It has since become gray, and yellowish from the other side, toward the back. Three stories high, facing the highway, it too has a backyard-a narrow rectangle cordoned off by chicken wire.

It stands alone, as the other houses shun it, and it doesn’t look like a tooth, since it is not struggling upward. It is old, closer in age to the dumps, the graveyards of its contemporaries. In the no-man’s-land between the two worlds-that of the teeth and that of the dumps-is the House. The piles of debris from the houses already knocked down, nesting grounds for rats and stray dogs, are much more appealing to the young Combers than the empty spaces between the teeth. In places where they haven’t sprouted yet, there are the fenced vacant lots. They stare with many eyes and they all look just the same. The long buildings of the projects here are arranged in jagged rows, with empty cement squares between them-the intended playgrounds for the young Combers. PHEASANT CRYBABY IS NOT THE SAME PERSON AS CRYBABY OF THE “PAST” EPISODES, WHO BECAME HORSE SMOKER ON APHIDS AND UNTAMED BULL TERRIERS SMOKER ON MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN BLACK SHEEPīOOK TWO EIGHT DAYS IN THE LIFE OF JACKAL SMOKER OF BATS, DRAGONS, AND BASILISK EGGSHELLS SMOKER OF CONCRETE AND THE INEFFABLE PROPERTIES OF MIRRORS SMOKER ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF TRAINING FOOTWEAR First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.Īmazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of, Inc., or its affiliates. Translated from Russian by Yuri Machkasov. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Translation copyright © 2017 Yuri Machkasov Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

The grey house mariam petrosyan