Sergey Gerasimov
|
Sergey Gerasimov lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. His stories written
in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine,
Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Oceans of the Mind, and
other venues. Upper Rubber Boot Books published his wildly
surrealistic novel, The Mask Game, in 2013. He is the author
of several novels and more than a hundred short stories
published in Russian. He also writes and translates poetry.
WEBSITE: sergeygerasimovnew.wixsite.com/sergeygerasimov
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/sergey.gerasimov.37604
OTHER:
http://www.litsovet.ru/index.php/author.page?author_id=20571 |
New Title(s) from Sergey Gerasimov
Click on the thumbnail(s) above to learn more about the book(s) listed.
|
Silly Lera is a mentally
retarded girl who lives in a magic oasis thirty thousand years
in the future. All people around her have their souls regularly
purged from weird or dark desires, which allegedly, makes the
oasis the best place in the world to live. The whole life in the
oasis is controlled by Maxwell's daemon who lets anyone out but
lets only good people in. When the daemon decides that Lera's
father can't return, she embarks on a dangerous quest to
challenge the daemon's decision and save her dad's life. The
only problem is the daemon has never been wrong before, so no
one is going to believe a silly girl.
Excerpt
Word Count: 14227
Buy at:
Smashwords (all formats) ~
Barnes and Noble ~
Amazon
Price: $3.99 |
| |
|
| Excerpts |
Oasis, or Do Schrodinger's
Cats Age? |
Chapter 1
After people asked Gods to purge their souls and prayed, they
usually spent a night in the central hall of the temple. It
helped. I knew that for sure, because my soul had been purged a
lot of times before, and after spending a night in the temple,
I’d always felt as fresh and pure as a newborn baby. Each temple
in the Oasis was colored differently. Ours, the yellow one,
wasn’t frequently visited.
I had to clean it twice a week.
The yellow temple was too big to clean it in an ordinary way,
especially for a clumsy girl like me, so the keeper of it,
Allardicus Blide, had taught me the necessary spell to do it by
magic. He was an old blind man who limped, but in the temple, he
moved with precision and confidence that came from long years of
practice.
So I said the cleaning spell, and hundreds of spirits thrummed
in on their moth-wings, as a rippling cloud, ready to dust the
whorls of delicate marble carvings, sweep the floors, and remove
rubbish. I scolded some cleaning spirits that were less diligent
or played hide-and seek instead of working. They buzzed angrily
at me and flickered, swarming around.
The temple was big, so cleaning it was a difficult task and took
a long time. It could be a little difficult, even with the
spirit’s help. But the place where people come to purge their
souls shouldn’t be dirty.
When the work was over, I noticed that the sun was already down,
and felt sad. Not depressed, but nicely sad, if you know what I
mean. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, smiled to
the sun and imagined it was smiling back to me.
“I can feel you’re sad about something, Silly Lera,” Allardicus
Blide said. He wasn’t entirely blind: I sometimes saw a boy
inside him, and that boy still had eyes.
Everyone called me silly. I was okay with that. I’d become Silly
Lera when I was ten. A silver-white snake had bitten my foot
then. All colored snakes are magical, and their bites are mostly
lethal. I’d survived, but since then, I hadn’t been growing up
at all. Now, four years later, I was still a girl of ten, and
retarded. I could sometimes be whacky, and clear thinking wasn’t
easy for me. I saw ghosts, and the spirit of my
great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came to me
so often I was sometimes heartily tired of her. And I could see
people inside people, like the boy in Allardicus Blide, for
example.
So I peered at Allardicus and saw that his inner boy was looking
at me. I winked at him.
“The sunset is beautiful today,” I said and added, so that he
could have a bit of sunset in his heart too, “The sun is orange
over the pines.”
“I used to like sunsets when I was young.”
“So you were not always blind,” I said.
“You’re right, girl.”
“How did you lose your eyes?”
He stroked his scanty beard. For a few heartbeats, his eyeless
face kind of stared through me into space. The last cleaning
ghosts still buzzed among the marble columns. “The former keeper
of the temple gouged them out,” he said. “Actually, you don’t
need your eyes to work in a temple.”
I tried to picture that in my mind, but failed. I’m not too
bright. Some grown-up things are far too terrible or
overwhelming for my brain to comprehend.
“And why do you limp?” I asked.
“I broke my leg, trying to escape from him. He locked the door,
and I had the not-so-clever idea to jump from the window.”
