It was dark, but the kitten was almost not afraid of the dark anymore. He got used to it. Moreover, he knew that his mother would return soon. She would feed him, lick him from the tip of his tail to his whiskered muzzle, then lie down next to him, purr a lullaby, and then he would not be afraid at all.
Only this time his mother was late. It was not like her at all.
Despite the fact that the basement was almost always in semi-darkness, the kitten learned to navigate in time.
Usually, when she left, he would immediately curl up into a ball, cover his nose with his paw, and sleep soundly.
And when he woke up, his mother was already there or came even before he wanted to eat.
But today something didn’t go according to plan: two hours had already passed since he woke up, and his mother was not there.
Forgot? Abandoned? No, such thoughts never even entered the baby’s head. “Something must have happened…”
Only if he is right, then this can only mean one thing: he does not have long to live.
There was plenty of water in the basement: the water pipe had leaked just the day before he was born – there was always a fresh puddle underneath it.
But food was hard to come by indoors.
There was no food here. So Mom had to go “hunting” every day.
The kitten got up from the warm cardboard box, went to the wall and looked up. There was a single hole through which light was shining into the basement. True, the hole was small, so there was little light.
And considering that there were thickets of bushes outside near the hole, there was practically no light. Only oppressive twilight that made you feel uneasy.
He tucked his hind legs under himself and tried to jump to the hole through which his mother came and went, but he couldn’t. He was still too small.
I tried ten times, and not one attempt was successful.
When, after another unsuccessful attempt to conquer the height, the kitten landed on all fours, the door to the basement opened with a terrible creak. It happened so unexpectedly that he did not even have time to hide. He simply froze, hoping that he would not be noticed. But he was noticed. The first to enter the basement was an old woman, a resident of this house. After her, two men squeezed into the narrow doorway.
– Look, you slackers! I told you, the cat gave birth to kittens in the basement. Go catch them all and take them outside!
“But he’s all alone here,” one of the employees of the management company wanted to object.
– Well, now there’s one, and in six months there’ll be about twenty. Why did you come here: to argue? Catch them, I say! And out into the street!
The men started running around the entire basement to catch the kitten, but it was not an easy task. They went out for a smoke twice. Only when the old woman joined them was the baby caught.
“You can’t do anything without Valentina Stepanovna!” the old woman, who was also their mother, scolded the men.
The kitten was thrown out of the basement, the door was locked, and the mama’s boys carefully sealed the hole in the wall. So tight that not a fly could get through.
– Scat, scat! – the old woman shouted angrily at the kitten. – Go away from here, and don’t let me see you here again!
The baby had to run away to a safe distance. He looked longingly at his house, where he was born and where he lived, and cried.
Now he has nowhere to live…
And mom disappeared somewhere.
What to do? Where to go?
But his oppressive thoughts quietly faded into the background. With wide-open eyes he looked at the world around him, the existence of which he did not even suspect.
Previously, his world was limited to a gloomy basement with four corners, a leaking pipe and a small hole in one of the walls. And now, it turns out, there is also an “other” world. There is so much in it…
…interesting!
In this world it is light, it smells of grass, people walk, birds fly and some strange animals with round legs and “burning” eyes “roar”.
Here and there the kitten saw cats that looked like his mother, but he could not find his mother among them.
Because she wasn’t there.
He meowed. At first, barely audible. Then louder. Finally, he started screaming.
What if Mom heard him?
But it was all in vain.
The cats turned around, looked at him with sympathy, as if to say: we’ve been through this ourselves, and then turned away.
– Are you still here? I said: get out of here! – Valentina Stepanovna screamed as she ran towards him. She had not liked cats since childhood. Nobody knew what caused her hostility. And she herself did not know. She simply did not like them, that’s all. Or maybe she was simply taking out her anger on them – she had to take it out on someone. And she was such an age that problems with the head were not uncommon.
The kitten had no choice but to run. He had no idea where exactly to run. The main thing was to get away from here. There was no way back anyway. They had boarded up the hole so much that it was impossible to get through it.
And the kitten ran. As fast as he could. He moved his little paws with all his might.
However, even if he ran at “low speed”, the evil old lady with a cane still would not have caught up. She was not a girl anymore, after all.
Trees, bushes, people, cars, buildings flashed before the kitten’s eyes.
All this fuss made his head spin, and he had to stop.
The adults looked at him and smiled. The children who walked nearby pointed at him and asked their parents to take him home, but their plaintive requests remained unheard. And only one mother asked her son:
– Are you ready to give up playing on your tablet? If you are, then let’s take it home!
