It had rained continuously for three weeks. Not a pouring down rain but a relentless cold drizzle under homogenous dark grey skies. His apartment was dark and chilly. He turned up the heat and kept all the lights on and played sambas and drank hot tea, but he could not stop the darkness and the damp from entering his soul. One day he didn't bother to get up. He called in sick and stayed in bed all day. He watched Perry Mason and a lot of commercials for payday loan services and business schools.
He found the box in the lobby around eight p.m. when he went down to check his mail. The box held four kittens. All black and skinny looking. There was an old pink acrylic sweater in the bottom of the box, all caked with kitty shit. He was going to put the box out on the street in the cold rain, but somehow he couldn't. He brought them into the relative warmth of his apartment. He put milk in a saucer on the floor and the kittens groveled and sprawled and half drowned themselves, but they seemed able to drink. They tipped the saucer and lapped from the floor.
Next day after work he took the kittens to the vet and had them de-flead and wormed. He set up a cat box and bought two kitty baskets with nice soft cushions.
At work for the first time he was talkative. He needed to give away at least two of the kittens. Mike in accounting took one of them for his wife who had just lost another baby.
A woman named Stephanie took one. She was a pale, quiet creature who seldom spoke and sat alone in her car on her lunch break. But once she had the black kitten there were questions to be asked. What vet to go to? What kind of food? They compared notes. They talked of the exploits and adventures of their slender black cats as they grew. And they began to talk of other things as well. They laughed together and took walks in the rain and one day he asked Stephanie to marry him and she accepted.
There was just one problem. Three cats. Too many.
Two of them went to the pound.