Счастливого Хэллоуина.
It was October 31, 2001. Headcheese Ikaika gave all the pups and staff the day off to celebrate Halloween! They spent the day gleefully observing the humans and all their amusing antics.
He peered through a gap in the hallway walls, whiskers twitching, while the rest of the colony pressed in around him. Through the crack, they could see everyone passing by, and the whole school had been transformed.
“The giants have gone strange,” whispered a pup. “Look at them.”
A teacher wore a pointed hat and a long black cloak. A boy had become a dinosaur, his green tail swishing and knocking over a pencil cup. Two twin girls had turned into glittery butterflies.
“They’re hiding,” a pup breathed. “Everyone’s pretending to be something else.”
“Why would they do that?” asked another pup.
No one knew. But one pup watched a bandaged boy carefully unwrap one hand to take a cookie, then wrap it right back up again, and thought it might be the most sensible thing she’d ever seen a human do.
Then the bell rang, and the giants stampeded out the door in a rustling, giggling river.
“The parade,” Barnaby said. “Quick. The yard vent.”
The colony scurried through the walls, tiny claws ticking against old pipes, and emerged at the grate overlooking the yard. Below them, the entire school was marching in a great looping line. Pirates walked beside pumpkins. A tiny astronaut held hands with a taller kid dressed as a taco. A teacher in a banana suit led the way, waving like a king.
“They look like us,” a pup whispered.
“What do you mean?” asked another pup.
“Like us when we all go out for the crumbs on Fridays. Everybody together. Nobody going alone.”
The others looked again. It was true. Whatever they wore, the humans moved in a bunch, bumping and laughing, the big ones slowing down for the small ones. When the little astronaut tripped, three kids stopped at once to help her up, and someone gently straightened her helmet.
At the end of the hall, the line stopped to hand out candy. A girl dressed as a ghost, a bedsheet with two crooked eyeholes, glanced up toward the vent. For one frozen moment, the pups were sure they’d been seen.
The ghost girl grinned. She set a single piece of cheese on the floor beside the grate, gave a tiny wave, and ran to catch up with her friends.
The colony stared at the cheese.
“Don’t touch it,” a pup warned. “Professor Vladimir said it could be a trap.”
That night, after the last giant had gone home and the hallways had fallen dark and quiet, the pups held a parade of their own, wearing costumes they’d crafted the previous day.
They marched through the walls in a long, squeaking line, nobody going alone. And for one magical night, the school belonged to them.
Professor Vladimir watched the pups from afar, proud to see them remembering the lessons he had taught them in class.
Meanwhile, the Grigoriy Clan settled onto a plumeria branch to share a snack and watch the Halloween festivities below. Observer Grigoriy counted the costumes on his claws. Americans, he decided, had invented a holiday that promised scares but delivered very little real fear. Back home, the truly frightening things lived in Grandmother’s stories—and usually had teeth.
Engineer Grigoriy, however, was barely listening. He was too busy marveling at the weather. It was eighty degrees, and a boy dressed as a vampire was sweating through his face paint. He tugged at his own fur hat, which he wore out of loyalty to his homeland, though it made his ears itch.
“Back home, Halloween requires a snowsuit,” he muttered. “Here, even the ghosts wear flip-flops.”
As the streets grew quieter and the last trick-or-treaters disappeared into the warm Hawaiian night, the mice settled in for stories from home. Commander Grigoriy described snowdrifts taller than houses and winters so cold that even your whiskers could freeze. Headcheese Ikaika countered with tales of plate lunches left unattended—an entirely different kind of danger, especially when hungry mice were nearby.
Soon, the stories began to sound less like tales of two different worlds and more like variations on the same theme. Back home or here in Hawaii, everyone loved an excuse to gather, eat far too much, and stay up long after bedtime.
Radio Operator Grigoriy lifted a bottle cap filled with guava juice.
“To new friends, warm nights, and surviving Halloween without frostbite!”
“Happy Halloween, brah!” Headcheese Ikaika replied, raising his own cap.
The others joined in, their laughter drifting through the plumeria blossoms and into the Hawaiian night. For once, nobody seemed to mind that home was a world away—or that the ghosts wore flip-flops.
Поиски мисс Ивонны Дижоны продолжаются.