Once it was Sylva the typist, who had believed the wild rumors of the editorial office got hit by an Alazan missile and burned up. Seeing it was all bullshit, she felt happy and immediately decided to take home her slippers from the drawer in her desk in the pool's room because it’s easier for her to type when they are on, somehow, yes, you know.

Or it could be an outsider veteran graphomaniac (you would not make out the exact age thru his stubble but no less than eighty), who brought a parcel of “material” prepared by him for the paper dead for at least two months already. Which is not paper’s fault with all the newsstands locked up or destroyed.

Carried away by his creative efforts the writer failed to notice the trifle…

At too near explosions the building hopped, and the window panes spilled, with the parting tinkle, the glass fragments over the floor. I raked them with the broom borrowed from the toilet room in the end of the corridor, and helped Rashid to seal the gaping window frames with the vinyl tape from the House Manager’s keeps. The watchman was stinking with wine and bitching bitterly to his hammer about the janitors who had ceased coming to do their job.

I acted a deaf stone to his harangues because I had no desire to guess who he was hinting at…

Actually, Alazans produced more noise than effect. The missile could not pierce a stone wall 40 cm thick. Well, yes, the wall’s outer surface would go kaput, the inside turn all cracks and crevices but still and yet the missile lacked might to penetrate and sky in. No, yeah, if it hit in through the window or balcony door then, no arguing, the place is smashed into a useless trash for sure, all the partitions felled down. However, were it some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would turn it into a shitty heap of nothing.

But then, at night, when going after water, I could enjoy a mesmerizing opportunity to admire their beautiful flight—from purely aesthetic point of view—a lazy yellow comet falling from Shushi in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) welcomed from the ground with long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two to burst it up, across the flight course, useless, unable prevent its final crash midst the city, and all of it against the backdrop of the full moon – lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again! Vain try, of course, yet the surrealism of the picture simply awesome…

And after Stepanakert was left not only by the special troops of the Soviet Army but the primordial regiment as well, they unleashed bombardments by the missile installations GRAD, and those things you couldn’t play down – undeniably powerful beasts. The hit of just two rockets was enough to level the three-story wing in the City Council (where there had been the TV studio).

The blast left low hillocks of crushed masonry and some aggravating stink of burned rubber. I cannot definitely state whether it was the smell of the explosives or from the buried, smoldering TV equipment…

* * *

Bottle #8: ~ From the Alternate Angle ~

First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscillated here and there, and extremely dark but still a sliver gray-hued streaks retained their static position along the edges of actual blackness.

However, all that jump-n’-statics abated gradually, and dissolve, and died away substituted with solid jet-black impenetrability. The wider opened I my eyes, the more of aspic char-coaled dark oozed into them.