First 500: Vostok by Łukasz Drobnik
WELCOME TO THE FIRST 500: Vostok EDITION, WHERE WE AT VRAEYDA LITERARY SHARE THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF OUR PUBLISHED WORKS.
BELOW IS THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF Łukasz Drobnik’S cyber thriller SCI-FI NOVEL Vostok, CURRENTLY ON SALE AT THE VRAEYDA STORE AND WHEREVER NOVELS ARE SOLD.
1 Ceres.
On days like this, Poznań was the cruellest of cities. It wasn’t easy to tell whether this was because of the twelve degrees of frost, the sharp sunlight, the motionless ice-bound white river, the snow lying on the roofs or a peculiar combination of these elements, but one could clearly sense that the city was streaked with a strange kind of anxiety, that its foundations were filled with elusive energy. You could swear it was about to suddenly break in half, and its northern and southern parts intended (like jaws) to break away from the ground, rise towards each other with a violent movement and forcefully collide until Piątkowo’s blocks of flats (like teeth) fitted between the tenements of Wilda.
***
If you made, right along one of its walls, a longitudinal section through the pub Kisielice , on the left side of the colourful rectangle you would see a bar, the back of a bartender working behind the bar, in the background a wall painted in vividly coloured stripes, black-and-white artwork on the wall, and further towards the right end of the section: empty tables, chairs, sofas. The only clients in the pub visible from this perspective were a man and a woman, in their late twenties by the looks of it, who sat on a soft couch by the right edge of the rectangular section and talked, smoking tremendous amounts of cigarettes.
A cloud of grey smoke hung in the air, the woman talked about the seemingly never-ending winter, there hasn’t been a winter like this in years, about chronic lack of sleep, she looked at a window covered with a soaked poster depicting a deer and ran her fingers through her short, bright hair. When she spoke, she gesticulated wildly; while sitting, she constantly shifted; and when she was telling her companion about a preview in that gallery in Jeżyce district, about the stunning works she saw there, she almost rose from the sofa.
The man, on the other hand, mostly sat in silence, inhaling smoke, listening to his friend, smiling faintly, but when he spoke, he covered his mouth with his hand closed into a fist or massaged his thick, dark eyebrow with his thumb and stared into the distance, which made him look unsure of what he was saying.
The pub was slowly filling up. Each time the door to the street opened, a piercing chill came in, covering in a flash the length of the stairs leading to the basement and permeating through a thick curtain which separated the pub’s vestibule from the long, colourful room. The man called the woman Weronika, she addressed him as Wu. With the back of her hand, she stroked his few-day-old dark stubble and said it would be nice if Wu moved his shapely arse again and went to the bar for a beer. Or not, maybe she’ll drink some wine, but only white, or better: white wine with sparkling water. And ice.
Wu smiled, put out his cigarette, kissed Weronika on the forehead and rose from the table. She followed him with her eyes as he stepped deeper into the pub, and then looked with yearning at his almost two-metre-high body leaning against the counter while he chatted with the bartender he apparently knew.
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