“No-o,” the boy answered, sniffling, and continued eating his chocolate popsicle.
The kitten looked at him and wanted to eat too. But where in this world can you get food?
He sniffed, and his paws themselves carried him in the direction from which the appetizing smell was coming. It was a five-star restaurant with the original name “Like Grandma’s”. It smelled of everything: fried meat, boiled fish, oysters and mussels. The baby had never tried anything like this, but he really wanted to try it.
Stopping at the back entrance that led straight to the kitchen, the kitten looked at the human-sized metal door that was slightly open and seemed to invite him inside, and quickly slipped through the narrow gap.
And in the kitchen itself he saw a mountain of cardboard boxes, one of which became his temporary shelter.
At the very moment he climbed into the empty box, two people entered the room. A man and another man.
“Fedor, you cook divinely, of course, but you also have to keep the kitchen tidy,” the restaurant owner said discontentedly, looking around.
– Arkady Viktorovich, I just don’t have enough time. I can’t do anything without an assistant.
– You’ll get an assistant. We’re already looking! We’ve placed ads in all the newspapers. In the meantime, please, put things in order here. God forbid an inspection comes to our place. I’ll give you ten minutes. Then I’ll come and check everything. And remember: it’s better never to argue with me. There was one such person here…
The short, bald man came out of the kitchen, and Fyodor looked at the mountain of cardboard boxes and began to carry out the order.
Throwing the last box onto the asphalt area next to the garbage bins, Fedya suddenly heard a strange sound, very similar to meowing. “Did he crush someone with the box or something?”
But when he picked up the cardboard container he had just thrown away, he realized that the source of the strange sound was inside it.
There was definitely someone inside the box.
“I hope it’s not a rat.” He had been afraid of rodents since childhood. No, he didn’t squeal like some ladies, but he didn’t feel any pleasure at the sight of rats and mice.
When Fyodor saw the kitten, he was very surprised. He looked at it for a long time and could not understand where it came from.
“Hey, where are you from?” he decided to ask the kid just in case. What if he answers? No, well, anything can happen in life.
—————————————————–
Fedor, for example, could not even dream that he would be hired to work in one of the most prestigious restaurants in the city. And they did.
However, the miracle did not happen this time.
The kitten only meowed in response, but unfortunately Fedya did not understand what he wanted to say.
But he assumed that since the baby was in the kitchen, he probably wouldn’t mind having a snack.
He never considered himself a cat lover (moreover, he was categorically against having pets in his apartment, despite the fact that his daughter repeatedly asked him to get a dog or a kitten), but he saw nothing wrong with feeding the hungry.
Moreover, he will feed you exclusively with what he himself has prepared. And he prepared, as the owner of the restaurant has already said earlier, simply divinely.
Fyodor brought the box with the kitten back to the kitchen and heartily shared with him the stewed turkey with the signature sauce, having first chopped it into small pieces.
The treat was accepted with gratitude and eaten with a bang! And eaten very quickly.
However, the enjoyment of the divine aftertaste was interrupted by the owner of the restaurant, who, as promised, came ten minutes later to check the work on the disposal of cardboard boxes.
– Well done, Fyodor! You’ve completed the task. Stop! What’s this box? Forgot? Didn’t have time?
With these words, the short man, who was resting his forehead against Fedor’s chin, kicked the cardboard box in which the kitten was. Fedya didn’t even have time to do anything. “Meow-oo,” came an indignant cry from it.
– What?! A cat in my kitchen? I’ll fire you right now! Don’t you understand that this is a gross violation of all sanitary standards?
Fyodor understood, but he couldn’t leave the baby hungry. Although, yes, he could have fed him outside…
– Take it to the dump immediately! I’m waiting!
So what was Fyodor supposed to do? He obediently took the box and carried it to the trash cans, looking inside along the way to make sure the baby wasn’t hurt. Then he put the box on the side of the can so that people passing by wouldn’t kick it, and quickly returned to the kitchen, where he immediately began preparing food for the other hungry people, to whom, unlike the homeless kitten, the same stewed turkey was sold for money.
He did cook, but the thoughts about the kitten wouldn’t let him rest.
“Maybe I should sneak it into the utility room and leave it there until the evening? What if the bald guy looks in there or the kitten runs away from there and catches his eye?”
Fedor didn’t take any risks.
He liked the job after all, it paid very well. He didn’t want to lose everything in an instant.
But I felt sorry for the kitten too…
And then orders started pouring in, brought to him by sweaty waiters.
