and disappeared into a small black hole in the floor. Warm rainbow light played overflows and invigorated Rhonda. The bathroom, for the convenience of using two ants at once, was divided into two parts by a low matte partition, which, like a mirror sheet, reflected the contents of one compartment in the other: snow-white washbasins for washing and pseudo-angular corner cubicles for taking a shower repeated to the utmost insanity glossy taps with cross-shaped “lamb”, numerous shelves for any important bathroom trifles, hooked plastic hangers, reminiscent of the teeth of a mythical dragon, transparent, cunning, in the shape of an unusual the marine animal, ladle, merry plastic stand for the toothbrush (with only one hole), showing a one-eyed pirate crazy
There was a soft knock on the pale blue plastic door, which was most likely used for the border between the bathroom and the corridor rather than for locking by random guests, then a beeped light a couple of times, and, finally, Ski’s cocked voice sounded.
– Rond, in a minute your time is running out! Hurry up!
– Now, now I’m going out! – skillfully repulsed a blow Rond.
– Come on, come on!
The red ant cocked his head: an electronic clock, neatly placed between the tiles, suggested that his legitimate five minutes for the soul had expired.
“Ehh, that’s a swim in the real sea!” Or you can in the warm and clean ocean… Sail away far, far from the coast, stretch out and lie down, relax on the calm, barely swaying waves, feel the whole expanse and depth of water, fully enjoy the expanses of the water element. Sail away so far where there is no one, so that the silence is quiet, gentle, light, whispering waves and the even, smooth surface of the ocean!”
He calmly turned the pretzel of the valve a couple of revolutions, and the brisk stream of water, gradually decreasing, completely disappeared, ant briskly shook the last drops from his head, extended his upper right foot to a striped towel and felt a gentle touch of light material.
“The most important thing is to thoroughly wipe the antennae so that you always have it dry and shiny!” Remember, a dry mustache will someday save your life!” – unexpectedly Rond showed another memorable photograph from a deep, deep childhood, – the words of the kindergarten nanny.
Drying himself with a pleasant towel, he threw open the bathroom door, and the mint breeze of the room air conditioner swept through the redder body. A disheveled ant pulled on his underpants in an instant and quickly ran out of the bathroom compartment. A few minutes were left before the general release. For some reason, Rond crouched for a second and abruptly jumped, fatally waving his right foot with all his strength in the air, depicting a volleyball player who soars above the volleyball net and punches the opponent’s block with an elastic ball.
“So as not to forget about the most important thing! As always – at the last moment!”
Rond paced broadly on the threshold of the room, Ski and Ave were already in their places – each in his own bed.
– We’re ready, – said Ave.
– Yeah, – Rond said in the affirmative.
– Yes, we are ready! – confirmed Ski.
– Well! I hear, hear! – Rond raised his voice.
The on-duty ant put his right red-haired paw to the electronic clock and lowered the registration token: the clock indicated the time with a bright green light – “Twenty-three, fifteen.”
“Everything went perfectly, another working week was tattered… another one, like hundreds of other weeks… how wonderful, how good that tomorrow, almost today is a day off! Finally, you can take a little breath after the marathon of a difficult work week and switch from all this perishable fuss, running around, husk, confetti…”
Rond, full of thoughts about the upcoming day by the usual movement, set the gentle Sunday alarm code on his watch, and, having pressed the automatic shutdown of the lampshade, flopped into his own, so welcoming bed.
“In a real calm sea-ocean, you would have a swim!” – with a new tidal, shaggy-foamy wave, his “hardly-selling” dreams of endless expanses of water returned.
An endless stream of pink fantasies annoyingly swirled in a fascinating icy whirlpool and did not let go into free swimming, boiling with boiling foam, and reverently charming, and lulling. Rond, who fell asleep, suddenly remembered his old friend Kint, who selflessly kept watch on a fishing trawler: “He surely admires all the beauties of the vast ocean, and, maybe, sometimes dissolves in it, swims, bathes… Work is work, but you can enjoy moments that are favorably given to us by fate.”
The muffled soft orange light of the lampshade, gradually fading away, finally fell asleep soundly in a gray-haired nightly note. Outside the twilight window, noisy rain still lashed uneasily. The murderous elements played the devilish tragedy in the theater more and more actively. The changeable gusty wind either flew with furious fury on the incalculable trophic drops falling from the sky, then silently faded away, as if a fearless jaguar, waiting in ambush for a young antelope, then again pounced with even more frantic force, and this desperate game continued without end and edge. Terrible thunderclouds pushed anxiously across the gloomy sky from one corner to another, and back again, as if finding no way out of a confined space. And yet, the only way out of the shaky shameless clouds was to completely pour out all their sadness accumulated over the day, two-week-month over the sleeping city, and only then calmly sail home…
Ski and Rond were already snoring soundlessly – apparently, they had revealed some secrets of enchanting night tales. Ave, lying on his right side, unsuccessfully tried to fall asleep and peered at the old Alt chair with curved carved legs, his eyes moved a little to the left of the furniture antiquary, and before his eyes appeared a picture of a lighted-black square window: external light fell on a huge rectangle from above, creating an illusion of infinite space.
If you look into the gloomy depth of the night, without being distracted by the same forty-story hulk, you can see so thin and fragile lines of sad loneliness! But, alas, the ghostly tears of nature, sullenly flowing down the transparent surface of glass, returned to the real world. A world of endless laws and regulations, where every working ant was a tiny detail of the universal mega-mechanical apparatus.
Suddenly, Ave caught himself with the careless thought that observing the rain chilly at night, at the very moment when everyone and everyone had already left the real world and were soundly sleeping, brought in his tiny heart an unclear confusion, and now for a whole month or not, more than a month, he lives somehow differently. Not so, that absolutely something radically changed in his life, but he began to inexplicably be excited and fascinated by the flickering night world, attracting to his mystery, like a magnetic plate. It seemed to him sincerely that every particle of his tiny organism deliberately tries to increase to infinite sizes, then to decrease to a point mark, and that his whole body is continuously breathing, and already lives some kind of indefinite, unnatural for a “vicious circle of working ant”, your life. Sometimes strange minutes came, and maybe seconds, when his “right” consciousness turned off, and he uncontrollably drowned in an infinite, mysterious Universe. A whistling wind gripped him gently and firmly and carried it into distant unknown expanses. After such alarming fleeting attacks, it seemed to Ave that he was losing control of himself, could not do anything and say where he was. His mystical soaring did not cause much concern, and he decided that since the state of these same “unreal flights” didn’t harm anyone around him, then everything was in perfect order, everything
