Сборник рассказов на Английском языке

Василий Мантуленко

Сборник рассказов на Английском языке

PAWS, LAUGHS & LOYALTY

50 Stories about Friendship, Animals, and Humour

An Extracurricular Reader for English-Language Schools

Level: C1 (Advanced)

Annotation

This collection brings together fifty short, original stories written for advanced (CEFR C1) learners of English. Each story is self-contained and can be read independently, in any order, in roughly the time of a single lesson or homework session. The stories draw on three recurring themes — friendship, animals, and everyday humour — and are intended for extracurricular reading in schools with an in-depth English programme.

Each story ends with two short discussion questions suitable for classroom conversation, written work, or independent reflection. Vocabulary and sentence structure are pitched at C1 level: learners should expect some idiomatic expressions, varied sentence length, and a wide working vocabulary, but no highly specialised or archaic language.

This edition contains the complete set of fifty stories.

Contents

Fifty stories, in five thematic groups of ten

1. The Cat Who Ran for Mayor Humour / Animals

2. A Parrot with a Grudge Humour / Animals

3. The Tortoise and the Skateboard Animals / Friendship

4. Best Friends and the Missing Sandwich Friendship / Humour

5. Grandpa's Goat Business Animals / Humour

6. The Hedgehog in the Post Box Animals / Humour

7. Two Rivals and One Umbrella Friendship / Humour

8. The Dog Who Judged Talent Shows Animals / Humour

9. My Neighbour, the Amateur Beekeeper Humour / Friendship

10. The Day the Ducks Took Over the School Animals / Humour

11. The Squirrel Who Stole My Homework Humour / Animals

12. A Very Reluctant Best Man Friendship / Humour

13. The Rabbit Who Ran the Book Club Animals / Humour

14. The Goldfish Diplomat Animals / Friendship

15. Two Left Feet and a Very Patient Llama Animals / Humour / Friendship

16. The Cardboard Box Incident Friendship / Humour

17. Grandma's Racing Pigeons Animals / Friendship

18. The Day I Adopted My Rival Friendship / Humour

19. The Owl Who Wouldn't Leave the Library Animals / Humour

20. The Great Sock Puppet Peace Treaty Friendship / Humour

21. The Chess Club Chicken Humour / Animals

22. The Cat My Sister Swore Was Imaginary Animals / Humour / Friendship

23. The Longest Silence in Locker 114 Friendship

24. The Ferret Who Failed Retirement Animals / Humour

25. Two Left Wellies and a Flooded Campsite Friendship / Humour

26. The Piano Teacher's Suspicious Cat Animals / Humour / Friendship

27. The Day We Traded Houses Friendship / Humour

28. Miss Featherstone's Chicken Empire Animals / Friendship / Humour

29. The Hamster Relay Animals / Humour / Friendship

30. The Best Interview I Ever Gave a Dog Animals / Friendship / Humour

31. The Great Wheelbarrow Race Friendship / Humour

32. My Grandfather's Impossible Puzzle Friendship

33. The Cow Who Wouldn't Come Home Animals / Friendship / Humour

34. The Worst Duet in School History Animals / Humour / Friendship

35. The New Kid and the Old Tree House Friendship / Animals

36. The Cockatoo Who Stole My Diary Animals / Humour

37. The Longest Game of Hide and Seek Friendship / Humour / Animals

38. Two Rival Ice Cream Vans and a Very Loyal Beagle Humour / Friendship / Animals

39. The Shy Violinist and the Barn Cat Animals / Friendship

40. The Signal Flags of Willow Creek Friendship / Animals

41. The Umbrella Policy of Flat 4B Friendship / Humour

42. The Tadpole Trade Animals / Friendship / Humour

43. My Brother's Imaginary Business Partner Friendship / Humour

44. The Longest Losing Streak Friendship / Humour

45. The Peacock Who Ran the School Garden Animals / Humour

46. Two Bikes and One Very Determined Goose Animals / Humour / Friendship

47. The Understudy's Best Friend Friendship

48. Grandad's Fishing Boat and the Seal Who Wouldn't Leave Animals / Friendship

49. The Great Snail Racing Championship Animals / Humour / Friendship

50. The Last Day of Camp Kestrel Friendship / Animals / Humour

1. The Cat Who Ran for Mayor

Humour / Animals

Nobody in the small town of Little Hollow could remember exactly whose idea it had been, but by the time the local election rolled around, a ginger cat named Biscuit had somehow become a registered candidate for mayor. It began, as these things often do, as a joke among the regulars at Maple Street Café. Biscuit had a habit of sitting in the café window, surveying the street with an expression of profound disapproval, and one rainy afternoon someone joked that he looked more competent than either of the actual candidates. Within a week, someone had printed posters. Within two, Biscuit had more supporters than anyone cared to admit.

