Black

The house is on the outskirts of the city. In a place called Rascheski. Long multi-story buildings here are built in jagged rows with square concrete courtyards in between — the supposed playgrounds of young "rascheschniki." The teeth are white, many-eyed, and similar to each other. Where they have not yet grown, there are empty lots surrounded by fences. The dust of demolished houses, the nests of rats and stray dogs are much more interesting to the young "rascheschniki" than their own courtyards — the intervals between the teeth.
On neutral territory between two worlds — the battlements and the wastelands — stands the House. They call it the Gray House. It is old and closer in age to the wastelands — the burial places of its peers. It is lonely — the other houses avoid it — and does not look like a battlement because it does not stretch upward. It has three floors, the façade faces the highway, it also has a yard — a long rectangle surrounded by a net. The House is gray in front and painted in bright colors on the inside, the yard side. Here, its walls are decorated with drawings of butterflies the size of small airplanes, elephants with dragonfly wings, flowers with big eyes, mandalas and solar disks. All this from the yard. The façade is bare and gloomy, as it should be.
The Gray House is not liked. No one will say it out loud, but the people of Combs would rather it not be around. They would rather it not be there at all. The exterior did not like the house, and the brownies did not like the exterior.

Black was sitting in a coffee pot reading a book. He forgot his glasses, which is why he was squinting slightly as he read the book. His blue eyes ran along the lines, his light hair stuck out like a hedgehog, and his pumped-up arms were visible from under his sleeveless T-shirt, which was a slightly unusual picture for the Internet. Noticing someone's figure approaching him, the guy looked up from the pages of the book.

• Do you need something?

Black asked, looking at the approaching figure with his peripheral vision, without looking up from his book.