Chapter 4
Episode 4rabina vabkuka numeta uo kope ku legenda gyvuos per am,zinias
The summer I turned twelve, the world beyond our kitchen window became a place of whispered rumors. Old Mrs. Kavaliauskienė, who lived three houses down and grew the most magnificent peonies, claimed she saw a stork carrying a snake in its beak, flying low over the birch grove. My mother, ever the pragmatist, dismissed it as a trick of the light, a shadow from the old water tower. But I believed Mrs. Kavaliauskienė. I had to. Because the stork, in our part of the world, was a guardian. And the snake, well, the snake was everything we were trying to keep out.
My rose-tinted glasses were gone by then, lost in a move or forgotten on a bus, but their memory lingered. I saw the world now in its true, sharp colors: the peeling paint on our apartment door, the worried crease between my father’s brows, the way my mother’s hands trembled when she counted the bills. The harshness was back, and it was louder than ever.
It was during this time that my father, a man of few words and even fewer smiles, brought home a book. It wasn’t a novel or a history tome. It was a thick, dog-eared manual on programming, its cover a faded, pixelated landscape of some forgotten video game. He placed it on the kitchen table, next to the borscht, and looked at me with an intensity I rarely saw.
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