Home by Solomiya Andrusiv

My hometown meets me
with rains and damp autumn. I haven't been here for five years and can't understand why I came back. Just at one moment something like a magnet has pulled me in this small place where I grew up and from which I've escaped at the first opportunity. You’re right, no one is waiting for me here - neither home nor family, but every porch and yard is filled with memories. From this swing I once fell and broke my head in blood when I rode standing in full height on a bet. On that bench used to sit a lovely old woman always smiling and asking if my friends and I wanted to try her home apples. And here’s the porch of my old house. I raise my eyes and look at the familiar balcony on which unfamiliar things are hanging. Then turn around, pull my head deeper into the coat collar and walk away.
So many years have passed and I'm here again. The fate is great joker. Hanging around I come near my first school. It is ridiculous that someone is studying here now although for me the town is like a ghost, the streets are deserted and gray. Perhaps it's all the fall. I sit on a bench in the schoolyard. All the benches here are painted in blue, the hue of the spring sky, not to the tone of the grayness surrounding me. Somewhere in the fifth grade, when they were just painted, my favorite jeans also became stripped with sky-blue lines.
Suddenly in a deserted schoolyard I notice a girl with a baby carriage and recognize my classmate in her. She also recognizes me, smiles and sits next to me. I ask her about the family and job, she - about place I'd gone and why the hell have I returned. We're chatting for about ten minutes, exchanging stories about who'd been worse off. I can’t look at her, so bright and lively in her red jacket, so I look away. And right behind the schoolyard, in former times without a fence, now - with some semblance of it, grows a small forest separating the school from a living district. My glance clings to the orange bricks of the old water tower, which is ruined since I can remember it. She traces my gaze and smiles.
“Do you remember how we walked here after school and were afraid to approach that tower?”
Yes, I remember. I also remember how we've come up with various mystical stories about that tower like that once it has become full of water and some girl has drowned there or about someone who has hanged himself and after that a ghost have been living there. A flash of memory suddenly appears before my eyes. There are five of us children and we, as always after school, are running through the forest looking for adventures and look askance at that tower. At one point, someone finds a lost boot. We immediately make up the story that a maniac lives in the tower, and the shoe belongs to his victim. And then I notice some piece of fabric that is hooked on a tree. I take it in my hands and understand that this is a scarf, all in someone’s blood. I was never afraid of blood, but now I'm looking at the scarf in my hands for a rather long time, as if I can't not believe my eyes. After that, the police had really arrived there and searched for something in the tower for several days, but had found nothing. Maybe someone just had nosebleeds and he drop his scarf, but after that when I got scared or nervous, I saw in front of my eyes picture, in which I hold bloody tissue.
“By the way, now rumors are circulating that someone has settled there. My eldest son said he'd seen recently how someone came in there with something like a bloody axe in his hands. I understand that this is just a childhood fantasy, but I’m afraid to walk here in the evening and don’t advise you too”
I grunted thoughtfully. Perhaps some maniac or murderer used to live here. Nevertheless, she has nothing to worry about, because now I'm living in there and I definitely haven’t killed anyone. I just can’t remember what have I been doing yesterday ...