Little Do You Know about the Day by Artem Zavalniuk

Today is the day.

Oh, you won’t believe me if I tell you how much I love this day! No celebration could ever be compared to this one. It’s been precisely 5 years since we moved together with Alexie to the countryside! It’s our anniversary, finally! Oh, Alexie… It’s going to be a gas today, I promise!

I smilingly come up to the room he sleeps in, with the enthusiasm of a first date. Couldn’t wait to present the gift! Oh, I’m a little scared…

'Pull yourself together, Jeffrey! You don’t want to spoil the wow-effect—it must be uplifting!', I say to myself.

Hardly had I stuck my head in his room door than someone knocked on the front one. I ignore it. 'Not today, sir!'

So, I open the door, and I see him lying. He still sleeps. M’kay, he always oversleeps. Well, then I'm lucky to have a little time to introduce what I prepared for him. It’s in the kitchen!

It's a big-big cherry pie, half the size of a table, you see! Alexie goes wild from cherries; he’ll definitely be amazed! By the by, he’s French, so the word ‘cherry’ always made him smile—chéri in French means ‘darling.’ At least n-years ago. Now he says nothing. I missed those days when he would come up to me, kiss my neck (always lower than you expect), and whisper in my ear, ‘My cherry’—the way he localized ‘mon chéri’ to our love language. Those days his eyes were sparkling from the exuberance! To think he will be unable to speak out a single word right after that horrible night!

Sometimes I wonder how everything could be different if it weren't for that dreadful event. But I love him being speechless, literally. Every now and then we must come to terms with the changes that life brings us. I’ve never stopped loving him. And he, I bet, would say the same thing. We love each other through thick and thin, in sorrow as in cheer, in talks and in silence.

I present him the gifts. He acts distantly as usual. We don’t talk much, needless to say why. But after 5 years together, I learned his body language: he’s always behaving upset until I light him up. Let me fix that now!

We sit together; I’m touched by his exhausted eyes. The bags under his eyes now are more visible than several days ago—no good, no good. I can’t let him look so sad. So, I take the foundation I gifted to him on his previous birthday and apply it with a blotting pad. Oh, it ends soon. I watch him sit straight on a chair. Back in the day, he would always joke that he could never sit straight… But now I can only imagine what he’d say. It’s already the tenth birthday when nobody comes to us. Alexie is in complete loneliness; nobody cares about him as much as I do. Oh, I wish everybody knew how much I cherish him! 

You might wonder what happened to him, why he lost his voice, why he’s alone, and why I decided to look after him. The answer is simple: love. Capitalized. Anything else is needless to say. Everything in our lives is for Love, because of love, or simply doesn’t matter.

There's been another knocking on the door. Alexie looks at the door with the look you often expect to see in people who seek help. 

‘Oh, my cherry, just a minute! It’s police officers’. A bulky, broad-shouldered guy in his late 30s named Jeffrey gets up from the table and go straight ahead to the door, taking the kitchen knife. He barely fits through the doorway.

Alexie hungrily watches him open the door, tugging the leg chain under the table and hoping officers would hear the noise. He’s begging for help. He’s begging for the day to come.