CLOUDLET

TSVETAN: You are one song to fly to the stars! (starts putting the chips back into the backgammon case) Are we starting the Tapa or it is late?

KOSTA: Not too late. Tsranka had not yet begun to sweep, we have time. Tsranka, are you going to chase us with a broom already?

TSRANKA: Come on, how would I sweep you away, such mighty handsome heroes! Go on, finish this tapa game, but it is your last!

TSVETAN: What do you mean, our last? See, tomorrow we get up, cut the grass, feed the sheep and sit to play. Until I beat him three times in a row we are not getting up!

KOSTA: When was the last time you beat me three times in a row, do you dare tell us? Well, dare you may, but do you remember?

TSVETAN: Get lost, I am not that senile, I remember it as if it was yesterday when we met in the trenches at the front line! Lice, hunger, we could not sleep and rolled the dices all night, but in the morning I beat you with a double same as the one you stole under my nose five minutes ago.

KOSTA: Ha, so you remember even if you are an year older than me, even more than a year!

TSVETAN: I remember. I remember that your commander then came and said that even if we were birds, we would not get out alive as that Nicephorus at Varbitsa that was besieged in the ravine. Yet you and I both got out in the fog. It held just long enough for us get out, as though for us it has descended.

TSRANKA: And so it was.

KOSTA: Hm, you were not yet born Tsranka! How would you know what was what, even if you are an old woman?

TSRANKA: What I know, I know. Do you know why Cloudlet is called Cloudlet and not ThreeHuts or say Fireflyville?

KOSTA: So the people decided so they named it. And it is anyway bigger than ThreeHuts, that one is a hamlet if I have seen one.

TSVETAN: Fireflyville is a better match. Especially now, when we don’t have electricity, it is exactly Fireflyville.

TSRANKA: Have you ever thought why our village’s chapel is down at the road and not at the cemetery above the village, as in all other villages? Why would you think of such things - they are not what man thinks. The chapel was built by women and dedicated to one. Once upon a time my grandmother told me the men were still abroad or with the herds, but gone, only women and children were left. The children were playing up in the high hills from there one can almost see the road to the big road. A horde started on the road to the village, bad men. The children quickly sent the fastest one of them down to warn the women to run. Sure enough, one of young women was in labor at that time, and she prayed to Mary, said, "Holy Mother, your Son, He ascended you straightway to Heaven in a cloud, if you no longer need this cloud, cover us with it for the bad men neither to see nor to hear us! " She barely crossed herself and a cloud dropped obscuring the village so th