I. On the nature of the stain
The stain on the jacket appeared on Tuesday. More precisely, it was noticed on Tuesday, because the question of when a stain truly came into being is one of those that Eastern philosophy answers with silence, and wives answer very specifically.
It was a red stain. Lazar believed it was wine from someone’s birthday, but he couldn’t rule out ajvar, or fate. It was the only jacket he owned. The wedding was on Saturday.
He stood in front of the mirror for a long time. Depending on the angle, the stain had the shape of the Caspian Sea or the profile of his former boss. The longer he looked at it, the clearer it became that the stain was not on the jacket. The jacket was around the stain. Lazar was around the jacket. And Saturday’s wedding was merely the context the stain had built for itself, so that it would have somewhere to exist.
II. The Moster
The Moster arrived at 1 p.m. local time. As it would later turn out, that is the only time there is.
His name was Dragan. He took the jacket the way one takes a newborn or someone else’s secret: carefully, without questions.
“Can you get it out?” Lazar asked.
Dragan looked at the stain for a long time.
“I don’t remove stains,” he said at last. “I show you that it was never there.”
“And the jacket?”
“The jacket was. The jacket remains. The jacket is, how shall I put it, the only real thing in this story.”
Lazar felt he ought to be offended, but he didn’t know on whose behalf.
The jacket came back on Thursday. Lazar ran a finger over the place where the stain had been. There was only the place.
III. Where the wallet was
Only later did Lazar remember that he hadn’t entered his card before seeing who was coming. In the old version of the app, you paid first and believed later, as in most serious religions and every gym. In the new one, you first see the Moster, their ratings and history, and only then reach for your card.
Order, Lazar realized, is everything.
Cash, as before, does not exist. Cash is an illusion from a previous cycle.
IV. The password as mantra
He didn’t type a password either. Passwords are mantras we repeat in order to forget why we came in the first place. You now enter Most with your Google or Apple account, in a single tap, like finally understanding something you had always known.
“Most123!” no longer exists. Perhaps it never did.
V. For those who came for information, not enlightenment
Which is, after all, a perfectly legitimate path.
- Dry cleaning for clothes: jackets, coats, dresses, everything that can’t go in the machine. Booked like everything else on Most.
- Sign in with Google and Apple: no new password.
- The card comes at the end, not the beginning: payment is still card-only, through Most.
- A web version? It’s being built. Like all real things, it exists before it appears.
VI. Epilogue
On Saturday, Lazar put on the jacket. It was clean, and there was something unsettling in that cleanliness, like a blank page or a Monday morning. At the wedding, around midnight, someone next to him spilled red wine. Lazar looked at it without fear, like a man who knows that this stain, too, is only a passing form.
Somewhere in Belgrade, or in Novi Sad, someone had just realized their tap was leaking. Someone else, on the other side of the bridge, was already packing their tools.
Between them, Lazar thought, there is nothing. Only Most, which in Serbian simply means bridge.
And a bridge, as anyone who has ever stood in the middle of one knows, belongs to neither shore.
Most currently connects the shores of Belgrade and Novi Sad.
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