**Didn’t Get It**

This story began a long time ago and ended about a week ago. Why didn’t I write it down right away? It all shook me so badly that I went through piles of books trying to find explanations for what happened. Now try to find those answers yourselves.

About five or six years ago my friends and I went fishing in the Azov marshes. We were sitting there fishing when suddenly some kind of plastic bag started drifting toward us out of the reeds. The wind was pushing it along, not very fast, so Igor started casting his spinning rod at it, trying to snag it with the hook. Why, you ask? Just before that I’d joked that this was exactly what a bag full of dollars should look like, and Igor couldn’t resist. He hooked it, pulled it in—and inside were four kittens. Three were dead, and one was still trying to move. Apparently the former owners either didn’t add a weight or there was air trapped in the bag that kept it from sinking. The kitten survived, and Igor took him home. What struck us was that the kittens weren’t newborns, the kind people usually drown, but probably a month or two old.

I won’t bore you with extra details—just one thing matters: Igor and Triton adored each other. The cat grew huge, black, sleek, and, to be honest, vicious. When the owners weren’t home, Trishka stood guard like a dog, and I assure you—even friends didn’t dare enter the house while Triton was on duty. But the rest of the time he loved lying either around his owner’s neck like a collar or sprawled on his chest.

Several years passed. Everything went on as usual. Then Igor mentioned one day that the cat had fallen ill—had grown scruffy, lost a lot of weight. A month later Igor himself got sick. A cough appeared, shortness of breath, his skin turned yellow. As a result, his character deteriorated—he became irritable, suspicious. It seemed to him that someone had put a curse or the evil eye on him—on both him and the cat.

One day he comes running to me, all worked up, almost hysterical, and starts telling me:

“You know how Trishka likes lying on my arms and chest. Since he got sick, he’s lying there all the time. But I started noticing that he keeps getting thinner, while it feels heavier when he presses on my chest. I tried chasing him off, but he keeps climbing back anyway. Then I got sick myself—and now I’ve figured it out. He’s sucking the life out of me. Look—wherever he lies, that’s what starts hurting. First my neck hurt, with that osteochondrosis—he stopped lying on my neck, and it stopped hurting. Then he lies on my chest—and now I can barely breathe. So yeah, I killed him.”

My eyes nearly popped out.

“Have you completely lost it? What does the cat have to do with this? We’ve been telling you forever to see a doctor!”

And I should say Igor never trusted local doctors much—he thought they prescribed the same pill for head and stomach alike, just the most expensive one.

“Wait, don’t get worked up,” he says. “Listen to the rest. I wake up last night because I can’t breathe. I open my eyes—and Trish is lying on my chest, his nose right up against my mouth. I exhale, and he inhales it forcefully. That’s when I understood everything. He got sick and is draining my health along with my breath. I saw something like that on TV. His lives ran out, so he’s using mine. You remember—he was the only one left alive in the bag too… I grabbed him, ran outside, took him by the legs, smashed his head against the corner, and threw him over the fence onto the wasteland. Now, I think, I’ll start getting better.”

Two weeks later he got even worse. They took him to the regional clinic. Then they found cancer. A month ago he told me:

“I’m going to die soon. Trishka has started coming to me—as if he’s alive. I see him in the yard, then in the window. Sleek, like before. Maybe I shouldn’t have killed him?”

Two weeks ago Igor died. They buried him. On the ninth day we went to the cemetery to commemorate him, and there—among the wreaths—lay Triton, dead. So it turns out he hadn’t killed him after all. Or maybe that wasn’t his last life.

I leafed through the literature and came to the conclusion that the cat wasn’t taking Igor’s life—it was taking the illness. That’s why he himself grew mangy and emaciated. He was trying to save his savior—but the savior didn’t understand…