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The lock clicked, the door opened. Methodius saw the dark corridor and the bright yellow spot of light shining through from the wide open door of the room. In the luminescent spot, a wheelchair was standing with a small stooping figure in it, a rug thrown over the legs of the figure. “Hello! Hop in!” Irka invited him in. She deftly turned around in the narrow corridor and dived into her room. Methodius followed her.
Irka’s room differed from the remaining ones in that there was not a single chair in it. Bright metallic handrails stretched along the walls at different heights. Irka hated to call her grandmother when it was necessary to get in or out of the wheelchair. The computer monitor twinkled by the window. Irka was in a chat room before Methodius’ arrival. Books and magazines covered the dying sofa. Irka was eternally reading twenty books at once, not counting textbooks. Moreover, she did not read consecutively, but pieces from different places. Strange that with such chaotic reading the books did not tangle up inside her head.
“Why are you standing like a lonely jerboa? Clear a place for yourself and sit down! And I’ll be right with you! Just have to tell people that I’m not home,” said Irka, nodding towards the bed. She rolled up to the computer and quickly typed:
Ciao, all! Gone to the front! Me.
“Well now, politeness, first of all! Otherwise people will think that I was hijacked,” she said, turning to Methodius.
He was going to sit down on the bed, but somehow he did not. As if there was a perpetual motion machine in the lumbar part of his spine. “Better let’s go to the kitchen. I’d like to get a bite of something,” he said.
Irka snorted, “Don’t frigging petition to me! Go to Gra
“Well, are we going?” Methodius repeated.
“It’s you ‘go’ and I ‘ride’. Indeed I’m a race car,” explained Irka.
Methodius had noticed long ago that Irka, like many handicapped people, loved to joke about herself and her wheelchair. However, when someone else tried to be witty regarding the same, her sense of humour dried up right there and then. She stretched her hand to the control panel and the wheelchair quickly rolled along the corridor to the kitchen. Methodius barely managed to follow her. After all, wheels will always outrun feet, it goes without saying, if there are no fences along the road.
Everything happened eight years ago. Then Irka was four. The automobile, in which Irka and her parents were returning from the dacha, was pushed out into the oncoming traffic towards a scheduled bus. Irka’s father and mother, travelling in the front seats, perished. Irka, with spinal trauma and two long, almost parallel scars from two pieces of iron gashing her back from the left shoulder down, ended up in a wheelchair. Still, Irka was lucky that she had an energetic and sufficiently young grandmother. Although in this case, it was better not to hint at luck at all. With such an argument, it was possible to get looks with daggers in her eyes.
In the kitchen Notre Dame de Paris was roaring. Grandmother A
Gra
“Met, come here, my little tousle! I’ll give you a hug!” Gra
“Sure thing! Only please put down the knife!” Methodius said. He loved Gra
Gra
“Gra
“But don’t say that here. You go crazy in March, with me it’s every day. Especially when everyone throws on a clearly unsuccessful dress, and the most successful will hang out of sight and dream of moths,” Gra
“Gram, Met wants to eat!” Irka said.
“Sure,” agreed Gra
“Okay, Gram, fine! We’ll do it ourselves!” Irka said. She knew better than Methodius that Gra
Gra
“Your grandmother is cool,” said Methodius with a well-packed mouth.
“She’s everything to me,” agreed Irka. “Only she ca
“And that’s true. Parents are people too. What, are they guilty, perhaps, that they’re parents?” Methodius agreed.
He suddenly recalled how and under what circumstances he was introduced to Irka two years ago. With his one friend – already former – he was passing by her entrance at the moment when Irka was trying to get the wheelchair onto the step in front of the entrance door. Irka, for the first time getting out of the house without the grandmother (afterwards she really got it for this), was considering how she could get out of the tight spot. Possibly, Methodius would have rushed past altogether, not noticing anything, if not for his friend, who began to laugh aloud. He found it very comical that a freak in a wheelchair could not get into the entrance – all the time rolling backwards.