As helpless as a poplar fluff

      — I won’t pay you alimony to a beggar!       There was a blow.       I knew this would happen. And I myself am to blame for this. I should have left immediately as soon as my mother arrived abroad with her new husband. And immediately left when those who were different began to be smoked out of the city.       Now there’s nowhere to run. They are everywhere, and my parents, even if they suddenly wanted to protect me — or at least somehow cared about me — could not protect me from them.       I have no choice but to give up. You can’t ask for help, you can’t trust anyone, not even yourself. There is simply no point in wasting effort and resisting it.       And now these screams, the sounds of a fight, the scandalous separation of a fairly famous athlete from her “unlucky” husband… And I…       And I just don’t want to stay with any of them. No, they’re not actually bad. I’m just one of many things they will share until the last drop of blood. Although, to be honest, in the end I will still end up on the street with a rejection note in my paws.       Curious, isn’t it?       The thing is that I have pink fur. Yes, such nonsense as the color of the skin of the furries of our city plays a huge role in this issue. They kill furries like me. You won’t pay a tidy sum — not yet. They are taken out of town, driven into dark gateways and liquidated, or…       I don’t know and I don’t want to know. At the age of seven, I probably shouldn’t even care about something like a question, for example, where can I get food other than the refrigerator. My peers still live in a world of magic and sparkles. Gray, red, white, striped, spotted — still living. Not me.       Father enters the room. I see the broken bridge of his nose, the fur stuck together on his cheek, and the cigarette he picked up, clearly trampled on more than once: his last money. I get up from the floor where I’ve been sitting all this time and dejectedly follow him into the next room. He opens the door and I immediately bump into my mother. A short and thin light golden spaniel with a fragile physique covers the mark from the slap with her paw and looks witheringly at her father with blue eyes, in which there is still a wet shine from tears and a spark of anger burns. She had changed so much during her month of absence from our modest home. This was no longer the loving furry who laughed boisterously and simply even perceived me as a living being. Standing next to her is her new husband, whom she met during her journey. A tall rusty-brown spotted furry with cold emerald eyes and blue-black oblique bangs. He somehow reminded me of my own father. Just to reduce his height, dye his coat dusty gray without a single spot, and change his eye color from grassy to amber. The same indifferent expression of the muzzle and the feeling of a hidden, but very real threat. I never understood my mother’s choice.       — I’ll go to them myself, — I said in a pitiful, squeaky voice and shuddered.       We all try to pretend that my words mean something. That I am not an empty sound of the word “daughter”. That they are still able to see myself, and not look through me. How hopelessly naive and stupid I am…        They don’t dissuade me. They sign some papers crookedly, shove them into my paws and kick me out of the house. From now on I am left to my own devices. Now I am a wandering pest for the capital. I am “dangerous to society.” I am “a rare mutation, backward and highly contagious.” It’s a pity that I don’t care. I am calm. I don’t need to care about it. I only have to walk half the street and I’ll fall into the right clutches. Everything is already destroyed, and I am just part of the ruins.       My grimy paws step onto the first stone of the paved square, and two black shadows appear behind me. They are already here; they came for me personally. A huge honor, by the way. Few of my fellow sufferers can boast of having seen them up close.       They take me by the elbows, and I feel the cool rubber of the protective gloves. Not surprised. Everyone knows that they are on defense around the clock. For twenty-four hours they stand guard at lampposts in their black cloaks and comb the streets in their iron black masks, black gloves… I don’t resist: I step evenly and softly on the stones; I walk side by side with them. True, I don’t know where exactly. They don’t like to reveal all their cards in advance.       I think there is no need to even clarify that immediately, from the moment of their appearance, they were overgrown with terrible tales and speculation. Judge for yourself: completely black “ghosts” who obey themselves, are not directed by anyone, are not controlled by anyone and have every right to do whatever they want. I knew how to listen and heard many versions of what was happening: some argued that these were not living beings at all, but machines controlled from one secret point. Others believed that they simply had superpowers: most of the poor creatures of unnatural color did not even have time to see the attack; they just felt like they woke up in a different place than yesterday. Some considered them to be divine forces, while others considered them to be fiends. I did not adhere to any of these obsessions. They were literally nothing to me. Empty sound. It existed, but had absolutely no meaning. About the same as I became for my small family.       