Highly Commended Story - With A Little Help From The Cat

“With A Little Help From The Cat” by Edoardo Mantegazza, International School Of Monza, Italy, is the Highly Commended story in the junior category of the first biannual Short Story Contest 2019.

Edoardo is a very curious boy who always wants to learn and experiment new things. He likes playing with his friends and on his computer. He is enthusiastic about coding. Edoardo is also an active person who enjoys sports like tennis, ski and hockey. His other interest is reading and the most recent author he enjoyed was Helena Duggan, with her new book "A Place Called Perfect". His ambition is to become an engineer and create new computers to help solving people’s future problems.

With A Little Help From The Cat

There was a little boy called Jamie Becker who was 11 years old and loved his family very much. He also loved his cat, Cutypie, which had a very sensitive nose. The family believed that the cat had psychic powers. Jamie had a brother, Marvin, who was very mischievous and liked to play pranks on his friends. He was 9 years old. Jamie’s family lived on a hill in a village which was very small compared to other places, but big enough to have a school, several houses and some shops in it. The village had one main street with houses on both sides of it, and the Becker’s house was the first one when you entered the village.

It was a Sunday morning in July and it was vacation time so all the kids where happy to play with their friends. The weather was clear and sunny; it was the perfect day to play outside. Jamie and his brother were playing football, while their cat watched from the side of the field. At one point Marvin accidentally threw the ball out of the pitch and Jamie and Cutypie went to retrieve the ball together. The pitch was on a hill so the ball fell for a long time and Jamie and Cutypie had to run for a while after it. While they were trying to get the ball, Marvin decided to run out of the pitch and go after his will for a prank.

When Jamie and Cutypie returned Marvin wasn’t there, so they became very worried of him. They didn’t have any idea of where he went. Jamie called out his name many times. No response. They started to search around and look for his traces, but they didn’t find anything. After about ten minutes Jamie was desperate. If his mom found out that Marvin had been left alone, and since he was the older brother responsible for looking after him it would be a very big problem. But then… Jamie noticed that Cutypie found Marvin’s traces! Jamie was very happy about this and his hope of finding Marvin increased very much.

The screeching noise of the bell infuriates me.

Meanwhile Marvin was running to the house of his friend John, who lived in a large house in the woods not far away from the village. Marvin thought of scaring John by entering in his attic and making sounds of ghosts. They had been talking about ghost stories for all week. Marvin passed by the last house and entered the woods. Nearby was his friend’s house. Marvin had to stealth behind the house to climb up the tall tree behind the attic’s window that was opened. Unfortunately while climbing he slipped on the last branch of the tree and remained hanging from that branch, with no possibility to get down. He understood that no one would help him because he realised no one was in the house.

Jamie and Cutypie set to search. Jamie had no idea of where his brother could have gone and in that moment he only trusted the nose of Cutypie. He only hoped he would find his brother very fast. While thinking, he didn’t even realise that his cat was waiting for him to come. He followed the cat till the house of John, and only reaching there he thought that Marvin was probably doing a prank. Jamie ran to search his brother around John’s house with Cutypie following him. Then he heard Marvin screaming and crying from the tree.

Jamie immediately tried to find a way to put him on the ground, but nothing was really coming to his mind. He was too stressed to think. He thought and thought and thought when… his cat had an idea. He brought Jamie to the warehouse, while Jamie had no idea what the cat was going to do. Then, when he saw what the warehouse had in it he understood.

He took the long ladder he found there, he ran with it to the tree and started to climb it. He was almost at the top, when the ladder started shaking. Jamie didn’t know what was going to happen, or what made the ladder shake. But he knew something… he was going to fall. But miraculously the ladder didn’t collapse.

Jamie was now at the top of the ladder, but the ladder was too short to reach Marvin. He tried and tried, but he couldn’t reach him. At the last try, and the try where he lost all his hope, Jamie was able to climb on the branch where Marvin was waiting for him. He brought him to the ground with a lot of struggling and concentration. Marvin was so happy to be safe on the ground, that he hugged Jamie and Cutypie. They all hugged together for a long time and enjoyed that happy moment.

That day Marvin learned his lessons: never prank somebody, don’t put yourself in danger and never leave to go somewhere else without telling the other members of your group.