He got up from the bench he was sitting on and was going to
leave me, but I came to him, touched his sleeve, and asked him
to wait.
“I don’t want to go home tonight,” I said.
“Why?”
“I hate being at home when Dad is not there, but he won’t return
until tomorrow. May I stay in the temple tonight?”
“What is your brother going to say?”
“Nothing. Delvin doesn’t care one bit where I am or what I’m
doing. He has a new passion now, and he doesn’t care about
anyone else.”
“What about your Granny?”
“Oh, she’s not real! She’s just a ghost.”
“Very well. You can stay in the temple if you promise to help. I
need a pair of
extra hands here. I think I’ll show you a very special thing
tonight.”
“What thing?”
“Wait and see.”
*
That night the temple had four guests. Allardicus Blide spoke to
them in the central hall, while I was lighting up candles
everywhere, and later, when they went to sleep, he waved to me
to follow him.
Panting, he hobbled up the long stairs to the attic. I followed
him, carrying a candle and wondering to myself what that special
thing he wanted to show me could be.
When we reached the attic, he unlocked a door with a big key.
The rusted hinges gave a rasping squeak, and we came in. I
gasped: the attic room was enormous. And it had its own
trembling light coming from nowhere. I blew out my candle.
“On the inside, this room is a thousand times as big as on the
outside,” Allardicus explained.
“Is it magic?”
“Of course. What else can it be?”
“I like it!”
“But we are not here to stand around. We are here to work. See
those four trees?”
I looked at him with suspicion. “How in the world can you see
them? You’re blind.”
“They are spirit trees,” he explained. “Spirit things are better
seen without eyes.”
I checked it up, closing my eyes. Naturally, I saw nothing at
all.
“Open your heart,” Allardicus said, “and repeat the Prijdi
spell.”
Prijdi meant “come to me.” I opened my heart as wide as I could
and said, “Prijdi, prijdi, prijdi…”
But I saw nothing.
“Try again,” he said. “You have the necessary gift, I know.”
“Prijdi, prijdi,” I said.
I saw the trees at last. They kind of glowed on the dark padding
of my eyelids. They looked like small willows.
Allardicus took heavy bronze shears from a shelf.
“Those four trees represent the souls of the four guests
sleeping below,” he said. “Our guests have come here to pray to
Gods and to get their souls purged. But I’ll tell you the
secret, girl. Gods are too busy to purge people’s souls. They
never do that. I do that. Practice the Prijdi spell, Lera. With
time, you’ll learn to see anyone’s soul tree immediately, in any
situation. No one will be able to deceive you then.”
And he started trimming the trees.
“Hmm… How do you know which branches to prune?” I asked him.
“Oh, I cut those that are too long, crooked, or that look weird.
Some of them are too dark in color, like this one. Every time I
cut a branch, a crooked, weird or dark desire dies in the
sleeping person’s soul. When our guests get up tomorrow, they’ll
feel purged from their sins, sinful thoughts, and rebellious
wishes. They’ll be perfect citizens, happy and calm. Everyone in
the Oasis is purged from time to time, that’s why it’s the best
place in the world to live.”
“The best place? Are you sure?” I pictured in my mind our Oasis
standing alone in the middle of a dark desert of human sins and
vices, surrounded by a high wall. It was so cozy to be inside.
“I kid you not,” he said.
I thought that the world was probably big and had millions of
places, good and bad, so I was incredibly lucky to live in the
very best one. The wall around the Oasis had only one Gate, and
that Gate was watched by the powerful daemon called Sentinel,
day and night. So I had nothing to fear.
I touched a long slender branch. “I think every branch here is a
bit overgrown,” I said.
“It’s because everyone believes they are a planet the world
spins around, and life is about them. But I’ll cut the branches
short, and it will teach our guests humility, subjection, and
deference to authority.”
“Deference to authority. That’s pretty cool. Delvin is always
saying I need this, but he is a fool. He was born dumb,” I said.
“Can I try to cut something off?”
He smiled. “It’s just the attic. You haven’t seen our cellar
yet!”
“Please, please, please!” I added some whining to my voice. I
knew it had always helped.
“Well, why not?” he said and gave me the shears. “But be
careful. Don’t cut too short.”
We took turns trimming and pruning the trees, while chatting
about this and that. The work was long, and the shears were
heavy, so I only returned home at dawn.
|
Back to Oasis
|
| |
| |
| top |
|
