Author's note: Sasha is Aleksander's nickname. Sorry for the confusion.

This morning started out as any other in this July. As much as it may sound like the start of some awful cliché, I would give anything to have it be that way. Don't clichés always have a happy ending? Facing reality, though, I had to accept that what happened could not be prevented. But can anyone really be ready for the worst? 

I got dressed, brushed my teeth, ate a couple of sandwiches and cursed myself for having only bought orange juice, which doesn't taste the best after toothpaste. I then brushed my hair and got ready to leave the apartment. As I was about to lock the door, my hand stopped. My heart had skipped a beat and, just for a moment, I felt slightly lightheaded. It all passed in a second, and although there was an ominous feeling deep in my gut, I blamed it on the side effects of my young and still growing body or the heat of the morning sun.

I took the bus number 42 downtown, after which I was to walk fifteen minutes to reach the small café where I worked for the summer. Being a waiter had not been my first choice, but they paid well enough. I could buy food and other things I needed, and cover half the rent while my parents helped with the other half. My apartment was small, with just one room, but I never complained.

I was halfway to the café when my mobile started ringing. The bad feeling in my gut was back, but I ignored it as I answered the call. My mother's voice tarried, but when she spoke, I immediately knew something was wrong.

"Are you at work?" she asked somewhat casually, but she couldn't hide the tremble in her voice.

"I'm on my way there. Mom, what's wrong?"

She was quiet for a moment and I heard her uneasy breathing. She sighed, and spoke the truth. "Aleksander... died this morning. I just got a call from the hospital. He'd fallen into a coma two hours ago, the doctors couldn't do anything. Half an hour ago, he..." Silence. "Darling, I'm so sorry."

I had stopped listening at the first sentence. My mother's words were distant, telling me something that could in no way be real. But a part of me, a really small part, was getting ready to accept this reality, because deep inside I'd known that Sasha would not recover.

Still, I cried.

I can't remember when we ended our call or how I suddenly found myself on my way back home. This warm summer's day may have started as any other, but it continued with me crying into a pillow, until the sun moved across the sky and a warm breeze brought with it grey clouds and light showers tapped against my old wood frame windows.

. .. ... .... .. .... ... .. .

I grew up on the Northern coast of Saaremaa. Due to sparse population I didn't know any other child my age well. But even so, I had always more things to do than I had time. From mapping the ditch - that I at the time thought was a river - winding through the forest, to collecting holed stones; from giving my own made up names to bugs, to entwining wreaths from various plants I could find. As a child, I was rarely bored. My father worked, while my mom stayed home with me, although I was too energetic for her to keep watch on me at all times. Still, I had only a few rules.

One of the few told me to never wander to the seaside alone. But one day, for some reason, I broke that rule. Maybe I did it unintentionally, perhaps by trying to catch a bug. I remember when I suddenly found myself looking through the thin grove, at the blue waves gently rolling toward the land. Completely forgetting my parents' warnings, I waddled on, thinking of all the seaside stones in which I had searched for those with a hole so many times before with my parents.

The stones made a familiar sound under my sandals. I stopped when I noticed a little boy with dark hair, crouching on the dried seaweed covered grass. He'd raised his head when he'd heard me coming and we stared at each other with shy curiosity. When he looked back down, I noticed small heaps of little stones on the flat rock before him. After a momentary hesitation I stepped forward, crouching on the other side of the rock.

The bigger heap had only the whitest of stones. They were polished in round shapes by the salty water and shined brightly under the sun. The stones in the smaller heap were black, or rather, as black as you could find them around here.

He picked up a couple of white ones and showed them to me. "They are dragon eggs."

Indeed, the round shapes made them look kind of like eggs. I moved the rest of the white stones around with my finger. "These don't have holes."

"Of course not. Eggs with holes are broken."

This also sounded logical.

I pointed to the dark stones. "What about those?"

The boy's gaze stayed on them for a minute as he pondered it. "Those are bad dragon eggs," he said then. "Demons come from them. But there are more good ones, so we don't have to worry."

We both looked up when we heard someone's footsteps. It was a young woman with beautiful long black hair. She seemed surprised as she came to sit beside us. "What's your name?" she asked, looking at me.

"Katrin," I said, feeling shy in the presence of an adult I didn't know.

"I'm Aleksander," the boy exclaimed then, standing up and pointing to the woman. "This is my mommy."

"Where do you live, Katrin?" the woman asked and I pointed toward the trees. On the other side of the gravel road was a pathway winding through the forest, leading to my home. Then the woman wanted to know if my parents were with me. Somehow she seemed to understand that I was not supposed to be here alone.

