Oasis

By Sergey Gerasimov

Silly Lera is a mentally retarded girl who lives in a magic oasis thirty thousand years in the future. All people around her have their souls regularly purged from weird or dark desires, which allegedly, makes the oasis the best place in the world to live. The whole life in the oasis is controlled by Maxwell's daemon who lets anyone out but lets only good people in. When the daemon decides that Lera's father can't return, she embarks on a dangerous quest to challenge the daemon's decision and save her dad's life. The only problem is the daemon has never been wrong before, so no one is going to believe a silly girl.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Feb 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781619503298

Sergey Gerasimov

Sergey Gerasimov lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. His stories written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Oceans of the Mind, and other venues. Upper Rubber Boot Books published his wildly surrealistic novel, "The Mask Game," in 2013. He is the author of several novels and more than a hundred short stories published in Russian. He also writes and translates poetry.

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Contents

Copyright Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

About the Author

Oasis

or Do Schrodinger’s Cats Age?

by

Sergey Gerasimov

All rights reserved

Copyright © January 31, 2018, Sergey Gerasimov

Cover Art Copyright © 2018, Charlotte Holley

Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

Lockhart, TX

www.gypsyshadow.com

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN: 978-1-61950-329-8

Published in the United States of America

First eBook Edition: February 20, 2018

Chapter 1

After people asked Gods to purge their souls and prayed, they usually spent a night in the central hall of the temple. It helped. I knew that for sure, because my soul had been purged a lot of times before, and after spending a night in the temple, I’d always felt as fresh and pure as a newborn baby. Each temple in the Oasis was colored differently. Ours, the yellow one, wasn’t frequently visited.

I had to clean it twice a week.

The yellow temple was too big to clean it in an ordinary way, especially for a clumsy girl like me, so the keeper of it, Allardicus Blide, had taught me the necessary spell to do it by magic. He was an old blind man who limped, but in the temple, he moved with precision and confidence that came from long years of practice.

So I said the cleaning spell, and hundreds of spirits thrummed in on their moth-wings, as a rippling cloud, ready to dust the whorls of delicate marble carvings, sweep the floors, and remove rubbish. I scolded some cleaning spirits that were less diligent or played hide-and seek instead of working. They buzzed angrily at me and flickered, swarming around.

The temple was big, so cleaning it was a difficult task and took a long time. It could be a little difficult, even with the spirit’s help. But the place where people come to purge their souls shouldn’t be dirty.

When the work was over, I noticed that the sun was already down, and felt sad. Not depressed, but nicely sad, if you know what I mean. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, smiled to the sun and imagined it was smiling back to me.

I can feel you’re sad about something, Silly Lera, Allardicus Blide said. He wasn’t entirely blind: I sometimes saw a boy inside him, and that boy still had eyes.

Everyone called me silly. I was okay with that. I’d become Silly Lera when I was ten. A silver-white snake had bitten my foot then. All colored snakes are magical, and their bites are mostly lethal. I’d survived, but since then, I hadn’t been growing up at all. Now, four years later, I was still a girl of ten, and retarded. I could sometimes be whacky, and clear thinking wasn’t easy for me. I saw ghosts, and the spirit of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came to me so often I was sometimes heartily tired of her. And I could see people inside people, like the boy in Allardicus Blide, for example.

So I peered at Allardicus and saw that his inner boy was looking at me. I winked at him.

The sunset is beautiful today, I said and added, so that he could have a bit of sunset in his heart too,