Usually you lose your dearest people long before their death.

It’s Okay,” he answered and smiled ironically. “I should be grateful to the knife that’s curing me for being so sharp.

They are just a strange whim, kink of nature, deviation that doesn’t seem to exist but is encountered every day.

Indeed, people are equal only in one thing: each of us is gifted a life, other differences are only notional; and what to do with one’s own life is at everyone’s discretion. The time has come to bestow upon us the most exalted gifts of serenity and joy. We silently trudged back upstairs. I fancied that I heard steps creaking and groaning throughout the entire stairway as if hundreds of invisible feet were stepping on them along with us. We were still alive but among the ghosts already.

You have always understood and accepted my most genuine, most intimate impulses and responded to them with surprising accuracy. I wish all people turned into such mirrors for each other.

And now, it turns out that our mother’s name means benevolence and generosity to people as objects of love! This is both a unique and beautiful name, Charity. “It was one of life’s cruel ironies,” I thought, “that a midwife, or whoever filled in the documents, must have known our mom’s name. I suppose she had a lot of fun naming us Hope and Faith! Or, on the contrary, she sympathized.

Would he as well neglect the perishing person, wouldn’t he help to get up, would he turn away? I think I know the answer is obvious. He was flying so high above each of us that after falling down he got below everybody else. To be precise, he was simply knocked down. And we, none of us, just did nothing. Thus, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, the best of us were eliminated in order to let others decay.

I clearly saw us from outside, like in a picture: we are not people, we are a road sign warning: “Stop and thank luck because such fate didn’t befall you as befell us, and only then keep going your way”.

They always act this way: push those who are falling.

We always humble ourselves before bastards - it has already become a tradition.