Ten, hell, even five years ago, jogging up all those metal stairs wasn’t a problem.
Winded, though he’s made it to the top of the hill. He roots his broad, black-wing-tipped feet into the brown and grass-lumped dirt beneath him like a dark, age-gnarled tree.
Bent over, the flaps of his suit jacket unloosed from the buttons and hanging, his hands press into his laps, as his still surprisingly well-built body works on catching its breath – a little panicked. He realizes it. Mentally, he calms down. He wipes his forehead with a sleeve.
Upset. Angered. Not in denial, but greatly disappointed.
‘So, this is it…’ Mack thinks. ‘Age.’ “I’m finally getting used up,” he says quietly to himself now that his breathing has almost returned to normal. His heart slows; he no longer feels the pulses beating against the skin of his wrists and neck.
‘Shit…’
By degrees he straightens up.
He inhales the pleasingly cool air of the late and early season, deeply, once – and exhales. His eyes glaze over Kyiv’s heliotropic dusking. He sees the silver-blue sparkling of the river; he sees the bridge.
If he were to comment about himself at this very moment, he’d probably say he was more satisfied, rather than happy, to be alive. If you think about it, there’s a difference.
Below him, cake-layered rows of particolored residential buildings begin to disintegrate into the gray confection of urban sunset.
Quickly losing focus of the short city distance just beyond him, Mack’s eyes retreat closer to himself, to his own body, and the hill that now surrounds him.
He stands next to a giant wooden cross looming 20-odd feet above him. Because the cross is in the hilltop’s exact center, Mack’s stance next to it is necessarily off-center, a little awkward, a little uneven, a little unbalanced: the closer leg is bent somewhat, while the farther one is straightened along the hill’s downward slope.
“What’s the point of all this, Smith? Why make me come up here, just to meet you?”
There is a meaninglessness in this overlong and empty moment. What is it supposed to be filled with? What is the point?
The metal staircase is behind him, but Mack notes two ravine-like paths, one either side of him and each starting around 10 meters out from the cross, deeply carved into the hillside by hundreds of years of millions of feet tramping them up from Podil District and back down again.
“Well-chosen, Smith.” For there’s really no place up here that Mack can see where anyone could conceal himself, to spot him, to provide armed cover just in case he’d been maneuvered into a life-threatening situation. “Hmm, bad shooting; nowhere to do it from… not without being seen… exposed… shot…”
But that also means no position from where he could be threatened. “Except they could be snaking it on their bellies, next to the paths, and then just come right up the hill at the word, at the signal…”
How many are there? He can’t hear them stirring, breathing. There is a wind; it is breezy… and just a little colder than it is below – back down on the medieval cobbled, up-winding street – as it is wont to be on top of a hill; his sweated-through shirt sticks to his skin, and the feeling is no longer refreshing after his arduous, old man’s climb, but has now turned unpleasant.
But yes, they are certainly there…
Who is he fooling? Himself, of course, ‘so better just stop it.’ He knows he might be killed; knew it before even coming here; knew it, in fact, as soon as he got off the phone some hours earlier with John Smith.
And the same bears for being watched – he knew he’d be watched when he got here; knows he’s being watched right now: but by whom, how many, from where, and how; well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? ‘I’m not supposed to figure it out,’ yet it’s supposed to bug him, which it does.
“Why, Smith? So’s you can laugh at me. Wanted to see me break a sweat, bent over, breathing hard; therefore, to humiliate me? You, a much younger man, gone bad, now I know, rotten to the core, laughing… at my expense. Hope it’s worth it…”
Jack Step, a younger man than Mack; Mack thinks: ‘…wore himself down, and out, a long time ago. But now Step seems to have slipped into a permanent first gear and just keeps going anyway.’
“No doubt, stopping the drinking helped. And I hope he really did stop. Jack’s had enough hooch for five Steps. All that wasted… ability… the man… time… shit…”
“Dickerson, well, he’s a case study in self-destruction of another sort altogether…”
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. *
* We shan’t make too much of stolen verses, now, shall we, Mr. Eliot? The Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board – always working in our Readers’ best interests…
Filed by The Rook, October 1, 2025: Go ahead, go ahead, continue on! What are you afraid of? You think something’s ever going to happen to me? Caw!