One lovely evening, exactly 2 weeks, 16 hours and 55 seconds before Christmas, Leopard the cat, after feeding his pet mouse (it’s XXI century, and our cat is modern), noticed that he totally ran out of the essential – dietary fish. He really, I mean really, didn’t want to but his instincts were telling him to go to the mall nearby. He changed his sandals to the grey kitten mittens (he didn’t want people to get the wrong impression that he was wearing the sandals with socks because of his white paws) and mentally prepared for a long, exhausting journey – a two way street, a 3-car carpark and an aisle of fat salmon.
At the very beginning of the journey, the alternative of not eating that evening seemed way worse than this, but when Leopard the cat opened his front door he started doubting his judgement. Right in front of his door was parked a car, and that meant that the owner of it was one Toyota closer to the mall than Leopard. He walked around the car without signing it (I mean with scratches) and was ready to cross the two-way street when he realised that this may take a while longer than usual and when he is finally back home his white mouse might already be grizzled.
He decided to walk to the back door of the mall. There was a gate not far from it with a sign saying “Press for Attention”, but Leopard the cat was not an attention seeker at all so he kept on walking until he reached a real entrance. It was supposed to be ONLY an entrance but the people there were moving all four ways and one kid was even trying to promote the fith way – jumping up for absolutely no reason.
Finally, Leopard managed to get in. When he reached the small fish shop where they were selling gluten free fish (he was allergic to gluten, okay?), there was a line longer than a tail of his poor probably already grey mouse. The cat patiently waited in the line, but when he finally reached the counter, it was 9:01 p. m. and they couldn’t sell him anything because the computer was already too tired to work and shut itself down.
“It’s not all bad,” said the worker, and gave him a form to fill. “You see, come tomorrow with that and you’ll get an exclusive offer.”
But Leopard the cat wanted to eat that day and didn’t care about any offers. He took the form, smiling like a young moon (at least he thought so, but any human being would have told you that he looked similar to a young vampire which didn’t know what to do with his new teeth) and slowly walked out off the mall.
After a couple of minutes, which felt like infinity, he finally came back home, changed his grey kitten mittens into his sandals and went to check on his poor mouse. And walking towards him, Leopard the cat was not thinking about the fish he wanted anymore. Oh no, he was silently hoping that this year Santa Claws would bring people a little bit of better understanding about Christmas; that they wouldn’t want to spend days and nights standing in long lines in order to give something mass-produced to their friends. So he went and hugged his little white mouse.