I was led to a large truck, on the sides of which were painted various signs instructing us to get rid of the fake ones, that is, us who differ from others only in the color of our fur. I smiled bitterly. Wonderful. The iron door — reliable, you can’t knock it down, and you can’t pierce it with a bullet — moved aside with a disgusting, drawn-out creak, and I saw about two hundred furries, no less, unhappy — and sometimes not so unhappy — furry children. Faded glances, triumphant glances, distant and indifferent glances… I knew it.       Not all of them were cruelly torn away from their families or soft bodies given into the outstretched hands of iron masks. Some openly believed that a luxurious life awaited them abroad, in some small and remote fairy-tale town. How it reminded me of my mother when she was getting ready to travel…       I shuddered. One of them, as if reminding me of himself, extended his paw to me from above. It’s unlikely that I will help, I quickly realized and put the documents that my mother gave me into the outstretched glove, with the words “if you don’t tell me, you’ll die.”       “How many more things today will remind me of my broken family?” — I rolled my eyes.       The black mask looked askance at the papers, nodded and disappeared into thin air. I pulled myself up with difficulty and fell over the iron threshold of the truck, having first fallen twice and broken my fingers. I hate my short legs. They’re just like mom’s… Damn it!       The iron doors slammed shut, cutting off the path to escape, which, however, was not for me. If I decided that I would go with them, then so be it. Was it fortunate or unfortunate that I found myself in the dark? — not alone. I heard breathing and rustling around me, and as soon as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I took an empty seat on an empty wooden box near the entrance. In the next two hours, nothing happened at all, if you believe the golden evening light, which did not change at all during the indicated period of time, penetrating into our iron box with a pitiful, lonely ray through the gap between the doors. They stood in a circle around the trap and waited for something. I tried to get rid of the caustic feeling of someone else’s gaze on the back of my head and doze off. Well, now I will be much more willing to believe in all the fairy tales of those present here…       I was awakened by a metallic crash outside. The sources of the sound turned out to be two more trucks that drove up to the area cordoned off with masks. Almost immediately a large crowd formed nearby. There were at least two thousand of them, although such a number is impossible to imagine. I had to make room. But finally all of today’s “catch” was uploaded. A light suddenly flashed inside our truck. Judging by the noise, in all the neighboring ones too. One of them materialized in the middle. The black mask was saying something, but I couldn’t make out the words. Soulless scary voice. A metallic, emotionless, sharp sound pierced the brain, drilling from the inside. Can you imagine having your skull split open with a chainsaw? Yes, it’s not much different. I covered my ears and cowered. Just turn it off, kick it out, don’t allow yourself to obey!       I, of course, planned that there would be many problems and dangers ahead, but I did not intend to part with my memory at the very beginning of what I had promised. There is a long thorny path ahead!.. The black creature turned to me: I alone did not succumb to the needles. The mask changed its voice, and now the insinuating words easily reached me.       “Humble yourselves… Humble yourselves…” — the honeyed whisper easily penetrated my ears, covered with my paws.       The monster was getting closer and closer to me, stretching out the time until the moment of reprisal. It also changed its appearance: instead of a furry, which, by the way, turned out to be quite cute, it turned into a maned something with such thin and shaggy legs that could only have been on a predatory spider. It was getting closer and closer, paralyzing me with its hissing and even its very appearance… I was able to see every cut on the mask, every iron rivet and look into the chilling abyss of missing non-existent eye sockets in the black angular cutouts of the plate mask. The creature rose on its hind legs, becoming ten times larger than me, as I remembered. It was probably even… bigger, it’s just that, being in a state of severe stress, I couldn’t calculate correctly… It took up all the free space in the truck, almost crushing the furries who obeyed and were sleeping in an artificial sleep. Although, I doubt that anyone would be disappointed if this happened in reality, beyond my imagination. I fought to the last and did not let the mask into my subconscious even when my strength was already running out.       — No! — I screamed, and the mask went crazy.       