Dina Climatiano

Floreasca Portal

It was past 11PM when I got home from work.

“I’m sorry girl, I got held up in meetings and then the server went down and I had to fix it… It was a whole thing.”

Shoshana looked up at me disapprovingly with her big brown eyes and wagged her tail. Once.  She was not a happy camper.

“Come on, let’s take you out. You must be starving, too.”

She perked up and started dancing around me while I got her leash. In 30 seconds we were out the door and waiting for the elevator.

“Where shall we go?” I asked. “Left or right?”

Surprisingly she did not lead me into Floreasca Park. It’s just as well because I heard some kids setting off leftover firecrackers. Shoshana hated firecrackers. It was bad enough with the fireworks on New Year’s Eve blowing up all around the city, but I always made sure to close all the windows and hold her close. She’s kept me company through my crappiest times, the least I could do was make sure she always had a place to bury her nose when shit started blowing up.

Instead she turned left and took me on a neighborhood stroll. It was freezing, it being mid-January in Bucharest, but at least the sky was clear. Shoshana, of course, didn’t care one way or another. Her thick wolf double coat meant that the only way she felt the winter was if snow fell directly on her little black nose, which was becoming increasingly unlikely these days.

She led me towards Parcul Automatica where she circled around on the grass a bit and did her business. I cleaned up after her and started heading back towards home, but Shoshana pulled me to Calea Floreasca.  

“Come on, you know Springtime closed an hour ago!” I said. She just stared back at me accusingly. She was right. I came home late, and she was alone all day in the apartment. She was due a long walk and a treat.

“Fine, you win. I think Genin is still open, maybe they’ll give you some leftovers.”

We made our way south. As we passed that new bistro, Moft something-or-other, I heard a strange buzzing sound coming up ahead.

“Do you hear that?”

Shoshana didn’t pay me any attention. Her only concern was to get to the shawarma as fast as she could. Typical.

Then I heard a loud bang from up ahead, metallic but also muted. It kind of sounded like someone was banging on really big pipes.

“The fuck…?”

I stood there dumbfounded.

One of the shop windows had been transformed into a giant lense. I looked right into it.

I had passed by it during the day and thought it looked a bit peculiar, but last time I checked it was just a shop being renovated. You could see a ladder, freshly painted white walls and some work tools lying around the empty space.

Now, however, I was looking into what appeared to be an endless aquarium or an underwater scene. The street was quite dark, but every once in a while schools of tiny silver fish reflected the street lights. More alarmingly, though, were the two giant spherical eyes staring right back at me, gliding closer and closer.

“Is that an octopus…?!” I asked no one in particular.

Shoshana paused her sniffing, looked up at me, glanced at the creature’s black abyss-like irises and lost. Her. Shit.

She barked up a storm.

The creature retreated back into the blackness behind it in a flurry of tentacles and disappeared. Shoshana came up closer to the giant lens and, satisfied that the thing had gone, resumed her sniffing and southward tugging.

The buzzing sound subsided. The deep-sea blackness turned back into regular closed-shop blackness, and upon further inspection I could barely make out the outline for the ladder inside the empty shop.

“Weird…” I muttered to myself.

“Come on, you’ve earned that shawarma.”

Shoshana began wagging her tail and picked up her pace. I followed silently.