Rus Like Everyone Else by Bette Adriaanse

then, at your concentrated frown.

    THE WAKING HOUR

    Rus woke up because water was streaming down his back. “Woah,” he muttered. “Wuhuh?” He blinked and looked about him. He was outside. It was night. He was lying on the bench on the bridge in the night and the rain poured dark and heavy from the sky onto him. “Whaz? Whu?” Rus stammered. He had a stinging pain in his shoulder and a headache. He looked down at his body. His hands were cut and shaking; his stomach was going up and down with his quick, short breaths; his fur coat was soaking wet and the clothes he wore underneath stuck to his body, and those clothes were not his own. One of his shoes was strangely tied to his arm by the shoelaces.
    Rus sat up. He felt nauseated and cold. He remembered falling over and he remembered Francisco’s face and how he had gone with his tracksuit. And the house keys. And all the money. All the money.
    Rus swallowed. The only thing he had left was the letter that he had somehow kept with him throughout the night. It was sticking out of the chest pocket of the oversized brown suit he had on. The rain made streams inside the suit, running down his spine and down his arms. The Russian song Francisco had taught him played on repeat in his head:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Da! Da! Da! Kak dila em pektopah.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Trust ya njet, ya njet pasha. Njet ya. Wie da?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Tri werst dobri Katya.
    It was probably not even Russian, Rus thought, and he placed his head in his hands as if he was going to cry. Considering the situation, he expected the sobbing and the hyperventilating to start any minute now, but they didn’t come. It was very strange.
    I’m alone and abandoned, Rus thought, trying to lure the tears. I’ve lost my only friend—I’ve lost everything! And all I have is some brown suit that is too big for me.
    He smiled, accidentally.
    It’s raining and I can’t get into my house, he continued persistently. It will be hours until the sun comes up. I have to pay so much money. I’ve probably already got pneumonia.
    Rus smiled again. It was unstoppable, the smiling. Rus did not know why he was smiling. He hardly ever smiled, and it was weird that it should start now, now that he was so miserable (now that I might even die, Rus thought dramatically), but it did start. His face was pulled into a strange kind of grin.
    There was nothing to be done, and Rus laid his head back and smiled at the rain pouring on his face from the gray-yellow clouds that traveled below the moon in the sky.
    When his smiling was over the rain was over too. Rus stayed in the same position, his arms hanging down by the sides of his body, his mouth still half open. He looked up at the glass apartment building on the other side of the canal, where all the windows were dark except one. There was a girl with a blond ponytail sitting behind that window, and Rus could make out a silhouette of another person standing beside her. They waved at him.
    Rus raised his hand and waved back. He had a sudden sense that things would get better now, for a while at least, and he pulled the wet letter from his pocket and started walking in the direction of the sender.
    THE SECRETARY AT THE LAWYER’S HOUSE

    The secretary woke up in the lawyer’s house. She was lying under a fan in his bed. The fan was spinning. The lawyer was not in the bed, but he would probably be back in a minute. The secretary looked up at the fan. She tried to focus on one blade, following it around with her eyes, but each time it became a blurry circle. She slowed the fan down with the remote that was lying on the nightstand. There were a lot of other remotes on the nightstand as well, and they all had printed labels on them: DVD, LIGHT, TV, BED, LUXAFLEX, STEREO , and CAMERA . The fan made a buzzing sound as it slowed down. It wasn’t attached to the ceiling properly; not only did