Veri sat on her bed, holding the tiny black kitten in her arms and stroking its thick, soft fur with her finger. Rain beat against the tight-shut windows and the trees outside creaked as the wind rushed through their leaves, but the little room was bright and cozy, with a low fire glowing in the hearth and the faint clicking of the mother’s knitting needles coming from the nearby rocking chair.

The six-year-old girl looked up from the kitten’s soft black body to her mother. The woman’s eyes were half closed, but her fingers worked so quickly they were a blur to Veri, who wished again as she always had that she were as skilled as her mother. Everything she had ever tried to knit came out as a knotty, warped shape, but her mother always perfectly made whatever it was she had in mind. The girl wondered what it was the thick, soft yarn could be forming now, but her young attention span soon turned back to the kitten she held.

“You’re a sleepy little one, aren’t you,” she murmured happily into the soft, tiny ear. “Very sleepy, and very cuddly, too.”

“What did you say, Veri?” her mother asked, turning her head very slightly in the direction of the girl.

Veri looked up. “I was talking to my kitten,” she answered happily, tracing the slightly raised shapes on the top of the cat’s head with a light touch. “I found him on my windowsill this morning.”

“A kitten!” the woman smiled. “Does he have a name yet?”

“No,” Veri answered. “I’m still thinking.”

There was a short pause. “You didn’t say anything about a kitten the rest of the day.” Her mother’s voice sounded the slightest bit reprimanding.

Veri shifted a little on the bed. “No.” Sometimes there were things she just didn’t tell people, and for some reason the kitten had been one of those things. There wasn’t anything, well, special about it, but still. Veri had kept it a bit of a secret.

“Why not?” her mother asked.

“I don’t know,” Veri mumbled. She slid her hand along the kitten’s back uncomfortably, but the feeling soon lifted.

Quiet slowly filled up the room again, and the small lamp’s yellow light gleamed in the thick, reflective glass of the window. Veri’s short, neat auburn ringlets brushed her shoulders as she bent to feel the fur with her face. The warm body of the kitten pressed more, then less, then more firmly on her cheek as it breathed deeply in its slumber, and, laying back onto the pillows, the girl closed her eyes in contentment. She heard the pattering rush of raindrops falling on the window, melting and merging with each other into a sheet of water that slowly slid down the glass, and a distant mumbling sound of quiet thunder.

Veri suddenly looked across the room again. “Oh, Mama, are we going to market tomorrow?” she asked, her deep brown eyes glancing at her mother’s pretty and young, though tired face.

Her mother smiled a little, though not through her now fully-closed eyes. “No, we’re staying home. The weather tonight would make it too hard to travel and to stay out all day.” She shifted her feet slightly into a different position. “Won’t you like that?”

“Oh, yes,” the little girl beamed. “Maybe we can bake those cakes Mrs. Widow likes, you know, the strawberry ones?”

“Mrs. Alison,” the mother laughed, though the sound quickly faded. “And that’s a very thoughtful idea.”

“We have strawberries already, even,” Veri continued happily. “They’re downstairs in the kitchen in a basket on the table.”

“I remember,” her mother answered, but her tone had become softer and now had a touch of sadness in it that Veri could barely perceive. The little girl cocked her head and seemed about to say something more, but the words weren’t there in her mind. She wanted to ask about Mrs. Alison, about what had happened to her that she no longer wore the bright, pretty colors she used to, and that she never laughed anymore. And of course, thinking about that made Veri remember about Mr. Alison, and that made her think about her father, and that brought to mind the thousands of questions she had that nobody had ever answered. Even though she was sure the adults knew the answers, for some reason they always acted like they didn’t. She herself only knew that her father, and many other men, had gone away for a while but were going to come back soon. They were taking a break from the rest of their lives, from farming and everything else they usually did. Probably they were having fun, Veri assumed, and she was glad of it – her father had been so anxious and upset before he had left. He could use a break.

And what about the soldiers who had come to the town? Everyone looked upset and scared when their lines marched through the streets, but Veri couldn’t imagine they were always that serious. One day she had tried to copy their straight, stiff posture, but she had only lasted for a couple of minutes before her back hurt too much to keep it up. There was no way the soldiers could stand like that all the time. They had to relax at some point. Besides, there were times when she could have sworn one of them was sad, or happy, or lonely. If they had feelings, then of course they couldn’t be all bad like everyone seemed to think.