EAGLE

I arrived in this city at about ten o'clock in the evening. They unloaded me near the bus station.

- How can I get to the railway station? – I asked the native.

“Here’s the stop, here’s the direction of travel,” answered the aborigine, “stand here and wait for tram number one.” Only the first one, not the second or even the third, will take you to the station. Do you remember? The first tram.

After repeating to me four more times about the first tram (perhaps that evening my expression on my face was actively retarded), the native left. And I stayed waiting for the tram.

I waited, sat down, gave 9 rubles, and drove off. Somehow the tram immediately turned from the illuminated, wide street into a narrow, dirty alley and stayed there for half an hour. Dirty streets stretched past me, populated by houses built a hundred years ago. These houses were clearly not well maintained. They did not collapse - they decomposed. Their walls were warped and gaping with pits of fallen plaster. Sometimes we came across houses built under damned communism. But they also looked like degenerate drunks.

The streets were so narrow that the tram passed centimeters from cars parked on the side of the road. The streets themselves were devoid of any signs of storm drainage, and the thaw that occurred that day formed lakes of dirty, lead-colored water. People, cars and the tram carrying me floated along them. There were no signs of normal street lighting on the streets, and the reigning twilight only intensified the feeling that I was inside another film about the end of civilization.

Somewhere in the middle of the journey, three human beings entered the tram and within a few seconds the entire car was filled with the aromas of many days of fumes. I, sitting a few meters away from them, instantly became tipsy. One of the male individuals was literally blue: he had huge bruises under his eyes, and all visible parts of his arms were covered in tattoos. He, his friend and the female who came in with them began to actively discuss the possibility of having sex together. The discussion was heated - one of the men didn’t want to go to the lady’s house and have sex in front of her son, and the lady didn’t want to go to work to have sex. After a couple of stops they got off without reaching an agreement.

Near the tram's final stop, at the heating plant, four homeless people were sitting:

- Happy New Year, man! – one of them told me in the voice of Siphon from “Our Rashi”.

In terms of the power of emotional impact, Hollywood, with all its films - disasters, nervously smokes on the sidelines, and all the Kubricks and Spielbergs are simply losers against the mayor of Orel and the governor of the Oryol region.