Immortal Ash

Chapter 2

They had been wandering in the fine night rain for a good quarter of an hour, stopping near trees that Wolf was sniffing carefully. 'Reading the chats', Sonya laughed as usual.

Eugenie was tensely silent. Putting his hands in his jacket pockets and lifting his shoulders, he obediently followed Sonya and her dog, but never dared to start a conversation.

She didn't rush him either, feeling not so much curiosity as annoyance. Perhaps Eugenie was hoping for an invitation to the house, but Sonya replied that they could meet only during her walk with Wolf. When she, dressed in a waterproof jacket with a hood, hiking pants and rough boots, went down to the street, Eugenie was already waiting near the entrance.

"You have a good wolf," said Lebedev at last.

"It's not a wolf, but a dog," Sonya corrected pedantically.

"I know," he nodded and was silent again.

"Eugenie," she couldn't stand it. "I have to go now. What did you want to say?"

"Shall we sit somewhere?"

"With the dog?"

"Well... Yes, I understand. I wanted to show you something. Drawings, to be exact. It's uncomfortable in the rain."

"You're into drawing?" Sonya laughed, but stopped, because Eugenie threw at her a sharp and at the same time full of pain look. A bad joke. Should have screwed up so badly.

"All right," she gave in to make up for the tactlessness. "Let's go upstairs. But I have to get up early tomorrow."

"I won't be long!" Eugenie rejoiced, and Sonya thought wistfully that once she would have given a lot for him to come to visit her.

The first to enter the apartment was Wolf. Sonya wiped his paws and back, and the dog went to the kitchen - to his favorite place near the refrigerator. Eugenie shook off the drops from his blond hair curled from moisture and smiled awkwardly. Sonya put the kettle on and turned to her guest. Eugenie looked around as if he was here for the first time. Or as if he hadn't recognized the kitchen since his last visit.

"These are Volodya's drawings," he began without any transition, pulled out a plastic file from behind his back and carefully laid out several sheets on the clean table. Sonya leaned over curiously, but barely glanced at the first drawing and frowned. Volodya, Eugenie's nine-year-old son, was certainly talented, though he paid for his genius with his health. In the first drawing, the boy depicted a girl dressed in a hooded cloak with a wolf on a leash. An uninitiated person might think that the child drew a drawing based on the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, except that Little Red Riding Hood turned out to be Sonya's face.

"What do you think?" Eugenie asked, but without the pride peculiar to fathers, rather with concern. Sonya realized why he was so nervous when she saw the next picture: a forest, a hut, a grinning wolf, and a girl lying on the grass with a knife in her chest. The unfortunate woman's face was covered by long hair that poked out from under her hood, but Sonya realized without details who it could be. Shuddering, she turned the sheet over and saw the third drawing, an abstract portal, flanked by blurry figures stretching out their arms to grab onto something.

"Horror," she exhaled involuntarily, and immediately corrected herself: "Horror, because it's scary. And the drawing is certainly talented. Volodya is a genius."

"Sonya, don't you get it?" Eugenie raised his heavenly eyes at her and furrowed his brow. She hesitated with the answer, automatically noted to herself that Lebedev looks much older than his twenty-seven years: his mouth is outlined by mournful folds, his forehead is mottled with horizontal lines. What a tired and doomed look he had! Sonya swallowed the bitterness of regret: from that cheerful and carefree handsome Eugenie Lebedev, in whom she was desperately in love, only a shadow remained.