Chapter 3
Episode 3keidti nėra jonų kur visa kada ir kur yra žodžių gramatika kol neisdiskutuots neatjausta neisdainuots tol Lietuva dar ne Dainava Lietuva mano siena gyvybinę Lietuva kaip upelis žalias Lietuva aš čia gyva
Klisto gyvenime uzrakint nevilties runkelių jėgos magnetizma kad spriciaj visas savižudybės ir patycias
The kitchen was a cage of white tiles and fluorescent hum. Klisto sat at the scarred wooden table, the weight of a November afternoon pressing against the window. Outside, the beet field stretched like a purple-green bruise under a sky the color of old tin. The air smelled of earth and iron. They had been sitting here for hours, the math textbook open to a page about linear gradients, but the numbers would not hold. They slid away, replaced by a dull ache that had taken up residence behind their ribs.
It had been three days since the last time they tried to explain. Three days since their father’s palm had landed hard on the table, rattling the salt shaker, and the word normal had been hurled like a stone. Why can’t you just be normal, Klisto? The teachers say you’re not trying. You’re not stupid—so why this? Klisto had not answered. They could not answer. The words that lived inside them did not come in neat rows. They came in waves, in colors, in the slow tilt of a shadow across a wall.
Now the silence was a locked room. Despair had sprouted like beetroots in the dark, pushing against the soil of their chest. Thoughts of ending it flickered—not as a plan, but as a gray static at the edge of every moment. They thought of the Golgotha their mother whispered about, that hill of skulls where nothing could be saved. Was that where they were headed? A private Golgotha where even Satan refused to go?
They pressed their palms flat against the table. The wood was cool. They closed their eyes.
And then they remembered the beets.
Last autumn, their grandmother had pulled them from the earth, their skins rough as old hands, bleeding a magenta so deep it looked like wine. Magnetinis laukas, she had said once, laughing, when Klisto asked why the beets seemed to glow in the evening light. The Earth’s magnetic field runs through them. That’s why they taste like iron. They remember where they came from.
Klisto opened their eyes. The beet field lay beyond the glass, patient and quiet. They stood, left the textbook behind, and walked outside.
The wind bit their cheeks. They knelt in the cold soil, the furrows sharp against their knees. They dug with their fingers until they found one—a beet, stubborn and alive. They pulled it out, the roots trailing like nerves. It was heavy in their hands, a globe of dark energy. They held it to their chest.
A strange warmth spread from the beet into their sternum, as if a current had been switched on. They thought of the gradient again, not as a line on a graph but as a living thing: the slow change from dark to light, from despair to something else. The beet was a gradient. The field was a gradient. The entire country of their childhood—the rivers, the songs, the language that tasted of honey and pine—was a gradient, a continuous field of meaning that could not be sliced into numbers.
They pressed the beet against their forehead. The soil smeared their skin. And they felt, for the first time in weeks, a tiny shift—like the first turn of a magnetic needle, a spin breaking free from lock.
Klisto whispered into the wind. Aš čia gyva. I am alive here.
The field did not answer. But the beet stayed warm in their hands, and the gradient between night and day, between death and life, became a path. They would walk it, slowly, one step at a time, with iron on their tongue and the Earth’s memory in their blood.