In the white haze, in black spots, in the blizzard of time, in the fact that winter is coming, do not pronounce the names of the past, they are all shadows, they are all that cannot be told in words, adverbs and numbers.
About what happened, about what happened, be silent and forget …
Crow-wing hair, red lips, brown eyes, a woman in a white-pearl suit leaned slightly towards the man through a berry handrail, and there were railroad tracks below and a road strewn with white groats.
Light burden of my time, dreams of the past…
A black short jacket with her hair pinned up with an invisible hairpin, a young girl, she sat down on a blue night seat cut with a golden ribbon, narrow and thin, similar to a cord used to catch unbroken horses … A young, quite a boy in gray got up to give way to an elderly woman in black. A courier walked back with a square Yandex bag, white with a golden outline, such are only found on the rims of carriage wheels.
The building, gray and gloomy, littered with tiles, like grits, yellow and once white, unwashed and dirty, on the door, a white plate with half-erased faded letters “Polyclinic”. Iron doors, black, heavy, sometimes difficult to open. A girl is standing near the entrance and measures the temperature. There is a mask on her face, a hat on her head, shoe covers on her feet and a transparent robe hides her body. She is like a formless being, sexless and devoid of herself, just a person who has turned into something else.
Inside, the corridor is flaky and dirty, looking like some kind of entrance to a distorted universe. Several benches are flat, a little cracked, on one sits an old woman with a long stick. She looks down and sighs strongly and drearyly, a dark hat is on her head. A man passes by, slender and gray-haired. The woman looks back after him and sighs even more.
A green wall opposite and leatherette nailed with round silver nails, broken fragments with slits shine through the tree as old as the world and the building itself, an elderly woman in a green coat sneezes, there is a white mask on her face, she seems to be invisible and like angels.
A white lattice on a transparent plane, behind her is a gray-haired woman in a doctor’s white coat, she is blowing a little from the iron front door and she is constantly wrapping herself in a gray shawl. A young woman with black hair and a heavenly waistcoat with goat lapels enters through a slot in the door. She is in a hurry and literally flies into a fenced-off room with many maps of living people, a simple chronicle of diseases and treatment, losses and losses.
The building of the clinic is filled and the anus and mouth are emptied, it seems that some secret beast is devouring other people’s souls, not escaping from another world. A man in a black crow’s attire constantly says the word of farewell “good”, refers to the old dictionary of peasant life, at the entrance to the greenery of the corridor stands a man in a black hat, a briefcase in his left hand, his senile eyes are narrowed, the light interferes with them. A woman in big dragonfly glasses comes out of the locked door, she says, like angels, “Come in who’s next!”
Noise in the corridor and old age itself in a gray long coat is approaching the window, the face is hidden by the shadow of the hood. Long extinguished lamps rest on the ceiling, they died after one and rest with obstacles on the plane of gray panels. Innocent doomed procession, those coffins that are impossible to imagine.
They will not say words of passion, it is quiet and almost a crematorium here, something that cannot be told to that other person who will come after you, like generations succeeding each other.
Irina Tall (Novikova) (she/they) is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor’s degree in design. The first personal exhibition “My soul is like a wild hawk” (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, in 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, draws on anti-war topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare and endangered species of animals and birds.