Kindergarten

 Since childhood, I have been vacationing with my great-grandmother in another city every summer. There's an old kindergarten near her house. It's not abandoned, there are even kids playing in the yard during the day, but they were picked up by six in the evening, and since seven o'clock, no one has been there for sure.

When I was 14 years old, almost all my peers in this city (at least those around me) began to get involved in alcoholic beverages. There was a guy there, he was 19 years old at the time, but for some reason he always hung out with kids like us. Actually, he bought us beer and cigarettes. And one day we were sitting in the courtyard of this kindergarten having a beer and talking — me, three other guys, the same guy and a couple more girls, and I was kind of dating one of them at the time. Towards nightfall, everyone gradually dispersed, leaving me with the girl. We were sitting on a bench, and then I wanted to relieve myself. I told her: "I'll go around the corner and sit here, okay?" "Okay," she replied.

I walked away, did my job, and came back, but my girlfriend had disappeared. I look at a little boy standing to the side with his back to me, about four years old. I asked him, "Hey, did you see a girl sitting here?" And he suddenly turned around and ran into me at the speed of an athlete. I didn't see his face — I was scared and jumped aside, and he ran around the corner. I ran after him, and he turned another corner. And then I heard the sound of falling, ran up — and there on the ground were shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops, in general, his clothes. The boy himself is nowhere to be found. I was standing there, perplexed, and suddenly I felt someone grab me by the neck with a cold hand. He turned around like he'd been stung, but there was no one there...

I then ran around the kindergarten one more time to make sure that the boy and the girl were not nearby, and went home. The next day we met with a girl — she said that she was afraid to sit alone, she went to look for me around the corner, but did not find me and headed home...