Писатель Илья Розенфельд

 Next stop: Life and Death . The tabooest topic. We’re afraid of Death, even though it’s Death that gives Life its meaning. Without a deadline, no project (including life) would ever get finished. Let’s pull the Grim Reaper’s hood off and see who’s hiding under there. Spoiler: not a skeleton—an exhausted bureaucrat. The Legend of Life and Death (The Bureaucracy of Eternity) Doctors say: “Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% fatality rate.” True. We’re all patients in a hospice called “Earth.” Yet we act like we’re going to live forever. We take out thirty-year mortgages, buy anti-wrinkle cream, and grind out abs—though the worms couldn’t care less whether we’ve got a six-pack or not. Death isn’t a villain. Death is a cleaner. Picture a party that goes on forever. The guests are drunk, the dishes are smashed, the music is blaring, everyone’s puking, and nobody leaves. Death is a kind woman with a mop who turns the music off, cracks the windows, and says, ...

As long as he could remember, he had suffered from pain. He did not know his father—a drug addict who conceived him high—and so life was something incomplete, flawed, for him from the very beginning. His mother could not bear either her own suffering or her son's, and at the age of five, she admitted him to the hospital.  That first time the little boy found himself within the state walls, he heard a phrase from a doctor that initially seemed strange to him: "If you wake up and nothing hurts, it means you're dead." After some time, his mother took him back. But soon he was admitted to the hospital again, and that day was the last time he saw his mother. Since then, he remained there, and the hospital became his world. He matured quickly, ahead of his years. In the hospital corridors, amidst the smell of iodine and quiet moans, he saw his life in a different light. He watched his ward neighbors—those who died with dignity and silence, and those who cursed the heavens...

November 12th. This must be a hallucination. Otherwise, I cannot explain what I saw today at the "Progress" cafe. I was sitting at my table. At the next one, an agitated woman was scolding a waiter. Her blouse and the tablecloth were stained with coffee. On the floor—a puddle and ceramic shards. In the center of this chaos sat that man. I had seen him before, but hadn't paid attention. And then something unimaginable began: the woman fell silent mid-word. The shards on the floor vibrated, flew up, and, fitting together perfectly in the air, "grew together" into a cup. Drops from the tablecloth and the woman's blouse flew upwards and poured into this flying cup, which a second later gently set down on the man's table, whole and steaming. The woman, now perfectly dry, calmly opened the menu. And He... He picked up this full cup of " Americano ," brought it to his mouth, and... filled it. I saw the liquid level rise in his mouth and drop in the...