Fairy Tale Fuss. Sergey Pyatenok

      The weather was hot, deadly hot. For a week already you could see a clear cloudless sky of rich blue color with a lonely sun, which either for boredom or for anger heated the dry earth.

      Day by day this sizzle repeated burning the grass in the fields and forcing all flesh to hide in the narrow shades of trees.

      The whole nature kept sorrowful calmness waiting for rain, which seemed to lose its way somewhere. Even the wind somehow unwillingly bent the yellow grass to the earth, and birds, usually restless, were silent.

      Herds of bunnies and ever-hungry ground squirrels fearlessly wandered the meadow filled with grasshoppers' rustle. They knew that in such a weather no predator would leave the midwood until dusk of the relentless sun. Even the dead bumpy road caused no concern to the animals.

      Suddenly, this sleepy silence was broken at the farthest hill by a huge swirl of dust, which was dragging along the road as a worm. First it moved silently without causing any anxiety to the animals. However, in a few minutes it started to clatter and roar loudly. After the animals noticed the frightful 'worm', they scattered. Many of them ran into the wood, others hid in the grass with fear.

      The 'worm' swooshed past the meadow and tailed away leaving clouds of grey dust. Its outgoing roar was herd for another few minutes. But even when the cloud of dust disappeared, and the roadside dust settled, frightened animals could not get back to their affairs for a rather long time.

      A silly cuckoo was so frightened that forgot its only phrase, and an old squirrel, after it saw the 'worm', even fell off the tree.

      Many animals saw this monster, but none of them knew that it was just a small car with wheels, which sank in and out of the road holes and bumps each after each creating the frightening noise. And only an elderly magpie could figure it out. Daydreaming, it was playing at the road with a square of a colored glass and noticed the 'worm' only at the moment it reached it. The poor magpie was nailed against the windshield, and for several seconds it watched the passengers of the car. Then the car hopped on the next pit and the magpie was brushed away. The whirlwind took it up, and from there the bird, tumbled and without several feathers, flew to tell the whole wood what had happened to it.

      Traveling in the car were the Tarasovs family comprising, like many others, two parents and two children. Behind the wheel was, as always, the head of the family, Alexandr Nikolaevich, a mechanic at Vestnik city plant.

      An eyesome woman sitting next to him read a women's magazine. This was Tatiana Anatolievna, a journalist of a local paper and the mother of the two little ruffians sitting on the back seat.

      "Mommy, what happened to that birdie?" a little girl Masha asked combing the hair of her red-haired doll. Masha was wearing a green print dress, and she was only six, despite that for others she often looked a couple of years older for her tallness.

      "She is OK, baby," Tatiana Anatolievna told. "I saw it fly into the wood wholesome and alive."

      "Mommy, do we have a long time to go?" the girl asked another question. "Look, my Dasha is already very tired, she wants to go to bed and sleep."

      "I don't know, Mashenka," Tatiana Anatolievna threw a reproachful look at her husband. "Our daddy decided to nick in and turned to this road. I suppose, he know where are we going. Ask him!"

      Masha at once glued to the shoulder of the second adult and cheeped:

      "Daddy, when will we arrive?"

      "Very soon, honey!" Alexandr Nikolaevich replied with a straight face without abstracting from the road. "We are almost there! If not round the first corner, then round the second or… er… the third one we'll see Tarakanovka village, and there it's no distance to grandma."

      In very deed, that straight face was just a mask hiding the real mood of Masha's father. He almost had no belief in his own words, and at that time he even wanted to be in his daughter's shoes because Masha did not have to be responsible for anything except for broken toys and books spoilt with patterns. She did not have to look for a small village among those innumerable dead rods, she could just sit on the back seat or sleep.

      At that moment Alexandr Nikolaevich wanted to believe that they were keeping the right course. But the time passed by, yellow meadows were left behind, but grandma's village did not still appear and the road was going into the deep wild forest.

      "I told you we'd better took a train," Tatiana Anatolievna started reproaching her husband. "But you decided to go by this wreck. I don't know why, but I have the feeling that we got lost."

      "We are not lost," the father objected. "We are keeping the right course."

      "Mommy, please, tell Dasha a fairy tale," Masha asked, reclined on the seat and offhandedly laid her legs on her brother, who was trying at least to take a zizz. "Only a nice and kind one! About the Father Frost and the Snow Maiden!"

      "Who told you that the old Father Frost is kind?" Vanya, who left his attempts to have a sleep, opposed to his little sister. "He freezes birdies, bunnies, children and then eats them. He is an ordinary mean old man!"

      "You're lying, lying! He is good, he brings presents to all children!" Masha got angry.

      "No, I'm not. He is mean!" the boy continued.

      All of a sudden, the unexpected anger of the little girl turned into soreness. Her eyes filled with tears, then Masha burst into sob.

      "Mommy," she cheeped sobbing "Tell him that the Father Frost is good, isn't he?"

      "Surely, he is! Calm down, dear, Vanya's just joking! He is angry that he has grown up, and the Father Frost will not bring him presents anymore. Besides, he must be willing to stop visiting his friends in the evenings and stop playing the computer. He must be willing to spend not only the weekend, but the whole summer in his grandma's village. He has a lot of friends there, haven't you, Vanya?" Tatiana Anatolievna told quietly soothing her daughter.

      She had already got used to often quarrels of her children, and she knew how to quiet down her son, who almost always started the quarrels.

      "Surely, I'm joking!" the boy gasped and saddened.

      He did remember the last summer holidays at his grandma's, when he every day made only troubles: he had constantly to fight with local boys, who disliked him in everything, starting from the fact that he was urban and up to his clothes.

      The most hurtful thing was that he nearly always lost the fights. It was not that he was weak or could not give a good hit. The country boys often attacked him all at once, and it is always difficult to win a crowd. However, over a number of such fights, Vanya quickly found a salvation: as soon as he saw a crowd of bullies, he ran away.

      What is more, he had to run a lot and quickly – with bread from the store, with products bought at the market, and once even with a water melon. Once, only in trunks, he hardly managed to flee away from the village pond, when the bullies came there. Each time, walking in the village, Vanya had to keep his eyes open.

      Yet, it turned out that those holidays also had pluses. The thing is that when the boy returned from the village at the end of summer, in school he instantly turned from a middle-level runner in his class into the fastest and almost invincible one.

      Another reason, why he did not want to stay at his grandma's, is that he had long time ago arranged a meeting in a number of days with Anya, who Vanya thought to be the coolest girl in school! So, if he would stay in the village, how he would meet with her?!

      Besides, a new computer game was waiting for him at home. Ivan had already bet Leshka, his deskmate in school, that he would pass the game faster than his friend. The boy did not want to go down without a fight.

      His mother, surely, knew all