Fifteen-year-old Priya, who lived above the café with her grandmother, was the one who ended up managing the campaign, mostly because she was the only person willing to take it seriously enough to do the paperwork. She found herself explaining to the county clerk, with a completely straight face, that yes, the candidate did indeed meet the residency requirement, having lived at the same address for his entire life. The clerk, an unflappable man named Mr. Doyle, simply raised an eyebrow and stamped the form. "Every town needs a bit of nonsense," he said. "Might as well be organised nonsense."

What surprised Priya was how the joke slowly stopped being only a joke. Biscuit's "policies" — dreamed up by her and her best friend Tomasz over long afternoons on her balcony — were mostly gentle jabs at the real candidates, who had spent months arguing about a proposed car park while ignoring the fact that the town's only playground had a broken swing. "Biscuit promises more naps for everyone and fewer arguments about parking," read one poster. It was meant to be funny. But underneath the joke was something true: people were tired of politicians who talked past each other, and a cat, whatever his limitations, could not talk past anyone.

Tomasz, who was hopeless at drawing but insisted on designing the posters anyway, produced a portrait of Biscuit wearing a tiny paper crown that looked less like royalty and more like a party hat that had lost an argument with gravity. Priya kept meaning to redo it properly. She never did, and in the end the crooked crown became the campaign's unofficial symbol, printed on badges that half the town wore, including, to everyone's astonishment, the actual sitting mayor.

The two actual candidates reacted to their unexpected rival in strikingly different ways. Councillor Briggs, who had held the seat for nine years and treated every question as a personal insult, refused even to acknowledge Biscuit's existence, which only made the joke funnier to everyone watching. His opponent, Ms. Okafor, a softly spoken teacher who had never run for anything before, took the opposite approach: she turned up to the café one afternoon, ordered a coffee, and asked Priya, entirely seriously, whether Biscuit might consider an endorsement. "He's a cat," Priya said. "I'm aware," Ms. Okafor replied. "I'd still like the badge."

By the third week, the campaign had acquired its own peculiar momentum. Tomasz organised a "town hall," held in the café itself, at which Biscuit sat on a cushioned chair at the head of the table while Priya fielded questions on his behalf, translating his silence into policy with the deadpan confidence of a professional spokesperson. Someone asked about drainage on Elm Street. "Biscuit is deeply concerned about the drainage on Elm Street," Priya announced, while Biscuit licked a paw, utterly unconcerned about anything. The room, packed rather more tightly than anyone had expected for a joke event, laughed until several people had to wipe their eyes.

Not everyone found it funny. A letter arrived at the local paper, signed only "A Concerned Resident," accusing the whole business of making a mockery of civic responsibility at a time when the town faced real problems. Priya read it twice, stung, and considered quietly withdrawing Biscuit's name before the vote. It was her grandmother, of all people, who talked her out of it, pointing out that the letter had at least gotten more people reading about the actual issues — the playground, the drainage, the years of stalled arguments — than either candidate's official leaflets ever had. "Sometimes," her grandmother said, "you need something silly to make people look at something serious."

On election night, Biscuit did not win, of course — write-in votes for a cat are not, whatever anyone hoped, legally binding — but he received an almost respectable four hundred and twelve votes, enough that the local paper ran the story on its front page under the headline "CAT NARROWLY LOSES, DIGNITY INTACT." More importantly, the actual winner, Ms. Okafor, stood up at her victory speech and promised, with a completely serious face, that fixing the playground swing would be the first item on her agenda, "since Biscuit's campaign was, if nothing else, right about that."

