down after each toast speech and my dinner companion on the right, named Nelson Stepanian (a double namesake of that hero pilot fighter in the Great Patriotic War), took pains to swiftly refill my glass, hiding a hooligan smirk in his sky-blue squint…
And then I was not up to no Planes… I just picked up my haversack bundled with the tent and sleeping bag, and barged away across the slope to find some quiet secluded place, and there, swaying, yet closely attending the process, I rigged up the one-person Made-in-China synthetic tent.
The residual shreds of verticality and blurred self-control were spent for reeling to a nearby Oak tree to take a leak behind its mighty trunk… The turnabout and the very first step towards the erected tent pushed me back and smashed against the bumpy Oak bole… Limp and unresisting, I slid along the crannied bark down to the tree roots and, completely spent, curdled there… The consciousness twilight thickened sooner than the upcoming twilight of the night. The dim modicum of closing horizon circle swerved pitilessly, a surge of overwhelming sickness rolled up to squeeze me, I rolled onto my side and, balancing on the unsteady elbow, honked over a gnarly bulging root, then fell back into the hard sharp quirks of bark bumping against the back of my head.
Do fish get seasick?.
~ ~ ~
In the dead of night, its harsh chill woke me. Recovering the ability of upright walking was a knotty task but, eventually, I tacked up to the tent, adding on the way my feeble, yet heart-felt part to the grisly howls, and satanic laughter of jackal packs in their uproar over the nearby slopes.
That was the first night to bring it up for me that certain nights are not easily dealt with, you have to clamber through them to survive till next morning. Terrified by the sharp ruthless claws ratcheting my chest, I lay as low as I could and waited for the dawn as for salvation. It came at last but brought no relief, and though my weak piteous moans were of no help at all, I didn’t have it in me to withhold them—everything was wrung away by the excruciating sickness.
Yet, if I somehow lived through the night (it started to shakily shape in my mind), then this here Cosmos still needs me for some purpose. My first task was to regain myself, assemble me back… The inventory revealed a shortage of the upper denture. I plodded along to the Oak, sat on my haunches and dumbly poked with a twig the shallow puddle of stiff vomit between the roots. Not there… The goodnight hurl was so forceful that the prosthesis leaped half-meter farther off from the puddle for a safe sleepover on the pad of moss; the jackals needed nothing of the kind with their teeth all there, and divers other gluttonous riffraff of the woods were not attracted by the piece of plastic for twenty thousand drahms…