On a night when the sun had hidden, a man stood under the light of a streetlamp.
“Nya! Nyaa!”
“……Gamja, I told you not to cry like that.”
Juan shook his head as he looked at the cat staring at him with wide eyes.
But then something strange happened.
As if understanding Juan’s words, Gamja drooped its tail and let out a dejected sound.
“Wak…….”
“You always seem to understand what I’m saying.”
However, such occurrences weren’t particularly special to Juan.
Ever since he first met Gamja, he had always felt that the cat understood his words.
Gamja often reacted appropriately to what Juan said.
Normally, Gamja ate food portioned out into plastic bags, but upon seeing a can, it got even more excited, climbing up Juan’s hand and clinging to it.
“Ah! Ah! Hey, that hurts! It hurts!”
“Waeoow! Waeoow!”
Hurriedly peeling Gamja off, Juan grumbled as he opened the can lid.
The sound of the can opening echoed cheerfully through the quiet alley.
A fishy smell wafted to his nose.
Juan placed the can in front of Gamja.
“Geez, you’re not a house cat, so your claws are sharp as heck.”
Juan muttered while rubbing his stinging arm with his palm.
Whether he complained or not, Gamja was busy burying its nose into the chicken breast can and eating.
Juan’s gaze, which had been glaring resentfully at the small back of Gamja’s head, soon softened.
Though his arm still stung, he couldn’t help but find Gamja adorable.
Resting his arm on his knees, which were drawn up from squatting, Juan looked at Gamja with a warm smile.
The sight of Gamja reflected in his dark eyes was utterly lovable.
“When did you grow this big…….”
He felt proud of how much Gamja had grown.
Juan, still watching Gamja engrossed in eating from the can, spread his hand to measure the cat’s size.
When he first saw Gamja, it was smaller than his palm, but now its body had grown larger than his hand.
Juan and Gamja’s first meeting was three months ago on a certain day.
On a deep night with no stars in the sky and the ground lit by the lights of buildings, Juan was eating a late dinner on the street, having missed a meal due to his part-time job.
Blowing on a hot bar warmed in a convenience store microwave, he climbed a winding alleyway leading to stairs.
“Ugh, I’m dying……. How is it that I still can’t get used to these darn stairs?”
“Ae……oow…….”
As Juan groaned and staggered up the stairs, a faint cry coming from somewhere stopped him in his tracks.
If it had been just an ordinary cat’s cry, he might not have paid attention. But the cry he heard was so weak that he couldn’t ignore it.
With a worried heart, Juan looked around. Under the streetlamp’s light shining down on the alleyway, nothing unusual was visible.
“Where on earth are you…….”
He couldn’t pretend not to hear the dying cry. But since he couldn’t see the source of the sound, his heart burned with anxiety.
“Just once, cry one more time for me.”
Muttering to himself out of a desperate wish to find the crying cat, a cry came again from not too far from where Juan stood, as if responding to his words.
“Wae……ong…….”
Juan hurriedly headed toward the source of the sound. Arriving at a broken section of a low wall, Juan crouched down and turned on his phone’s flashlight.
“Ae……oong.”
A tiny kitten was curled up on the ground beyond the wall. Though it was very thin and small, thankfully, it didn’t seem to be injured.
Juan let out a sigh of relief. As the tension eased with that relief, his body naturally relaxed. Because of that, the hot bar in his hand dropped to the ground with a thud.
“Nya! Nya!”
“Hey, hey! Don’t eat that! It’s salty!”
“Waengwaengwaengwaengwaengwaengwaeng.”
Before he could stop it, the kitten grabbed the hot bar with its front paws and shoved its tiny snout into it.
Despite its strong determination to eat, the kitten, perhaps because its teeth hadn’t fully grown in, could only lick the hot bar. Even so, it made strange, happy noises.
Watching this, Juan couldn’t help but smile despite his worry about the kitten eating something salty. As if entranced, he stared at the kitten before snapping back to reality.
“Wait, little one.”