Councillor Briggs, defeated and visibly displeased about losing to a teacher he had never taken seriously, muttered something to a reporter about the whole election having been "undermined by novelty candidates," a complaint the paper printed in full, next to a photograph of Biscuit asleep in the café window, magnificently unbothered by the accusation. Priya cut that page out too, and pinned it beside the front-page headline, so that anyone reading the framed clippings would understand exactly how seriously some people had taken a cat's imaginary candidacy.

The local radio station, sensing a good story, invited Priya on air the following weekend, and she found herself, rather to her own astonishment, fielding questions from the host with the same deadpan confidence she had used at the town hall, explaining Biscuit's "platform" as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a cat to have policy positions. Ms. Okafor called in halfway through to congratulate her, live, on running "the most honest campaign this town has seen in a decade," a compliment that made Priya blush so hard Tomasz later claimed you could hear it over the radio.

Priya framed the front page and hung it in the café, next to the window where Biscuit still sat every afternoon, watching the street with the same look of quiet disapproval, entirely unaware that he had, for one strange autumn, been the most popular figure in Little Hollow. Tomasz suggested they run him again in four years, and had already, rather worryingly, begun sketching a new and even more asymmetrical crown. Priya said they'd see. Neither of them really doubted that they would.

Discussion Questions

1. Why do you think the joke campaign eventually influenced something real in the town?

2. In your own words, explain what Mr. Doyle means by "organised nonsense." Do you agree that towns need this?

2. A Parrot with a Grudge

Humour / Animals

Mrs. Alvarez had owned Ferdinand the African Grey parrot for eleven years, and in that time he had learned to say a great many things, most of them acquired from her nephew Diego, who visited every summer and apparently could not go five minutes without swearing at video games. By the time Diego was seventeen, Ferdinand's vocabulary was, in Mrs. Alvarez's words, "broad, colourful, and entirely his own fault."

This would have remained a private embarrassment had Ferdinand not developed, that particular July, a grudge against Diego's new friend Samuel, whom Diego had brought round twice and who had made the fatal error of laughing at the bird the first time he squawked something unrepeatable. Parrots, it turns out, remember insults with the precision of accountants. From then on, whenever Samuel appeared, Ferdinand would puff himself up to twice his size, fix him with one round yellow eye, and deliver, in a voice uncannily like Diego's, a string of commentary that made Mrs. Alvarez choke on her tea and made Samuel go the colour of a tomato.

Diego found this hilarious for approximately the first four visits. By the fifth, he had started to worry that Samuel, who was new to the neighbourhood and did not yet have many friends, might stop coming round altogether rather than face the bird's judgement one more time. So Diego did what any self-respecting seventeen-year-old with an unhelpful parrot does: he consulted the internet, found several contradictory articles about "reconditioning parrot behaviour," and settled on a plan that mostly involved bribing Ferdinand with sunflower seeds every time Samuel entered the room without incident.

It did not work quickly. For two weeks, Ferdinand accepted the seeds with the air of a bird taking a bribe under protest, and insulted Samuel anyway, seeds or no seeds. Mrs. Alvarez, watching this small domestic drama unfold from her armchair, offered the unhelpful observation that Ferdinand had once held an identical grudge against the postman for nearly a year, over a delivery mishap nobody could even remember the details of any more, and had only relented once the postman started greeting him by name every single morning without fail, rain or shine, for months on end. "He doesn't forgive quickly," she said, "but he does eventually forgive thoroughly."

Samuel, to his credit, took the postman story as a kind of instruction manual. He started bringing his own seeds, offering them himself rather than leaving it to Diego, and eventually just talking to the parrot directly, in the low, patient voice you might use with someone who had been badly hurt once and had trust issues as a result. "I know I laughed," he told Ferdinand one afternoon, entirely seriously, while Diego watched from the doorway trying not to laugh himself. "I shouldn't have. You're allowed to be annoyed. I'd just like it if we could move on." Ferdinand responded by biting the proffered seed clean in half and hurling the other portion to the floor, which Samuel, with impressive optimism, chose to interpret as partial progress.

