“A Letter”). You see, they, the ghosts, absolutely don’t care where to appear. The surroundings don’t interest them at all. As in the works of past centuries, they are spiritually bound to the premises in which they died. Although, to tell the truth, I prefer stories outside the Otherworld – “A Piano”, “A Cat’s Name”, “See you Tomorrow”.
Without exception, all the short stories of Alexandra Kryuchkova are written at a high artistic level of narration and dramaturgy.
Kryuchkova’s creative biography is full of surprises. She began writing poetry and prose at the age of 11. And not just began, because some short stories were included in the book, which is the subject in my note. This is evidenced by the dates under the works. These stories not only entered the book, they took their rightful place in it. The old works of the child prodigy Kryuchkova, included in her collection, were written by the hand of master. And they say that there will be no more Lermontovs because of the supposedly “slow” maturation of modern youth. However, it is not so! When you read Alexandra Kryuchkova’s stories, you don’t even think that they were written by a teenage girl.
I think that such an early maturation of Kryuchkova, as in the case of Lermontov, is caused by the premature death of both her parents. The tragic orphanhood could not but affect the child’s psyche. For Alexandra Kryuchkova, this resulted in a genuine interest in the Other World. The drama of life entered her soul early. As in the case of Lermontov, everyone learned about the prodigy Kryuchkova in retrospect, when she had already grown up and became a famous poet.
Although the stories, presented in the book, were written by Alexandra at a young age, they have not lost their original value even today. And yet, it’s a pity that our country didn’t care about its brilliant children in the nineties of the last century. And that Alexandra Kryuchkova’s early stories were published only two decades after they were written.
Alexander Karpenko6,
poet and writer
The newspaper “Poetograd” No. 12 (113), 2014
https://www.reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=9499
http://www.poetograd.ru/arch.html
TALES of GHOSTS
I dedicate my book
to every reader!
As well as to:
my parents,
grandmothers, grandfather and great-grandfather,
my son Andrey and our cat Josephine,
and all KIND creatures and entities!
Part I. LOVE ME NOW!
0. Bonfire
I walked for a long time somewhere far away, in an endless thick fog, until I suddenly came upon a Man.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized, trying to move on, but realized there was someone there, too.
“Follow me,” the Man said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The queue…”
“What are you queuing for?”
“Everyone gets their own.”
“And how long do we have to wait?”
The Man shrugged. The queue moved a little further. I began to distinguish some voices.
“Do you know what is there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the Man replied indifferently. “They say, there is the City of the Sun beyond the fog. However, not everyone can reach it.”
“Are you from the City of the Sun?”
“I don’t think so,” the Man grinned. “More likely, from the Land of Dreams’ Dungeon.”
The queue moved forward a little.
“So, are you an atheist?” I supposed.
“Not anymore,” he sighed.
Suddenly, a girl of about five years old emerged from the fog. She ran between us and immediately disappeared.
“Are the kids in the queue, too?” I wondered.
“I guess so,” the Man replied and shrugged.
The Girl emerged from the fog again, but from the other side. For a moment she stopped next to us and then turned to me.
“There’s a cat waiting for me there! And who is waiting for you?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged.
“Weird!” the Girl said thoughtfully. “There must be someone waiting for you! If there was no one waiting, you wouldn’t be here!”
I smiled, and the Girl disappeared in the fog at once.
Soon we reached a bonfire on the side of the road.
“Well, we can relax until morning,” the Man said.
A shadow of a woman separated from the fire and approached me and the Man.
“Join us!” she suggested.
The Man and I sat down by the bonfire. How many of souls were there? Anyway, I couldn’t count, Mr. Fog clearly didn’t want us to see each other …
“What are they throwing into the bonfire? There is no wood at all!” I asked the Man in a whisper.
“Stories!” he smiled.
“And you both will definitely tell us yours, too,” the Woman smiled, handing cups of tea from a thermos to me and my neighbor.
“What for… tea and thermos?!” I asked the Man, without ceasing to be surprised at what was happening, when the Woman left for the fog.
“It’s more familiar,” the Man answered calmly, and at the same moment a sad female voice sounded out of the fog.
“He told me, ‘See you tomorrow!’…”
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Карпенко,_Александр_Николаевич
