment of choice: Clio doesn’t like to choose. She doesn’t like to choose what to wear, where to eat, or what to be when she grows up.

Longing: All her life, our heroine has felt that she has to be somewhere else. That this world is not really for her. That she can’t learn to fly here. This feeling is not a constant weight nailing her to the ground, but rather a sub-tone, a quiet ceaseless squeaking noise that accompanies Clio throughout her life.

This is why a random song, a thought, or even a whiff of wind can make a person suddenly and inexplicably cry, even though nothing seems to be wrong. But the rest of the time, too, her eyes betray this longing: occasionally Clio can be seen staring off into the distance. To somewhere where she is not.

CHAPTER 2: Tramway

On a Wednesday evening,

After the dinner,

The sleep is for tired moany adults.

We are inviting,

Young daredevils,

To the jungle and into the wild…2

Oooh no, now that song will be stuck in my head for a long time. Stop playing. Stop playing. Stop it. Don’t think about anything. Quiet.

…

Wednesday evening, after dinner…

Oh, for heck’s sake! It’s not even Wednesday. At least it’s not even Wednesday here. And somewhere, maybe it is Wednesday. Probably not in our world, though.

Somewhere…

Is life without the internet worth travelling to other worlds?

After all, if you think about it that way, what is the average Gondorian doing on a quiet Wednesday night in Middle-earth? We’re talking about the most boring times, not when it’s time to die heroically in a war for world peace.3

Speaking of battles, even Grandpa Tolkien, with all his thoroughness, did not carve in stone the names of thousands and thousands of foot soldiers, even the ones who died more or less heroically.

And he carved more than most authors, alright.

Ok, now I’m just thinking about the Professor snowboarding. Stop! Stop!

Clio’s confused train of thought hit the rock of reality the moment the creaking tram doors opened and let the cold November air in. Admittedly, the cold itself is already pretty bad, but now it was particularly unfortunate.

This tram is an artefact from such ancient times that it was not yet known that the metal seats were uncomfortable for passengers. Plus, as it is such a relic, it wasn’t surprising that heating didn’t work. And in this nasty cold times, there is a real danger of sticking to one of these iron thrones.

It’s time for us, sitting in our warm, cosy abodes, to indignantly cluck our tongues and think patronisingly from the height of our wisdom: «Well, she who cares about her health would rather stand than freeze her fillets. She’s got babies to give birth to!»

But the foretold mothers have no interest in our most helpful advice.

Sitting on a tram is not only an honour and a great privilege, but also a simple matter of survival. Working-class life develops many helpful reflexes, and «if you see an empty seat, sit!» is one of them. The battle for a seat after a work shift is no joke.

Only happy people who are full of energy can afford to bow to ladies of indeterminate-yet-something-close-to-retirement age, cherishing a sense of satisfaction at how well their parents raised them.

People who are mentally and physically exhausted by the pressure of work are ready to get into the vehicle, plunge onto the first free seat they see without a second thought and tell the woman, who does not look old enough, an indecisive and uncertain but still a ’no’ to a demand of giving up the seat.

We, who lie on our smart mattresses that remember our shapes, should, of course, respond to such impertinent reflections with yet another clucking of the tongue. After all, they’re not made of glass, they won’t break, and in general, the youths of today have no respect for their elders!

But let’s not put our eggs in one basket of public condemnation just yet – we can’t do any better than the ladies mentioned above anyway.

All the more so because today was somehow not an ordinary day. Today the tram was as empty as a library, or so it seemed after the everyday procedure of mass intimate breathing on each other’s necks.

No one was trapped by the half-open doors, everyone could reach the handrail, no one looked with hatred at the lucky people who had taken the seats. It was a miracle. A simple rush-hour miracle. And all its witnesses enjoyed the moment instead of asking unnecessary questions.

However, this miracle did not go unnoticed. It may have given direction to the restless stream of our heroine’s thoughts. Meanwhile, the girl was shaking as she received a gift of a merciless November that crawled through the open doors.

It took longer than it should to focus, but before the doors closed and the tram moved on, the Clio could see the name of the tram station. She was still five stops away from home.

The cold had managed to stall the flow of her thoughts, but now even a February frost probably would not drive her off the icy steel seat. The risks were high, but she was willing to pay the price for the chance to sit forty extra minutes and stare unseeingly at the passing lights.

Beyond the door of the tram, cold but still bright and dry, more of the «joys» of a brutal November awaited: a mixture of mud, gravel and rotting leaves. A bonus was the treacherous knee-deep puddles in the most unexpected places on the seemingly long-explored road through the garages. The lack of street lights along the way and a light drizzle of an ice-cold rain only added to the anticipation of this daily torture by the outskirts of the city.

In the meantime, there was only coldness and an internal dialogue with an internal audience.

It’s cold. At least I have some time to wander through the wilderness of my thoughts. If a person has ever been in such a state after work, they know that at such moments the intracranial space is more like that game in which you need to reach the «Core of the Earth» article on Wikipedia in as few clicks on the links as possible from any random Wikipedia article.4 To get to the bottom of it, so to speak.