There were setbacks. One Saturday, Diego made the mistake of laughing himself at something Ferdinand said mid-tirade, and the bird, apparently deciding the entire visit was a conspiracy against him, refused to come out of his cage for the rest of the afternoon, sulking with a theatrical thoroughness that Mrs. Alvarez said reminded her uncomfortably of Diego's own teenage strops. Samuel apologised again the following week regardless, bringing an extra-large bag of seeds by way of what he called "compound interest on the apology," a phrase Ferdinand naturally could not appreciate but which made Mrs. Alvarez laugh so hard she had to sit down.

Whether Ferdinand understood a word of any of it is, naturally, impossible to know. But something shifted. By August, he had reduced his commentary to an occasional muttered remark, delivered without real venom, more habit than hostility, and by the time Samuel left for university that September, Ferdinand had taken to whistling the first three notes of Samuel's ringtone whenever his phone buzzed, which Mrs. Alvarez took as the closest thing to an apology the bird was ever going to offer.

Diego, meanwhile, found himself oddly moved by the whole business, and began to wonder, not entirely as a joke, whether Ferdinand's grudge had actually taught him something about his own friendships — the way a single careless laugh could linger far longer than the person who'd laughed ever realised, and the way patient, unglamorous effort, repeated often enough, could eventually wear even the most stubborn resentment down to nothing. He mentioned this once to Samuel, who considered it for a moment and said only, "I think you're giving the parrot too much credit," before admitting, a beat later, that he thought about it rather often himself.

By the time Diego left for his own first year of university the following autumn, Ferdinand had become something of a fixture in both boys' phone conversations, a running joke that outlasted the original grudge by a wide margin. Mrs. Alvarez took to sending photographic updates of Ferdinand's antics to both boys equally, insisting, with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who had watched the whole saga unfold from her armchair, that the bird had done more for their friendship than either of them had managed on their own.

Mrs. Alvarez, for her part, kept a small notebook of Ferdinand's vocabulary over the years, half out of amusement and half, she admitted, as a kind of insurance policy in case any future visitor complained. She showed Diego the entry from that particular summer once, a single line reading only "July: hostilities with S. Peace talks ongoing," written, she said, entirely straight-faced, the week Samuel first started bringing his own seeds, as though she had been tracking a genuine diplomatic negotiation rather than a teenager's attempts to win over an irritable parrot.

Diego still isn't sure whether the sunflower seeds worked, or the patience, or simply time. What he is sure of is that Samuel, who now calls Ferdinand "my old rival" with real affection, sends the bird a bag of unsalted peanuts every Christmas, addressed, without irony, to "Ferdinand Alvarez, Esq." Mrs. Alvarez reads the label aloud to Ferdinand each year, and swears, though nobody quite believes her, that he always listens all the way to the end before losing interest.

Discussion Questions

1. What does Samuel's approach to Ferdinand suggest about how to repair a damaged relationship?

2. Find two idiomatic or colloquial expressions in the text and explain what they mean in context.

3. The Tortoise and the Skateboard

Animals / Friendship

It is a truth universally acknowledged among ten-year-olds that a tortoise is, in almost every respect, a disappointing pet. It does not fetch. It does not perform tricks. It regards the world with the placid indifference of a creature that has survived several ice ages through sheer stubbornness. Leo knew all of this when his grandfather gave him Norman the tortoise for his tenth birthday, and he had spent the better part of a year quietly resenting the gift, comparing his lot unfavourably with his friend Aisha, whose dog Rocket could catch a frisbee in mid-air and generally behaved like something out of an advertisement.

The turning point came, unexpectedly, on a Tuesday in April, when Leo's skateboard rolled off the garden path and came to rest, quite by accident, directly against Norman's shell. Norman, for reasons no one has ever satisfactorily explained, did not retreat into his shell as tortoises are famously supposed to do. Instead he pushed forward, very slowly, and the skateboard rolled a few centimetres across the patio. Leo, who happened to be watching, laughed so hard he had to sit down.

