Man, from the apartment next door

Chapter 1

I hear a voice from a beautiful distance, a morning voice in the silver dew.

Anton hummed loudly, an ironic chuckle showing on his lips as the upstairs neighbor played an old song at full volume. That asshole was always playing some bullshit early in the morning. Shastun wasn't even mad at him anymore.

— Beautiful far away, don't be hard on me. Don't be cruel to me, don't be cruel to me," the teenager sings with feeling, clutching his old Samsung with a cracked screen in his hand and waving to the tune. He lies on the bed, which creaks slightly as he waves his hand in a particularly emotional way, and looks up at the ceiling with his leg over his head. Just then, his other neighbor — also upstairs, but living on the right side of the dopey Uncle Slava, who is always playing Soviet songs on his stereo — starts banging on the radiator angrily. Here it is — the morning of an ordinary schoolboy, Anton Shastun, who has been stuck in a distant Khrushchev apartment for sixteen long years.

Anton is even a little upset that today is a Saturday — a day off from both him and his mother. He may have been happy to spend time with her as a child, but to be honest, he vaguely remembers those times when things weren't the way they are now...

— Anton!!! — Mom shouts from somewhere in the other room in a broken voice. Yesterday was Friday, and that fact easily explains her present state of mind. The boy reluctantly slides off the bed and out into the hallway. A sagging piece of wallpaper, which has been bothering him for weeks, catches his eye, and he irritably rips it off, exposing part of the gray wall, and crumples the paper and throws it in the trash in the kitchen. It really doesn't seem to have been renovated since the thaw. The apartment smells damp and smells of alcohol, which makes the boy irritably open the window wide, even though it is not May, and ventilate the room. Under the table, there are several empty bottles of Arsenal on sale, and in a garbage bag two bottles of whites are rattling around. Anton no longer even makes scandals and lectures to his mother, he is reconciled to the point that a sense of apathy has become his usual state.

Reaching into the hinged cupboard, which has never closed tightly, and one door was only held by a good word, he takes out of the rusty dish rack a mug "for his mother," which has already had some chips from time and is missing half of the handle. After rinsing it off under the faucet, he pours water from the filter into the container and takes it to his mother's room. The curtains were tightly closed, the place was a mess, someone else's dirty laundry was on the floor, which made even Shast, who was used to this kind of life, cringe with disgust and quickly shoved the mug into the trembling hands of a woman.

- My son," she said in a husky voice, not sober to the end, reaching out to kiss her son on the cheek. Anton only dodges, wanting to get out into the fresh air as soon as possible. He has no need for these caresses, he is tired of them. Now she is ready to confess her love to him and praise him, but in the evening she will be drunk again with her new bully boyfriend and it will start "fetch, give, go away - do not interfere. - Well, Toshenka," she says pitifully, trying to get out of bed, but she gets tangled up in the blankets and spills half the contents of her mug over herself. - Fuck!" she curses through her teeth.

Anton silently walks out of the room, slamming the door loudly. One day he'll leave here for good, but he still needs somewhere to live and somehow finish school, and then... then he'll figure something out. He'll try to enroll and get into a dorm, start working. He would definitely leave Voronezh. That thought was the only bright and desirable thing he clung to every day.

The bottles in the trash bag tinkle pale as he goes out to the stairwell to toss them in the trash. He's still wearing the dark gray T-shirt he slept in, stretched almost to mid-thigh. It hung on him like a sack, making him look even skinnier than he was. On top of it is a black, unzipped, sporty, thin fabric sweatshirt that he raced almost anywhere and anytime. There are black jeans dangling from his skinny legs. He's all gray-black, just like the atmosphere at home. He's comfortable racing in dark clothes-it's almost invisible for the stains and black stitches that sometimes have to be darned.