And so, my trip to the seaside that day ended with Aleksander and his mother accompanying me back home. During the short walk, the boy became very chatty, making my own shyness go away, too. He told me he lived near here, but at the same time a bit far, because he'd walked a long way with his mother to reach the sea. He also told me about his two black-and-white cats and their old family dog named Riki. By the time we got to my home, the two of us were friends. Mom was displeased that I'd gone off by myself, but she wasn't too angry with me because she began chatting with the other woman. They then stayed for longer and I showed Aleksander my holed stone collection.

Since that day, we were inseparable, always making our parents take us to each other's place. A few years later, when rules mattered even less, we made our own shortcut through the woods that connected our homes. We then met almost every day and with any weather.

. .. ... .... .. .... ... .. .

I can't imagine anyone saying otherwise, but I've never liked funerals.

Never before had I been to the funeral of someone I knew well, though. All my experiences came with the passings of distant relatives whom I didn't know personally, where I only went out of politeness. I could never wait for them to end.

This time it was a thousand times worse.

A week and a half later I was back in my tiny apartment. Wrapped up in a plaid blanket behind my desk, I sipped my slightly cooled down lemon tea. I was watching my favourite TV series from the laptop, although most of the time I was not even paying attention to it, when a notice at the bottom corner of my screen showed a message I'd received on Facebook. I paused the video, fearing yet another note of condolences from my adult relatives who had finally found a use for the Facebook accounts they created long ago.

It was Sandra, perhaps the only person I was still happy to talk to.

S: can't believe we only have half of our summer left, I don't wanna go to school :(

I gave a small smile at the screen. At times I felt like Sandra was trying a bit too much to keep my thoughts away from what happened, but I was thankful to her for that.

K: Tomorrow it's a quarter and a day after that you're already at school ;D

S: in a week we'll both be wrinkled and grey XD

K: You can be wrinkled alone :D I don't want to

S: XD

I knew Sandra since the beginning of high school. In the summer after ninth grade, Aleksander's mom had the opportunity to get a better job in Tallinn. They didn't sell their old house, but to leave a teenage son alone to look after it all, with no driving license and in a sparsely populated country area wasn't a suitable solution to either of them. So the two of them went to live with Sasha's aunt in the capital. Surprisingly, neither of my parents were against it when I said I wanted to move to Tallinn as well. I'm guessing they were so used to always seeing us together that they knew what this new situation meant for us. They paid for my small apartment on the condition that I'll find a job each summer and won't let my marks go down in the lack of parental supervision. The following autumn, me and Aleksander went to the same high school in Tallinn.

We never really were much alike. For example, we had many completely different interests. When I signed up for additional art classes in November of the first year, I did so alone. And that's when I met Sandra, who often forgot her supplies at home and took mine instead.

After a short moment the girl sent me a new message.

S: I actually wanted to ask if you want a burger? my parents went to see granny and told me to make my own food

K: Lazy :D

S: exactly! so you up for it?

I was about to answer when a red notice popped up on the messages' icon. I clicked on it and the menu showed me a new message from an account named Aasd Aa, as if they had pressed the first random letters on their keyboard when choosing a name. They also didn't have a profile picture. I looked at what they wrote.

A: i found

I stared at the words blankly for a moment. With no explanation and previous chat to accompany them, they seemed kind of eerie. I clicked their name, but the profile it showed me was empty. The account had just been created, there were no images, no posts and no information on the person.

I hesitated before answering.

K: Found what?

I waited, but nothing happened. I had completely forgot Sandra, who was now trying to get my attention again.

S: no? D: pls i need u

K: I'll come with you. I'm hungry too

S: yay!

At the same time, I received another reply.

A: this

And not a second later:

A: here

A: you

I felt a cold shiver when I saw that last word. The thought of someone making an account only to send a vague message like this to me was scary. I shook my head. It must have been someone's idea of a joke.

K: Who are you?

No answer.

I wrote Sandra.

K: You want to go now? I'm ready

She was, too, and after having decided on a place to meet up, I closed my laptop, not waiting for the answer of the other person. I told myself that it was nothing to worry about. But for something as insignificant as a couple word text message, it had succeeded in making me feel as if I was being watched.

As I stepped out of the apartment, I realized how much I wanted to get away from there.

. .. ... .... .. .... ... .. .

