For my parents
1
A wind like this can blow your socks off, even if there are shoes on them. The wind rolls along the grass, and the grass here is up to the person's neck, and if a person squats down no one will find him, including himself. In the sky, everything flutters, too, but dark-blue and light-blue. Unlike the grass, everything runs for real up there yet it doesn't all run away because there is a lot of everything in the sky that can just run.
Under Basil there's a tame fire-red buffalo. Its wool runs on it, too, from its tail to its neck but like the grass it doesn't run away. Basil and the buffalo are the best of friends, Basil presses his cheek to its warm dusty wool now and then, and the buffalo knowingly looks at him askance. Basil doesn't know how come they are together, and he is not sure every minute that he should really know it. For the reason that Basil rides it, the buffalo can do everything and understands everything. When they are together, it is much more than one plus one. It is not an addition table at all; it's something much more useful and important. Just to ride like this for a very, very long time, and not to reach any destination. This way, his friendship with the buffalo will never end.
2
There is a lake in northern woods, and on its bank, there is a lodge. A forest warden lives there all the time. As a New Year approaches, the warden has more things to do, and at the New Year's Eve night he leaves on a business trip. At that time, a carefully picked out child is usually brought to his lodge. This child is picked, first, from a bunch of other kids, and second, from the parents. Just for a few days. The parents worry, of course, but they are proud, for their child is supposed to save the world that night.
The thing is this. It so happened that there is still the world only because on New Year's Eve a picked out child, a new one each time, stays alone in the forest warden's lodge and saves the world. How this child manages to do it no one knows. When television interviews them later and asks, what exactly they did, the children answer, Nothing special. Well, they ate a pie of course, that the forest warden left them, and they fed squirrels… that is, first, they woke them up, and then fed them… and they rolled in the snow some… well, and did other stuff, too, forget what. In other words, adults still don't understand how it happens but they don't want to risk and not bring their children to the lodge in the woods. The First of January may never come otherwise.
This year, Basil went there.
3
There's a sideboard in the sand, very tall, four—no, five heads taller than Basil. The sideboard is empty, or it seems so from below, apart from its top shelf. On the top shelf there sits an old beautiful mug. It doesn't have any flowers on it, no golden rim, it is a real enameled mug, to be held with both hands. Basil needs to get this mug because crabs scheme under stones, and their chief has to be caught and put into the mug until morning.
Basil is perplexed. If he climbs the sideboard as he is he may fall down, and then that's all she wrote. To pick the chief with bare hands is dangerous, he might be armed. The evening is falling, and soon you won't be able to see crabs at all, and they talk without making any sound. Deep in thought, Basil strays from considering the mug and the sideboard, and looks at the sea—and he realizes that crabs are small fry. The sideboard disappears at once, and the mug can be picked up from the sand just like that, although Basil doesn't need it anymore. Somewhere far, far away, on top of a tall mountain, over a pink precipice covered with fir trees, the sideboard will appear again, and its top shelf will have a basket, very handy to pick squirrel's bread into.
4
One Very Good wizard had his guardian angel all chocolate. This Very Good wizard did good deeds, there was no stopping him, and the angel broke pieces off his own coat and rewarded the Very Good wizard. The coat replenished at once.
One Simply Good wizard had his guardian angel all usual who didn't need to do anything special so from nothing to do he became a philosopher.
One Not So Good wizard had a neurasthenic guardian angel who visited a therapist.
One Evil wizard had a toad for his guardian angel.
Basil, they say, needs a protection fuse angel, and this is why it's a phoenix bird. Basil often sees it with his own eyes on the other side of his neighbors' fence.
5
One not very busy railroad in the mountains has two stations, quite near each other. When a steam engine arrives at one, the train's tail car leaves the platform of the previous station no further than thirty railway ties. Or thirty-two. So passengers jump from the platform, walk on those few ties, climb on the step of the last car and proceed in a single file through the rest of the cars while the engine just stands and waits for them. The passengers are requested not to linger in the dining car with cakes, but to avoid this they'd have to reroute through the roof. Although the dining car has special guard rods installed on its roof, and there are spiderworts planted in iron buckets welded to it just for the beauty of them, passengers are simply lazy to climb there, especially when it rains, or when they are full-bodied or too adult. Or, as it is often a case, they are full-bodied, and too adult, and boring to boot, all at once.
Basil sits on the platform where the head of the train has arrived. Basil was the fastest walker through train cars, and he bought only one cake—and lost it in a car platform irretrievably—so now he is waiting for when the train stops standing and turns back into a real train*.
<…>