Saying a brief word to the kitten, still busy licking the hot bar, Juan hurriedly ran back down the stairs he had struggled to climb. He descended so quickly that he nearly twisted his ankle and almost tumbled down the steps.
“Waengwaengwaengwaengwaeng.”
Worried that the kitten might have left in the meantime, Juan was relieved to see the baby cat still licking the hot bar, just as it had been when he left for the convenience store.
“Don’t eat that, eat this.”
Juan removed the hot bar and placed an opened can in front of it. Immediately, the kitten, as if mesmerized by the fishy smell from the can, buried its snout into it.
“Myamyamyamyengmyeokmyeok.”
Perhaps finding it incredibly tasty, the kitten, unlike before, began eating the can’s contents energetically while crying out. Unlike the hot bar, which didn’t diminish no matter how much it licked, the can’s contents decreased by a tiny bit with each flick of its small tongue.
“By the way, your fur color is really unique. It’s like a freshly steamed potato. A new potato steamed with the skin on.”
“Ummyengmyengmyeng.”
And so, the bond between Juan and Gamja began. Gamja seemed to wait for Juan to finish his part-time job and come home, meeting him in the alleyway every night.
Juan wanted to take Gamja in, but the studio apartment he lived in was too cramped even for one person. Above all, the lease agreement strictly prohibited pets.
Moving to another place wasn’t an option either. He was already struggling to pay rent each month, let alone afford a broker’s fee or moving costs.
In the end, he had no choice but to settle for feeding Gamja.
“You’ve finished eating. Are you getting faster at eating?”
“Aeng!”
“Yeah. It’s good if you eat well. I’m heading out.”
“Waeaeaeng!”
Juan, who had been squatting while Gamja ate from the can, stood up, brushing off his numb legs.
After saying goodbye to Gamja, Juan began climbing the remaining stairs. Not long after, he reached the top of the stairs and arrived at a flat alleyway.
“Haa, haa.”
– Buuaaaang!
As Juan caught his breath upon reaching the flat ground, he turned around, startled by a roaring sound cutting through the night air. Far in the distance, a car was speeding up the slope at an unbelievable pace.
Though it was a road connected to the main street, it was far too narrow for a car to travel at such a speed-just wide enough for one vehicle. It was almost like highway speed.
Realizing this wasn’t a normal driving situation, Juan was about to dodge the rapidly approaching car.
“Waeok!”
“Gamja!”
For some reason, Gamja, who should have stayed on the stair path, had followed him up to the flat alleyway.
Without time to figure out what was happening, Juan’s body moved not to avoid the recklessly speeding car but to run toward Gamja, who was sitting in the middle of the alley.
The moment he embraced Gamja with his whole body, the car’s headlights engulfed the world. At the same time, Juan’s body was flung into the air.
* * *
“Ugh, Gamja…… are you okay……?”
Juan tried to check on Gamja, who should have been in his arms, but stopped short. His arms…… were white. Fluffy…… soft…… and a gentle white at that.
“W-What’s wrong with my body? W-What’s wrong with my hands?! Why are there cotton balls attached to me!”
Juan shouted in panic. Where his hands should have been, there were beige cotton puffs boasting pink jelly pads.
Juan knew exactly what they were. They were a cat’s front paws. He couldn’t understand why they were attached to his body.
On top of that, his voice somehow sounded smaller and more squeaky than his original voice.
“Why does my voice sound like this?! It’s too cute!”
Juan clutched his head with his cotton-puff paws and screamed.
Unbeknownst to him, his smaller body had changed the resonance of his voice as well.
“Why have I turned into a cat? Did the accident mess with my head? Am I seeing things? Yeah, that must be it. Ouch……. Now that I think about it, my body hurts too…….”
His vision spun.
Once he became aware of it, his whole body ached.
There was no doubt he’d been in an accident. The shock must have caused him to hallucinate.
Thinking this, Juan tightly shut his eyes.
After a long, deep breath, he opened them again, hoping to see his outstretched fingers.
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