Mutiny of the Little Sweeties. Dmitrii Emets
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to them and blocked them up in that room so that they did not run and grab everything. They generously gave the next room to Mama and Papa as their bedroom. Vicky, Alena, Alex, and Kate divided the centre room among themselves, where, in principle, there would be enough space for everyone if bunk beds were put in. Kate had already managed to put the guinea pig and rat cages on the centre room windows – and there were two of them!
Vicky did not like it. “No rats! They throw sawdust out of the cage all the time! Dirt from just one of them! Choose: me, your sister, or the rats!” she yelled.
“I didn’t ask you to choose!” Kate warned ominously.
Peter won for himself the far right room. He had already managed to close the door and hung up a “DO NOT DISTURB!” sign, which he had foresightedly printed on the printer back in Moscow, glued onto cardboard, and brought with him.
Mama wandered anxiously around the house and counted the beds. This turned out to be simple; there was only one bed. There was also a huge decrepit sofa. If you tapped on it even just slightly, a cloud of dust would rise to the ceiling. Costa discovered this first when he hit the sofa with his sword. On noticing this, Alex approached it, and Rita after Alex, then all three began to bang on it with passion.
Peter watched the childish fun for some time from the height of his wisdom, and then also wanted to move onto the sofa. Better yet, to run, jump, and flop on it from the maximum possible height. “Well, break it up, pip-squeaks!” he ordered offhandedly.
However, before Peter could pound on the sofa and break all its legs, Mama ran into the room. Coughing from the dust, she began to pull the kids out of the room and demanded that Papa drag the sofa onto the street. “Okay! We’ll buy beds tomorrow. Good that we took the kids’ mattresses with us! They can sleep right on the floor!” she said, and everyone went for the mattresses.
Later, everyone still ran around a little and lay down to sleep. Papa fell asleep first, having been up for more than 24 hours. He did not even unload the things from the car. Rita, Costa, and Alex slept with him on the same mattress. Papa had to lie on the edge and pull up his knees, because they would not fit otherwise. They did not fit because the mattress was so small and Rita wanted to be right in the center, but she began to twist and turn and kick all those who accidentally touched her. Costa and Alex fenced Rita off with pillows as shields.
This was their first day at the new place.
Chapter Four
The Flying Shoe
The legendary creator of gunpowder, the monk Berthold Schwarz,[4] died in the explosion of his invention.
The morning began with a scream. It was Vicky. Everybody woke up at once and ran to her. There was no saying what and why. A new home, a new place.
“A cockroach was climbing under my mattress!” Vicky informed them.
“That’s all? At least a large one?” Kate asked, yawning.
“Huge! Never saw anything like it!”
“Put down soggy bread for it, cockroaches love that!” Kate advised her and lifted up the mattress to look at the cockroach.
“Careful! Wrinkles!” yelled Vicky, the only one who managed to put sheets down for the night.
The cockroach turned out to be a giant purple ground beetle, which was hiding in a crack in the wooden floor. Peter immediately got on the Internet and found out that a ground beetle never attacks first, but, escaping from enemies, can secrete yellowish drops of acid. If the poison gets on the hand, for example, and the person wipes his eyes with this hand, then the retina cannot be restored.
Alena and Vicky immediately began to run away from the ground beetle, but the others, on the contrary, ran for it. Alex tried to place the ground beetle on a sheet of paper so that it would secret poison. Kate yelled, “Leave it alone! It’s in the Red List!”[5] Costa, brandishing his sword, tried to get to the ground beetle and hit it. Rita screamed just for the company, because she saw that everyone was running and yelling. At the same time, she was also stomping loudly.
Everything ended when Papa placed the ground beetle in the palm of his hand, took it out into the courtyard, and released it onto the grass. The ground beetle did not secrete a drop of poison. It did not figure out that it was on Papa’s hand. It probably seemed to it that it was a piece of bark.
“You kicked it out of the house! It was happy here with us! Comfy and safe!” Kate said sorrowfully, and Mama forced Papa to wash his hands with soap.
“If you go blind, who will feed us? You work with your eyes!”
“Very funny! And no one ever mentioned being sorry for me!” Papa sulked and quickly went to his new office, before some crazy toddler kept him busy.
There turned out to be no desk in the office. There was only a nightstand smelling of valerian[6] with a lamp attached that had a neck like the knight in chess. Papa started to move the nightstand so that it would be closer to the light. Breaking away from the wall, the lamp immediately dislodged and fell to the ground. It turned out that where the bolts were attached had managed to rot.
“Well! First destruction!” Papa said, with sadness remembering the old man, who treated them as decent people.
“Not the first destruction! The second!” Peter corrected him. It turned out that he had already managed to break a chair, which, according to Peter, had itself to blame, because who knew that one should not stand on it.
Papa took the chair and the lamp to the basement and placed his laptop temporarily on the windowsill. When he did that, someone loudly said “honk-honk!” at him. He decided that it was Peter, but then saw a gaggle of geese, in a long chain like prisoners in the movies, walking around an enormous trough and making an awful racket. An elderly woman, hands in her apron, was standing near the geese and admiring them. All this took place some two metres from the window of Papa’s office. If Papa opened the window, he could easily stretch a mop through the small flowerbed to the geese and the woman.
“Isn’t that our yard?” Mama asked perplexedly.
“No, not ours! This is the side of the street,” Papa replied. “What, will they be honking all day? This is a city! It’s two steps to the main street! Why are there geese here?”
“Do you want me to stick some film on the window so that nothing will be visible?” Mama suggested.
“Oh no, don’t! I want to see life, not a film with flowers!”
Leaving Papa to observe life, Mama set off to the kitchen to make breakfast and save the rest of the produce from Kate. Dogs were already barking somewhere close and Mama suspected that Kate had something to do with it.
Looking out onto the street, Mama discovered that it was indeed so. Kate was feeding the dogs their remaining sausages, and Vicky was standing beside her, smearing iodine on the bald back of the long dog with a squirrel-hair paintbrush, which Mama recognized as one of her favourite paintbrushes. The bald dog was eating a sausage and it was all the same to it that they were pouring and spreading iodine on it with a natural squirrel-hair brush. True, the other dogs were looking at the bald dog with suspicion and moving away from it.
“What are you doing?” Mama shouted.
“Why is it bald? If it’s bald, that means it’s sick. If it’s sick, it must be treated!” Vicky stated.
“Don’t touch it with your hands! What if it has ringworms?” Mama was worried.
“No one is touching it with hands! I’m touching it with a brush!” Vicky explained, and the dogs, having finished the sausages, rushed to the gate to bark at a lone cyclist.
Mama was afraid that people would think that these were their dogs because they ran out of their gates, and rushed to save the cyclist. The cyclist yelled and jerked his foot, trying to kick the dogs. As he rode down the figure-eight
It is unclear whether Schwarz is a historical or purely legendary figure. It has been suggested that he was a historical alchemist of the late 14th century who developed gunpowder in Germany.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.
Valerian is a perennial flowering plant with the roots being used in herbal medicine, since valerian root has sedative and anxiolytic effects.