The creature lifted itself off the floor, turned into choking black smoke and rushed through the air towards me, hanging from above and finishing me off with an unearthly screech of rage. It squealed almost silently, but my ears perceived such piercing sounds that my eardrums threatened to burst every second. A dark cloud with an iron mask-grin was looking for a loophole, stubbornly breaking through. I, gasping for breath, stubbornly thought about the bright and good, which seemed to act as something like an invisible armor for me, driving away the monster, which was much stronger than me in its clearly unreal nature, which is why my little heart almost stopped… But suddenly Something inside me loudly cracked and broke. They weren’t bones, no. Something opened a major crack right in my soul, already poisoned by the act that those furries, whom I had considered all my life as my support and my greatest treasure, so easily committed. The creature recoiled and hissed: the brokenness in me scared it away for some unknown reason. It squealed, fused back into the shape of a furry, and then quickly disappeared into thin air.       I slid helplessly down the wall. Everything darkened before my eyes, swayed and swam. My heart jumped out and my breathing became irregular, no matter how much I tried to restore it. Having difficulty maintaining my consciousness, I finally realized that I had been absolutely right all this time: they turned out to be nothing at all. I knew that as soon as I switched off, the mask would return to finish what it started.       The trucks started and drove off. Until we left the city limits and the road was smooth, I had to slap myself in order to stay awake. So by the time the road became covered with the long-awaited potholes, there was no living space left on my face. I was not happy for long: the constant shaking tossed me from side to side, and I hit the iron walls painfully every time, unable to somehow prevent such injuries. But I still had to look for something positive and good around, otherwise it wouldn’t take long for me to completely despair and go crazy from waiting for the inevitable… Thanks also to the fact that the rain pounding on the roof didn’t reach us, they were furious, and everything that was outside, could not get inside.       I should clarify something: I knew the map of the suburb very well, and, apparently, we had not yet gone beyond Marble Forest. I know from myself that in the fog, floating in clouds between the trunks of centuries-old giant sequoias, there can be anything at all. And without facing this, you will never know in advance what awaits you. Most furries believed that this Forest, which could not be destroyed or appropriated for their own construction and recreational purposes, was teeming with a variety of untamed creatures and monsters that carried a mortal danger. When trying to find out something about this place, I only learned for certain the history of the name: it turns out that the Forest began to be called that precisely because the fog shimmering in the sun very much reminded the first viewers of the texture of white marble — just as solemn and beautiful, most likely, it was it’s a spectacle. On any other issues, opinions varied as if everyone was talking about some kind of their own forest, which had nothing at all in common with the “real” one that someone else was talking about. So many legends, stories and, in a sense, even legends were associated with this place… Books were written about it, fairy tales were made up… Everyone wanted to one day get behind that foggy curtain, which turned out to be impassable for communication signals, and see the magic hiding behind it, with my own eyes. Probably, everything there is amazing and unusual, not similar to our everyday life… Another world, located literally behind three trees… I think I’ve already been there once. But then my parents quickly pulled me back into the world and forced me to immediately go back to the city. I was still very tiny and, of course, I didn’t remember anything at all… But something in my memory still sways. As if there was something dear and familiar in this Marble Forest… In a word, behind the scenes the Marble Forest was called a “monstrous abode”.       …The truck I was in suddenly jumped on the next bump and braked. I, flying in the clouds and thinking about my own fantasies mixed with memories, did not have time to grab onto anything and fell to the floor from the great height of the wooden box on which I was sitting. Of course, something instantly crunched loudly in the shoulder, and the paw… was dislocated, although it would be inappropriate to say so. The iron box immediately accelerated and, as if nothing had happened, caught up with the others. There was no noise outside. So, this is just revenge for the fact that I remained disobedient, I swear by anything. It turns out that these “ghosts” are not so impartial. It’s worth taking note.       …When, as a child, a yard bully hit me in the face and hit me in the eye — for me, fortunately, everything worked out — I realized what a miracle it was to see the world in the present, without anything mediated. When I first learned about my mother’s new husband, I realized what a miracle it was to be loved and, in principle, to have a real family that needed me. And now roughly the same thing happened with my paws: now I adored my short, clumsy paws because they exist and because they naturally function properly. Trying not to howl in pain, I rose from the floor. The right paw did not move at all, and every attempt was given off by a dull, burning pain. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. The bumps didn’t let me sleep, and that was good. I had time to make my final guesses about what would happen to all of us before the truth was revealed to us. And the trucks rolled steadily forward along the dirt road for another five or six hours…