Once it was Sylva the typist, who believed wild rumors that the editorial office got hit by an Alazan and burned up. Seeing it was all bullshit, she felt happy and decided to take home her slippers from her desk in the pool's room because it’s easier for her to type when the are on, somehow, yes.

Or it could be an outsider veteran graphomaniac (you would not make out the exact age thru his stubble but no less than eighty), who brought a parcel of “material” prepared by him for the paper dead for at least two months already. Which is not paper’s fault with all the newsstands locked up or destroyed.

Carried away by the creative efforts the writer omitted noticing the trifle.

At too near explosions the building hopped and the window panes, with the parting tinkle, spilled the glass fragments over the floor. I raked them with the broom borrowed from the toilet room in the end of the corridor, and helped Rashid to seal the gaping window frames with the vinyl tape from the house manager’s keeps. The watchman was stinking with wine and bitching bitterly to his hammer about the janitors who had stopped coming to do their job.

I acted a deaf to his harangues because I had no desire to guess who he was hinting at.

Actually, Alazans produced more noise than effect. The missile could not pierce a stone wall 40 cm thick. Yes, the wall’s outer surface would go kaput, the inside turn all cracks and crevices but still the missile lacked might to penetrate and sky in. If it hit in through the window or balcony door then, yes, no arguing, the place is smashed, all the partitions smitten down. However, if it were some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would turn it into a heap of trash.

But then, at night, when going after water, I had a charming opportunity to admire their beautiful flight—from purely aesthetic point of view—a lazy yellow comet from Shushi descending in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) and from the ground long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two burst up, across the course to its final crash in the city, and all that against the backdrop of the full moon – lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again!

No use whatsoever yet the surrealism of the picture looked awesome.

And after Stepanakert was left not only by the special troops of the Soviet Army but the primordial regiment as well, they unleashed bombardments by the missile installations GRAD, and those things you couldn’t play down – undeniably powerful beasts. The hit of just two rockets was enough to level the three-story wing in the City Council (where there was TV studio).

The impact left low hillocks of crushed masonry and some aggravating stink of burned rubber. I cannot definitely state whether it was the smell of the explosives or from the buried TV equipment…

* * *

Bottle #8: ~ From the Alternate Angle ~

First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscilated here and there, and extremely dark yet slightly gray-hued streaks retained their static positions at the edges of actual blackness.

However, all that jump-n’-statics abated gradually, and dissolve, and died away substituted with solid jet-black impenetrability. The wider opened I my eyes, the more of aspic char-coaled dark entered them.

The silence wished for so eagerly just a while ago—before the ominous click of the lid—commenced to depress the ear drums muffling, little by little, the all-pervading blackness in the thick wrap of hermetic shroud of soundlessness.

“Aaaa!” I issued a desperate shout at the top of my lungs, horrified, trying to disengage myself, to kick away the sticky horror of being deaf-and-blind, which straining only brought about an even bigger fright and made me realize that atop of everything else I was mute. The scream felt like virtual, it did not reach the organs of hearing and sounded only within me. But how on earth could I be sure that it was sounding at all?

A captive in the doubled cage, twice doubled as a matter of fact – three layers of indissoluble calcium in the shell's structure added with my deaf-mute-blindness, a kinda mollusk’s mantle sack, that's what I was, fixed in, strait-jacketed, incarcerated.

The panic smacked me like the mains of 240 V, yanked hither-thither like a withered pear-tree quacking in vigorous clutch of the deuce, yet even for those violent jerks there was not room enough—my nose squeezed between the knees, unyielding bottom under my left shoulder, the right one rubs against the hard lid, and no way to stretch the legs out at least for one foot. Got trapped and nabbed by the shrewd dickens under a washing-tab!