What followed was three weeks of increasingly elaborate experimentation. Leo built Norman a small wooden ramp out of an old shelf his grandfather had been meaning to throw away, painting it a garish shade of green that Aisha, arriving to inspect the project, declared "aggressively festive." She was sceptical at first, folding her arms in the manner of someone who suspected she was about to waste an entire Saturday, but by the second attempt she had abandoned scepticism entirely and was lying flat on the patio, filming Norman's progress on her phone with the dedication of a wildlife documentary crew.

Together they constructed what Leo, with the grandiosity only a ten-year-old can summon, referred to as "the Norman Grand Prix": a chalk-marked course around the garden that Norman navigated, at his own considerable leisure, while pushing a specially adapted mini-skateboard with his front legs. He was, it must be said, extraordinarily bad at it. He frequently lost interest halfway round the course and wandered off towards the lettuce patch instead. Once, memorably, he fell asleep mid-race, prompting a twenty-minute intermission during which Leo and Aisha argued, with enormous seriousness, about whether a sleeping competitor should be disqualified or simply awarded extra time.

Rocket, meanwhile, showed an entirely unexpected interest in the proceedings, trotting alongside the chalk course each afternoon with his ears pricked, occasionally attempting to nudge Norman along with his nose in what Aisha swore was encouragement and Leo suspected was simple impatience. Far from being jealous of the tortoise stealing his afternoons, Rocket appeared to adopt Norman as a sort of ongoing personal project, standing guard at the finish line and greeting each achingly slow completion with a single, dignified bark, as though officiating his own small awards ceremony.

None of this mattered in the slightest to the question of speed. Rocket, for all his frisbee-catching brilliance, had never once made either of them laugh the way Norman did, wobbling determinedly across the patio at a pace that would have embarrassed a garden snail, entirely unbothered by his own incompetence. There is something contagious about a creature who simply does not care whether he is good at something, and Leo found himself, for the first time since the tortoise arrived, genuinely looking forward to afternoons in the garden.

By summer, word had spread around the street, and Norman had something of a small local following. Neighbours would stop by the fence specifically to watch him fail spectacularly at the Grand Prix, placing entirely unofficial bets on his finishing time and cheering, without a trace of irony, when he occasionally managed to complete a full lap without falling asleep or defecting to the lettuce patch. Leo's grandfather, watching from the kitchen window, allowed himself a quiet, satisfied smile — the exact smile, Leo's mother said later, of a man who had known all along exactly what he was doing when he chose that particular birthday gift.

Aisha's parents, watching the whole spectacle develop over their fence, eventually asked whether Rocket could join the Grand Prix as an honorary official rather than a competitor, a suggestion Aisha embraced with tremendous enthusiasm, designing him a small cardboard medal that read "HEAD OF SECURITY" in glitter pen, which he wore, with evident pride, for the remainder of the summer, guarding Norman's chalk-marked track from the neighbour's cat with a seriousness entirely disproportionate to the actual stakes involved.

By the final weekend before school started again, the Grand Prix had become something of a genuine local tradition, complete with a scoreboard Leo kept with scrupulous, entirely meaningless precision, and a small crowd of regulars who brought their own garden chairs. Leo's grandfather was persuaded, after considerable pressure, to award a trophy — an old teacup, repurposed for the occasion — to Norman for what the engraved paper label, in Leo's careful handwriting, called "Outstanding Achievement in Not Caring At All."

Word of the trophy ceremony reached Leo's school by September, thanks largely to Aisha's enthusiastic retelling, and for a brief, glorious fortnight Leo found himself the most sought-after storyteller in his year group, cornered at every break time by classmates demanding to know whether it was really true that a tortoise had a fan club, a scoreboard, and an official Head of Security. Leo, who had spent a full year quietly wishing for a more impressive pet, discovered he rather enjoyed being the person with the strangest and most delightful story to tell.