Waking up on Monday morning after a serene night’s sleep, the programmer Konstantin discovered he had turned into an elven princess.
The metamorphosis threw him off and for a short while made him doubt his own sanity. Konstantin examined himself in the mirror with extraordinary thoroughness and attention, and then reinforced the visual inspection with a tactile one. After that he smoked on the balcony for a long time, thoughtfully and with a slight edge, tugging at his pointed ear.
Konstantin was in turmoil, and yet, in some mysterious way, he also felt an unhealthy kind of exhilaration; as though certain invisible shackles had fallen away – shackles that for years had weighed down his soul and forced him to squander himself on petty matters, even though somewhere in the back of his mind a ringing sense persisted that he had been born for something immeasurably greater, more significant. In the end, it wasn’t as if he terribly missed his thirty-five-year-old body. Quite possibly, minus the beard, such an exchange might even work out in his favor.
A work call was scheduled for twelve. With difficulty he combed his curly, endlessly long golden hair, and only barely managed to stuff his chest into a T-shirt. He joined the conference already bracing himself to answer awkward questions. But there were no questions – except later a colleague messaged him privately asking for the link to the site where you could score such cool skins.
That evening Konstantin went to the supermarket for groceries. An oversized puffer jacket and knee-deep snowdrifts reliably concealed his elven beauty. Outside, everything was as before: gray facades, stray dogs. The only hint of anything magical was a faded unicorn on a half-torn banner for a local tire shop. After paying at the register for a pack of frozen cherry dumplings, Konstantin – secretly hoping he’d somehow, by some miracle, ended up in a fairy tale – understood for good that he hadn’t, and grew dejected.
Having come up with nothing better, he texted his buddy Boris, dryly outlined the situation, and suggested they crush a couple beers in an hour or two. Boris didn’t believe him; Konstantin had to take a full-body selfie, and then agree to a video call.
When he got to the bar, Boris was already there – moreover, with freshly washed hair and a new T-shirt, which even made Konstantin a little wary. They sat there for a long time and in earnest; went over every movie and video game about elf girls they could remember, and still couldn’t come to any sort of definite conclusion. After the third liter Boris started looking at Konstantin with a kind of predatory interest, and Konstantin understood it was time to wrap things up before their friendship took a fatal hit.
“Why you so sad, beauty? Someone offend you?” the taxi driver asked.
Konstantin, sulking in the back seat, shrugged his fragile shoulders. The gesture came out so graceful it made him want to cry.
“I’m not sure I want to be a princess,” he said honestly. “Why do I need this? What’s the point?”
“If there is princess,” the driver said, “then somewhere there must be prince. Eh, I wouldn’t refuse a prince. Like, for example, Ryan Gosling.”
He breathed in dreamily and even clicked his tongue.
“A prince. And my own kingdom. And a king and a queen,” Konstantin thought.
Obeying the fresh thought, he asked the driver to change the route.
Woken by the late call, his mother fumbled with the keys for a long time.
“One moment! Kostya, is that you…? Oh.”
“Hi, Mom,” Konstantin said.
She froze in the doorway, peering at her son; then sighed heavily and stepped back, letting him into the apartment. She led him to the kitchen, put the kettle on, went to the bathroom for a comb, and, ignoring Konstantin’s weak protests, began brushing his hair.
“We should probably get you dressed properly,” she said.
“This is the moment you’re supposed to say something like, ‘You know, son, I’ve always wanted to tell you…,’” Konstantin couldn’t help himself.
“You know, I’ve always wanted to tell you…,” Mom obediently said. “…that I wanted to name you Yuliy. Here – if you were Yulya right now.”
“Yeah. Or Yuliariel. So Dad wasn’t an elf?”
“He was a bastard.”
They had dinner, talked about various insignificant things. Konstantin started getting ready to go home.
“They say on TV the world has started changing very fast – faster than it’s ever changed,” Mom told him at the door. “Constant cataclysms. There was the pandemic, then that horrible war. And now new changes, probably.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” Konstantin asked.
“Maybe nothing? It’s us who will have to do something. And you’ve already done everything.”
Getting out of the taxi, Konstantin didn’t go to his building, but headed to the playground instead; his sharpened vision let him make out the stars even through the cloudy murk that veiled the night sky. Dozens of thoughts danced in his head, his heart hammered like it did before a date. His feet, in the shoes his mother had given him, were freezing mercilessly. And then Konstantin realized that it wasn’t, after all, everything. That he still had to do something else.
He had to trudge through snowdrifts for a couple blocks.
“Finally,” the unicorn said unwelcomingly. “I’ve been waiting forever.”
Tossing its muzzle, it stepped down from the banner and, with disgust, set its hooves in the filthy snow.
“Let’s go, then.”
“Wait.”
Konstantin felt around in the pocket of his puffer jacket for a crumpled pack, and inside it – the last cigarette; rolled it between his fingers, blew into the filter. The unicorn shot him a condemning look.
“You should quit that crap. My friend died that way.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Konstantin said.
Wherever they were headed, riding in heels was inconvenient, and he took off the shoes before climbing into the saddle.
