and inexplicable panic, disarming fear. The blackening anxiety in the rattling air convulsively, with emphasized bitterness, plotted white gagged-wide strips of the crosshair, as if at a distance of several meters from Amina was an invisible ant and shamelessly with all his might painted lime on a transparent fence.
The naive ant from this unusual mirage vision threw into a light heat. The breeze suddenly changed and Amina smelled a sharp smell of a burnt tree directly in her nose, she instantly looked away, from where an unpleasant aroma had come, but she saw nothing and no one.
“Solid nasty things! We must survive this day, then it will be easier!”
The worried ant grunted a little in the womb once or twice, and it seemed to her that a bully bird, a mockingbird, mimicked her somewhere in the bushes, Amina made another effort and tried to say something, but an indistinct dry rattle scrambled out from a dry throat.. With a habitual movement, she carefully brought the foot up first to the petiol*, then to the swollen tummy, as if checking if her treasure was in place. The round, elastic body kept a new, infinitely dear to her life.
Amina recalled snatches of anxious and nervous sleep, which she had just dreamed of. For the last couple of hours she was dozing uneasily, constantly waking up and again crying and drowning in the same dream that she had before, and this continued until she finally woke up.
“Oh, oh, what kind of strangeness of our body? The riddles are solid… the same dream, the same plot scrolls more than once? Are we doing something underreporting somewhere, or what? Or do you need to change the tactics of behavior? Something useful to learn from this dream? Several times – is it like a reminder or what? Mysteries of the mind… Maybe, a reminder that we went the wrong way, and we must return to the beginning of the labyrinth of our destiny. Well, what if it’s too late and nothing can be changed? There are different situations in life… Sometimes it seems that each of us periodically returns to the beginning of this very labyrinth, which… No, perhaps you can’t return to the beginning! Of course you can’t! Each of us returns to a certain point where he already passed, where he was already… and, now, we stand and think: ‘Well, oh, after all, the last time I went this way, and came back here again, and where do i go now Where to? It’s a vicious circle?’ There are two or three more turns… it happens that there is… and we set off again with the naive hope of overcoming this damn thing, and it tempts us to express ourselves curiously-abusively, but, okay, just – damn maze with the help of higher forces, go-go, but, in the end, we return for the third, and fourth, and twenty-fourth times to the same intersection. The question is, well, why? Yes-ah… it is asked, but no answers have been given… we need to get up and go, planting hope and relying only on our own strength… who else would answer our questions. And who will answer them, if not ourselves… means, the conclusion is that we get up, no matter how hard it is, and set off again on the road in search of truth, happiness, dreams and everything else!”
In a failed, crumpled dream, the ant sat quietly, lounging in a soft leather chair, near the tinted oval window in a new, sparkling every detail, car of a high-speed train, confidently flying through an endless wheat field. Somewhere in the distance, the gloomy outlines of the city were visible: black factory chimneys blew out puffs of smoke, it seemed, never fading, rare multi-storey buildings stuck out with bristling needles-giants against the background of other cubes-houses. With each second, the metropolis was moving more and more away from the train.
“We, like, should approach the city, go to it, and not go somewhere to distant lands, away from it…” – Amina tried to rationally think in a dream, but the composition, the gentleman swaying gently swaying, everything went away and left from an alien settlement with a pretty decent speed. – “How so?” Well, how so?” – with an upset spontaneous hopelessness sighed an ant.
The pale, soullessly sad sun disc barely peeped out from behind the swollen rain clouds, surprisingly reminiscent of a pockmarked udder cow, ready for milking, and which were so full that they conscientiously waited for only one thing – the slightest signal of divine thunder to liberally give birth to a merciless, tropical rain. Either from the fact that the glasses in the impeccably new-baked carriage were carefully covered with a reflective gray-blue film, which was applied so that the bright sunshine did not interfere with the soft-armored passengers, or from the impending hard marbling of the weather, or something else, the gloomy landscape, which was slipping measuredly beyond the borders of another world, seemed even more depressingly gloomy.
A puffy toy – a funny little elephant – a hero from a well-known old animated film – a whitish-pink color: a soft proboscis, uncompromisingly bent upward by an arc-shaped pipe, innocently called for a cheerful mood, bulging over a funny freckled blue-eyed blue in Amina’s velvet doll legs. With a cap mounted on a puffy head, the blinded-oval, insanely huge ears seemed to serve the elephant so that he could easily overcome distances, flying from place to place. At first he sat quietly and with dignity, and was the size of a militus, tiny kitten, and after a minute or two indecently inflated into the pre-business of a giant pillow. The half-asleep ant, smiling a little noticeably at the very edges of the mouth, hugged the southern fat man tightly, like the most dear and beloved animal, and, sentimentally clinging to the plush, soft, angelic, almost half-dead creature, because it swayed measuredly in time with the train, flashing hilariously strange artificial buttons of his eyes, captivating with a sparkling light, and indistinctly ambiguously mumbled under his nose, – at least, it seemed to Amina, she felt much easier, trying not to think at all about the crazy speed the tee with which the train was whistling, neither about cloudy, prickly, depressing weather, nor about what is happening outside the bad window, nor about what is somewhere out there, its incomplete report about boarding schools and even not about what awaits her ahead.
The bright, spacious car was full of passengers, everyone was sitting in the same comfortable seats as she was. Someone was dozing uneasily, sniffing nervously and loudly, whistling through the sugar holes of the little mustaches, and at the same time, anxiously moving his upper pair of paws – it seems that in ephemeral oblivion, the helpless ant tried to crawl out, climb out of some incredible blockage, subtracting his path and getting out on a saving surface; someone calmly spoke in an undertone on philosophical topics with a neighbor on the road; a pretty well-dressed elderly ant, so crimson-gently sitting in the chair opposite Amina, having buried her face in the book with her muzzle, neatly mastered a thick historical novel; two mock soldier ants in full marching uniforms, somehow strangely falling into the “business class” completely unformatted for ordinary military men, settled down comfortably, turning almost close to each other, and talked about something, actively gesticulating paws. From the side, their lively dialogue seemed rather amusing, and Amina, looking at this scene, smiled broadly.
The car door rattled loudly and drowned without a trace somewhere in the wall, plastic profile slides indifferently captured her A comedic teen ant almost flew into the carriage, dressed in a fresh, clean, as if dry-cleaned, costume of a funny doggie: a cocker spaniel muzzle curiously rose on his head, shaggy velor ears drooped limply to the mesonotum (middle back) *, upper and the lower legs reliably moved, repeating the movements of the pet. A well-dressed suit looked great on the newcomer, and if it had not been for the lie-codegter finishing element – the doll’s face above the artist’s head, then everything would have looked just fine, without any flaws. Perhaps it was necessary to think of it in some other way: to reflect and adapt so that the terry mask of the good-natured dog would be worn directly on the muzzle by the ant artist. Following the funny cocker, he literally crawled on all fours, a gingerbread man rolled in a little gingerbread man, dressed in a colorful, multi-colored suit, either a soldier or a fireman from the last century, with delicately embroidered round shoulder straps, hanging (obviously with overkill) from all sides with sparkling elaborate accelerant, like a serpentine Christmas tree, he instantly rose and straightened. The belligerent stamped sprout
