You can tear St. Petersburg into two pieces – winter and summer. You can also shatter it into five million if you want – one city for each person living there. I think the number of St. Petersburgs is closer to the second than the first, but I’m going to start with the first. Let’s see how far this gets into five million.
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By May of each year the sun is already saturating most hours of the day. Smiles are seen on more faces, lights are seldom switched on and open windows ripple down the sides of sun-drenched tower blocks. Every year it’s the kind of summer which gets between your toes and grows warmth and good summer muck all over you. You forget you might have wrinkles or a few white hairs, and let tiny, fleeting breezes into your home and through the tatty seams of your summer clothes. Trees drown in laziness allowing dust to settle on their leaves, turning them a gorgeous summer grey. Beer replaces vodka in most hands as the drink of necessity – to cool the dusty throats of everyone. Drinking becomes a happy thing again. Even the cars, buses and trams look like they could do with slugging a few bottles. All this under the impervious sky which everyone seems to be looking at again.
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Pyotr sits at a window seat in the tram to his home. The lines are ragged on this street, and he watches his bottle jerk around on his thigh as the tram jumps on the track. The beer steams and evaporates in smoky spills from the bottle neck. Pyotr doesn’t mind – it’s summer and he can pick up another, a fresh and cool one when he gets off. He rests his forehead against the window, feeling the sweat compress on the glass – pushing a circle of around an island of skin. This sudden, extra heat turns him to the beer again. The summer awards him a real swig – a full flush to chill the gullet down. The winter never allows such swigs, but he’s not thinking about that – not even a little.
In the distance he can see his mother’s block stretched away at the end of the titanic row of concrete – windows flung open like thousands of fins. The road flutters a mirage just next to her building and he finds it hard to imagine it’s not wet over there, but he really knows it’s not – nowhere is right now. Except the inside of the bottle in his hand. He gulps fifty milligrams more to celebrate just that.
At his stop his stomach doesn’t appreciate the sudden change in movement from jostling on neglected tracks to walking on parched mud. It whacks a hot twinge into his lower abdomen.
‘Great,’ he says to himself with a headshake and thinned lips. ‘I don’t come to see my mother in four months and the first thing I need is a shit – a fucking summer shit. Guaranteed liquid. She better have paper or I’m in real trouble.’
.
He picks up his pace to get there quicker and brown clouds swirl around his old shoes. He ignores that to think over his story.
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