In Zhytomyr autumn came quietly. Cautiously, as if it was afraid to offend the summer, which was finally announced and began to entice us with warm weather. A few days ago, during a brief rest in a small village on the seafront, I remembered the old story of one man about his feelings of autumn. It called itself Smoke, but apparently it was a fictitious name. Poetry of the artistic word was enchanted, remembered for a long time

Autumn came …
Not far from the waves the sea, all summer, all spring and summer ….
The shore was flat, sandy, it rushed with small pebbles, throwing them with the last transparent wave and grabbing back the first reverse.
It seemed strange: what the sea is fighting like? And where are the waves coming from, new and new – without end?
Nobody thought about this, until now, on July 22, the sea had reached its own: waves threw it on the shore. Perhaps they threw it gradually, shreds, all summer, all spring and summer, but nobody knew about it.
Now everything became clear: the shadow from a boat, plunged into sand, fell not at the place where a week ago. In the light hot air a cock shouted, but no longer reminded of childhood. The cyclist stopped on a dusty road, lifting his head, sweaty, his neck fluttering like a sparrow breeze.
It was Autumn … The waves eventually pulled it out of the middle of the ocean and thrown it to shore.
It happened on July 22, about thirteen and a half minutes. It has come to pass …
Autumn rolled to the sand, quiet rustle ran along it, exchanging traces of human legs, twice stumbled, and clutching for the shaft and rushed to the village. That’s when a cried old man immediately shouted. Beating around a huge sunflower, like a woman under her shoulders, shaggy bee …
Autumn was hidden, waiting in very secretive places: in the forest, under the leaves of the fall, in rocks in the field, where the rollers of the broken bottle lay in the sudden change of the birds’ flight. And when the poet opened his notebook, to write a new rhyme, he found between the autumn leaves, as if someone had dried a flower there. Poetry words became heavy, like the bell of the church bell, or as a strike paddle on the water of the night lake.
By the evening She made it a lot! Suffice it to say that on that very same day a large large, like an unprovoked teal of the girl, was dewed out. Some local newspapers even wrote about this …
Well, in the evening I met her!
You see, do not hide in the evening, do not have to do this in the evening! It divides the sun and determines every place, and at the same time all the only …
This evening I met her – the next Autumn!
Serhii Sobchuk, Member of the National Union of Local History of Ukraine
Anna Sobchuk, co-author

Translated by Aliona Matushevich