While Fedor was preparing another dish from the chef, a man came up to the trash cans, looked inside, picked out some edible remains and threw them into a cardboard box that was next to him. By a coincidence, this was the box that the kitten was in. But he didn’t even notice it. He threw the “loot” inside, then picked it up and carried it to the temporary location, which again by a coincidence (or maybe not a coincidence) turned out to be next to the basement from which the kitten was escorted out today.
Arriving half an hour later at the right “address,” a bearded man in torn clothes and “hungry” sneakers sat down on the cardboard box that he always carried with him, and was just about to get food out of the box when he was immediately hit with a cane.
– Oh, you such-and-such! – Valentina Stepanovna was indignant. – I told you not to show up here anymore! If you don’t understand the good way, then get it!
The cane was raised up and then brought down with force, and the old woman screamed loudly throughout the street.
In short, the homeless man had to grab what was nearby and run as far as possible. “They don’t even give me a decent meal! What kind of people are these!” the man was indignantly thinking to himself. And Valentina Stepanovna grabbed a cardboard box and dragged it to the dump, where, in her opinion, it belonged.
However, on the way, her back seized up. The box fell out of her hands, and she remained standing in a half-bent position.
Here you have the boomerang effect in action.
At that very moment, a girl named Anya, whom her mother had sent to throw out the trash, came out of the entrance.
When she passed by the old woman, she grabbed her hand and began to ask in a pitiful voice:
– Darling, you’re going to the dump, aren’t you? Couldn’t you take this cardboard box with you?
Anya knew this nasty old woman with a cane, but she didn’t like her (nobody in the yard liked her at all), but she agreed to help, so as not to listen to her later about how she was such and such and all that. And Valentina Stepanovna slowly hobbled home. There in her nightstand she had some ointment for her back pain.
Anya threw the garbage bag into the bin and was about to send the box after it, but…
…I heard someone scratching her from the inside.
Looking into it, the girl saw a kitten. Oh, how happy she was! This was the dream of her whole life. And when cherished dreams come true, how can you not rejoice?
She took the baby out and ran home, skipping. Mom, meeting her at the door, just shook her head: “Daughter, what will daddy say?” But Anya had already fallen head over heels in love with the kitten and was not going to part with him – she would not allow anyone to hurt him, much less kick him out.
Fyodor had already finished his shift, changed his clothes and hurried outside. It was already getting dark, but the outlines of the cardboard boxes against the background of the garbage bins were still discernible. He ran up to them and began to open them one by one.
Imagine his disappointment when there was no kitten in any of them. Just in case, he looked through the boxes again. No, the kitten was nowhere to be found. “Run away or… hide?”
He turned on the flashlight on his phone and made a series of sounds he hadn’t made since he was a child:
– Kitty-kitty-kitty!
Two cats, who were constantly “on duty” near the garbage bins, ran out in response to the call, but the kitten was not among them.
Fedor went home upset.
“What kind of person are you, Fedya?” he thought. “Your daughter has been asking for a kitten for three years, you liked the kitten, your wife didn’t seem to mind, and you took it outside…”
Fyodor’s hungry conscience was eating him from the inside and he could not come up with an excuse for himself.
He even wanted to get drunk. But he didn’t drink. At all. Never. That’s how his parents raised him.
I had to suffer “dry”.
“When I get home, I’ll tell you what I did today, and let my daughter and wife judge me. To the fullest extent of the law!”
It became a little easier. And in order not to back out at the very last moment, he took his phone and wrote a text message to Larisa: “I’ll be home soon and I’ll have a serious talk with you!”
Fyodor entered the apartment and immediately became wary: it was suspiciously quiet. “Are they really asleep?” His pale wife and daughter came out of the kitchen. They looked as if they had seen a ghost, and Anechka had a kitten in her arms…
The same one he treated to the most tender stewed turkey with signature sauce at lunch. The same one he was looking for at night at the dump. The same one that sank into his soul and… the same one before whom he was very guilty.
Fyodor ran up to his daughter, took the kitten, hugged her, and tears streamed from his eyes.
The wife and daughter did not understand anything. Their mouths were open. They expected a completely different reaction from the head of the family, who warned them by SMS about an important serious conversation.
“Fedya, you wanted to say something…” Larisa began cautiously.
– Me? Tell me? No, I didn’t want anything… – the husband answered and carried the kitten to the kitchen, where he joyfully began to cook him dinner.
This is how the Rumyantsev family got a daddy’s kitten, which, while he was at work, was Anya’s, and while Anya was at school, was mom’s.
In general, the whole family fell in love with him. So now the baby not only has a place to live, but also someone to love.
What could be more beautiful?
