Рњрѕр»с‡р°с‚ Р”рѕрјр° (molchat Doma) - Рўсѓрґрѕрѕ (sudno) 〈100% VALIDATED〉

He picked up a small cassette player and pressed play. The drum machine kicked in first—stiff, mechanical, relentless. Then came the bass, a deep, driving throb that felt like walking through thick mud. When the vocals drifted in, low and detached, they sounded like a man singing from the bottom of a well.

The radiator hissed, a pathetic attempt to fight the creeping frost. Egor stood up and walked to the mirror. His reflection was a ghost—pale skin, dark circles, eyes that had seen too many identical sunsets over the same concrete horizon. He picked up a small cassette player and pressed play

The room was the color of a bruised sky. Egor sat on the edge of a bed that felt like it was made of damp cardboard. Above him, a single lightbulb flickered with the rhythm of a dying heart, casting long, jittery shadows against the peeling floral wallpaper. When the vocals drifted in, low and detached,

He reached for a glass of lukewarm tea, but his hand stopped. On the table lay a small, white pill and a copy of a poem by Boris Ryzhy. He knew the lines by heart now. Living is difficult and expensive, but dying is easy and free. The irony was the only thing that made him smile lately, a sharp, jagged twitch of the lips. His reflection was a ghost—pale skin, dark circles,

The music didn't make him feel better, but it made the emptiness feel like a place he could inhabit. It was the sound of the hallways he walked, the stale bread he ate, and the silence of the people he passed in the street.

Outside the window, the Belarusian winter was a wall of gray. The brutalist apartment blocks stood like giant tombstones in the fog, indifferent and cold. Somewhere in the distance, a tram screeched against rusted metal tracks—a sound that matched the synth-line humming in Egor’s head.