It began just before New Year, when Sasha complained about a nasty dizziness in the morning. It only got worse as night came, to the point where it triggered a vomiting reflex. It was all gone the next day, though, and we were naive enough to believe everything was fine, whatever it had been.

On the first of January, Sasha woke up to a headache that no pill could relieve. Since we had celebrated the New Year together, I knew well enough that alcohol could not be the cause. But he said the ache wasn't too bad and we even played some video games at his place. On the days that followed, he only complained about having a mild pulsating pain and despite my recommending he see a doctor, he thought he was fine.

Three days later, Sasha fainted.

His mother called the ambulance who took him to the hospital and took blood samples. But as they didn't find anything wrong with him, they let him go the following day. About a week went by. Sasha admitted a couple of times that he still felt an occasional weak headache. But it was then that things started to get weird.

He told me what his mother had told him one day. Sasha's mom had woken up in the middle of the night, not sure what had disturbed her sleep since everything was quiet. But then she'd noticed the door to her bedroom was open and there stood a dark figure. Scared, she'd spent a long minute without moving, simply staring at the shadow until her eyes adjusted and she recognized it as Aleksander. When she'd asked what was going on, Sasha had remained silent. He'd just stood there, with a blank expression, looking back at her. It had lasted a few minutes until her mom turned on the light and got out of bed, but then Sasha had simply turned around and gone back to sleep. He claimed not remembering any of it and he laughed as he told me the story. I found it strange, but nothing more. We both thought he had walked in his sleep, despite neither of us having memory of him doing it before.

I'd been used to him telling me everything, but he didn't tell me what took place a couple days later. I was over at his place again and was just returning from the restroom when I noticed small slits in the kitchen wall beside the fridge. I was sure those hadn't been there before and asked Sasha's mom about it, who was in the kitchen preparing food at the moment. She gave me a weird look that made me feel uneasy. But her words sent shivers down my back.

She'd found her son throwing kitchen knives at the wall the previous day. Sasha had put all the sharper knives on the table and was playing with them like a knife thrower in a circus.

Shocked, his mother had asked him what he was doing, to which Sasha had replied that he was killing the flies, as if it was a completely normal thing to do.

Returning to his room, I asked the boy why he hadn't told me about it. His only answer was: "Was I supposed to?" It didn't sound like him at all.

From that day on he never was quite himself anymore. He was aloof and forgetful. On some rare occasions he would not react at all when I tried to speak to him, instead staring at me with an empty expression. I was especially startled by his unexpected fits of rage at small things. He would scream or say something rude or sarcastic if he thought I did something wrong or when I didn't understand what he was saying. He would sneer when I accidentally hit my knee. Sometimes he apologized afterwards and he still called and sent me text messages all the time. But as time passed, the less we talked, and the more he started acting weird. I received the news with a few days' delay that Sasha's mother had taken him to a doctor. Then followed visits to a neurologist, psychologist, psychiatrist and other specialists. No one told me if the same changes I had noticed in Aleksander were enough for his mother to go through with all this, or if something else had happened in their home to scare her.

The last time I went to his place, more on my own initiative than because of being invited, I found him alone in his room. He was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, explaining the complex world building of the game World of Warcraft to exactly no one, answering questions that no one had asked. Someone had drawn a solid line across the floor, up the walls and over the ceiling in a black marker.

He finished his explanation and only then looked my way. I hadn't moved from my spot in the doorway. I was feeling sick in my stomach and had a lump in my throat. Something was wrong with Sasha and I had no idea, what. The boy pointed at the line on the floor, which divided the room in half, leaving the door on one side and his bed with him on it to the other.

"Step on the line, I cut your throat like a swine. If the line is crossed, I hang you on a post."

The hairs on my skin rose as all the blood left my face. I turned around and ran out as he laughed, loud and foreign and crazed. That laugh remained to haunt me a long time.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Author's Note:

Compared with my other two translated works, this one is brand new in both story and translation (my past attempts were kind of awful), and I'd love to get some feedback on it. This story will only have five chapters, so it should be quite a short read and I hope to get all parts translated as soon as possible.

You can also comment on my use of English. It would be much helpful :)

PS. *This story is taking place in an Eastern European country, Estonia (below Finland), if anyone was wondering.

**Since this has caused a lot of confusion - Sasha is Aleksander's nickname. It derives from Russia, where they sometimes add -sha to make something sound more like a Russian word or name. Sasha can be a nickname to Alexander, Aleksandr, Sander and other similar names. There was never a need to clarify in the Estonian version of this story, since people around here are used to it. Therefore it didn't show up in the translation either. Sorry again for the confusion ;)