Vasilich, Dark Premonitions

by Boris Bakhmetyev

  As the year drew to a close, Cactus Vasilich was increasingly overcome by vague, dark premonitions. And it wasn’t due to just the shortening of daylight hours and the lack of sunlight.

  Vasilich was worried about his own fate. How much longer would he continue to «reign» in the office of the top executive during the latter’s absence? And what if the entire office were to be shut down altogether? Then all his immense influence and authority among the populace would vanish into thin air. Who would have any use for him then?

  In the past, when the top executive was still healthy and coming to work, he had promised Vasilich that in some unforeseen emergency, he would find him a place in the cactus greenhouse at the Apothecary Garden — perhaps even as chairman. But where were those promises now? With the executive absent and his situation uncertain…

  On top of that, Iskrina Romanovna, the top executive’s secretary and Vasilich’s trusted confidante, had added further cause for alarm. She had been watering his pot with a bottle of «Saint Spring» mineral water from the reception area once a week, but now she brought troubling news. According to what she had overheard in conversations among the executive’s deputies, the doctors’ prognosis for Evgeny Vasilyevich — the remarkable office employee whose spirit had inhabited the cactus — was extremely bleak. His brain showed no signs of activity, and the doctors were considering disconnecting him from life support. For now, they were merely trying to track down his relatives, who were believed to be somewhere in Belarus, in order to obtain their legal consent.

  All in all, Vasilich grew increasingly despondent. He kept imagining the magical, melancholic music from the ballet "Swan Lake". Despite his prickly exterior, Vasilich possessed a delicate, poetic soul. He felt like the dying Prince Siegfried from the very first, ill-fated version of "Swan Lake", in which everyone dies in the end…

November 16, 2025