Only, unlike this game, tram thoughts have no goal, they just jump one over the other, like players in the Leap Frog game, and you never know where you find yourself in the end. Maybe yet again in the hot embrace of Mother Earth’s insides, but today I’d prefer something else. I have no energy to work out another theory about the possibility of the Lost World’s5 existence.

Wait a minute, I’m already thinking about it! Oh, man.

Clio frowned and hummed thoughtfully. She was distracted from further speculation about the structure of the Earth’s crust by a persistent and not particularly gentle poke on her shoulder. She had to collect the rest of her strength in a fist of the power of will and turn to the person behind her. This time the gaze came out being rather surprised.

– Ma’am, pass this to the conductor.

Well, this youngling who’s holding out his fist full of change is either brave, cruel or just plain stupid. Perhaps an unfortunate combination of all three, plus a dozen others misfortunes of a person. But those three are definitely present, because to call me a Madam, basically an old woman, when I’m not even in my thirties yet, must show his readiness to say goodbye to this Earth.

I’ll stop you before we all start click-clacking our tongues and rolling our eyes again, reasonably pointing out that some random teenager doesn’t have to guess the age of people he doesn’t even know. And that Clio probably doesn’t look too well right now, etc.

Take notice that these are the thoughts of a tired, hungry, frostbitten girl who is not yet ready to admit that the heavy-handed «Madam’ is about her.

Ah, the wicked irony, for now there was no more surprise in her eyes. At that moment she gave the lad the exact look those ladies of indeterminate age give the rush-hour sitters. And with that look and calling someone «youngling» came the beginning of the end.

But not all was lost yet, because instead of angrily sending the boy off on a long journey to places where the light doesn’t shine, the novice Madam awoke to remnants of some schoolgirl shyness and confusion – she silently held out her hand and accepted a damp stack of coins into it.

Well, now there is a difficult choice – what to do next? The first option is to get up and walk to the conductor, idly rummaging on the phone on his tram throne, covered in cozy knitted napkins.

Her eyebrows darted up and back down, the lips got pressed together, presenting the look of doubt.

After all, there are no people in the way, the aisle was clear. Why didn’t he just stand up and walk himself? It’s not that difficult!

Her eyes rolled back to where no one had ever come back from before. Lips got smacked into a tube in disapproval.

Oh, and if I go there myself, what a look I could give this idiot on the way back! He’d be embarrassed he hadn’t done it himself.

A malevolent smirk full of anticipation appeared on her face, this time only her left eyebrow made the pilgrimage upwards.

But oooh, on the other hand, is this gesture, aimed at shaming the younger generation, worth the effort? There is always the option of passing the curse on to the next sitter and let him deal with it. Maybe this is not a battle worth fighting at all?

Her eyebrows drew close to the bridge of the nose and froze there in a disgruntled position, a heavy sigh expressing general pensiveness was made.

And then came the realization.

Thoughts took over her facial expression at a completely inappropriate moment yet again. First of all, the other person’s money had been in the possession of the unwitting bidder for too long already.

But the best part was that the man in the cap who was sitting in front of her must have overheard the request of the young gentleman. And as a good Samaritan, he has decided not to waste time and to immediately make a pre-emptive strike by turning around to face Clio.

However, as he turned to take the baton of coins, he witnessed these strange facial gymnastics. The picture was more than impressive. The girl froze in a strange and even somewhat theatrical pose with a half-bent hand clenched in a fist. If the coins had been replaced by a skull, no one would have had any doubt that his name had previously been Yorick.

Clio herself was absent from her head at that moment. Her eyes were staring off into space, with no answers to so many questions that arose.

What is an innocent citizen left to do in such a situation? Nothing. So decided the man who had turned around to his misfortune. His dark eyes half-covered with the puffy eyebrows were scanning the face of the unexpected tram mime expectantly, like the rays of flying saucers trying to determine whether there is intelligent life forms on this planet.

Millions of years have passed in that instant. Stars were being born and were dying. The moment when he could turn away and pretend it had never happened had passed without a trace. Too late. And until now, all that remained to be done was to wait with outstretched hand for it to be over, and to silently move his bewildered grey mustache that had certainly never seen anything like it before.

It was then that Clio came to a realization. The gaze of the newly awakened girl met the stranger’s scratchy eyes. A silent scene. The spark, the storm, the madness – now time had stopped altogether. But despite all the intimacy and drama of the moment, unfortunately (?), this was not a scene from a romantic film, here we can rather name it a psychological thriller.

Not even the apocalypse could interrupt this game of staring. And even though the girl’s pupils were magnetized to those of her tram-mate, she knew that everyone was looking at her right now. No, not just everyone in this carriage.

The man behind the wheel of the car, which has just passed the tram, also got one of the best seats. A boy of about ten, watching the show from the back seat of that car, was joyfully gulping down a handful of popcorn.

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