Modern Fairy Tale. Swamp Cyberpunk. Alex Benedict

      ISBN 978-5-4490-1215-9

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      – What was it yesterday? – Makosh were standing with her arms akimbo, fixing a piercing glance of her red eyes on my turgid mug. – I’m so pissed off with your Vodyanych! Boozing fly-agaric extract biting it with lilys is all you do all day long!

      Oh, my beloved stub, my dear wood… My wife got really steamed up – a typical hag. Nothing really happened after all. Well, we had a drink with water elf, but there was a reason – his mermaid eloped to Neptune, coveting on algae and pearly shells.

      – Don’t turn your cheeky face away, when your wife is talking to you! – the better half kept on winging. It seemed that she almost switched to a wheeze, so hard she tried to tear out of a dress, busting her guts.

      – Makoshechka, my love, my green-eyed beauty, don’t scream so loud, my head cracks like a taliped bear stepped on it. I was just trying to defend myself from the accusations. And almost all I said was the truth. Mikhalych really partied with us yesterday and while he was falling drunk he accidentally stroke the top of my head. I just remembered it, tumbling in a soft moss: the bump, as I felt it, was a size of a fist. A bear fist, a solid one.

      – Bother it! – my hag sorrowfully threw her hands in the air and sat on a stub, turning away from me. – All the girls married normal pucks and mine one is worse than the Russian. I wish you could have at least a cone from you or some help about the house. When did you ever go around your lands? Squirrels ate all the pines, foxes don’t make it in time to eat the hares – they multiply like rabbits, and bears ever more so. One made a habit of drinking with you, the other ones leave no salvation to wolves, chasing them – there will be nobody left to be sent out for the sheeps soon!

      I turned sideways. A headache got worse than before. Though, honestly, I had nothing to say in return. The babe was absolutely right. It’s all Vodyanych’s fault! Come over, he says, for a minute to try a new extract, swearing there’s no any shrooms blended to it. He got me round, a swampy toad. And now I lay dying and listening to all this preaching. I need to settle this matter somehow… But how?

      – Makoshechka, what if go the village to take kids together? I can be on watch, while you kidnap them or split some logs for making a soup and pick some herbs to make it rich.

      The wife turned sideways to me, looking askance and shooting fire, intently, surprisingly, staring at me:

      – You? On watch? Split the logs? Have you come alive again or what? A red mug. When you have enough sleep, bring me an ipad3.

      – I’m sorry, darling? – her last words didn’t make sense to me at all. Seems that I drank too hard yesterday, – What should I bring?