The mornings outside the supermarket always smell the same: warm bread being loaded into a van, spilled kefir, grass crushed by the wheels of carts, and someone else’s haste. I arrived early to pick up a box of expired sausages for the street gang and a few bags of pellets that the store had donated to charity. The janitor was shoveling garbage to the dumpster, crows were squabbling on the roofs, and somewhere deep in the concrete yard, water was dripping from a leaky pipe, measuring the seconds of someone else’s morning.
The black bag lay in the shade of an acacia. It lay—but not quite: it was barely perceptibly breathing, as if it were alive, and this breathing was reflected in a quiet rustle. «Rats,» the janitor grumbled, not even looking up. I nodded, but something stopped me. You stand there, a grown woman, with a box of sausages in your hands, and suddenly a childish “look” rises inside. I put the box on the ground, squatted down, and carefully touched the package with my fingernail.
Silence. Then a short, muffled squeak, as if someone had swallowed their own voice. Another squeak, and my palms instantly sweated.
“Pash, do you have a knife?” I called out to the van driver who was smoking near the ramp.
“What for?”
“It seems like someone is alive here.”
He approached, squinting from the sun, and stretched his lips in an uncertain smile—one of those that means “well, I guess so.” But the package moved again. Pashko swore, took out a folding knife, and handed it to me.
“Just be careful. Because, suddenly there…” he didn’t finish.
I cut the top, and heat and sour, dried milk immediately blew out of the crack. The polyethylene parted like old fabric, and a white ear protruded. Then a nose. Then a whole little head, as light as a bread crumb. The puppy took a convulsive breath and poked its chin at the edge of the bag. Another head moved after it. And more.
“Holy Mother of God,” Pashka burst out, and his voice became thinner than mine.
“Hold the bag, I’ll open it wider.”
“I’ll hold it.”
There were five inside. All milky, pale, with soft pink ears. They lay in layers—warm, hungry, forgotten. Two of them had ribs sticking out as if someone had drawn them with a pencil just under the skin. The third’s muzzle was covered in a crust of milk and dust. The smallest one didn’t even squeak, it just trembled—the trembling was like the buzzing of a broken wire.
“They threw them out at night,” the janitor muttered, looking down at his underwear. “In the morning the container was full, we pulled everything up, and this one rolled away into the shade.”
“If it hadn’t rolled away,” I said, “we wouldn’t have found them.”
I sat down on the asphalt, stretched out my arms, and transferred the puppies one by one into a clean apple box. “Quiet, quiet, now, now,” I whispered, even though I didn’t know if we would have time. The world lived by its own logic: someone had to hurry to work, the crows were demanding breakfast, the forklift was twitching, and in my hands lay five small reasons to stop for even a minute.
“Where are we taking them?” Pashko was already turning on the heating in the cabin, even though it was hot.
“To Mila.” She knows how to save. And let Lena prepare the mixture.
— Let’s go.
We loaded the boxes into the van. The road to the shelter was usually short, but today every hole seemed unnecessary. I kept talking to the little ones, as if I was rocking them: “Do you hear? This is a car. It takes you to a place where it smells like a warm towel and a bowl, not polyethylene. Just don’t give up. Don’t dare.” Sometimes one of them would answer with a quiet sob, the other would move a paw as if he were floating in a dream.
— Who do you think could have done this? — Pashka asked at the traffic light.
— Anyone, — I answered. — That’s the horror: the “who” has no face.
— Do you think they were taken from their mother?
— Yes. Their ears are too clean. Two of them even have their claws trimmed. That means they were held by hands. The same hands tied the knot.
We arrived. The shelter yard is always noisy: someone barks happily, someone fights over a bowl, someone wins the battle for a sunspot. But when we took the box out, the noise died down. Dogs know how to read important things without words. Mila ran out to meet us in an apron, her hair damp from rushing, and immediately turned on her quiet storm mode — everything was done quickly, clearly, without panic.
«Weigh. Warm. Mixture — one and a half milliliters every twenty minutes. The hot water bottle is no higher than forty,» she dictated, and I felt my heart finally return to its place. «This one is breathing shallowly. Give it here.»
We divided ourselves, as if in a long-rehearsed play: Lena prepared the mixture, Pashko took on the «courier service» between the kitchen and the room, I held the weakest. The puppies smelled of crumbs of sleep and that special tenderness that reminds us that in the world, you can still start over.
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