The plump man only laughed heartily in response, tipping his hat in deference to the young lady. He greeted the two manly suckers (in his private opinion) less respectfully, nodding to both of them. Turning around, and ostentatiously not showing any seriousness, but rather, with the smile of a circus clown, the good-natured Thick-cheeked One took off his hat and draped raincoat, and guided in the darkness of the hallway solely by his own senses and the courtesy of his gut, he hung his clothes on the horned rod with three legs.

Firstly, The Yellow-faced One bowed meekly to the familiar faces, laid his damp-swollen cloak on the back of one of the chairs, and plopped down half-asleep on its neighbor. The chair beneath him gave a dismissive grunt. In a gesture of utter disdain for the irreverence of the chair, The Yellow-faced One pushed it and himself closer to the massive meeting table. The Thick-cheeked One took up a position in a corner couch under the gaudy and listlessly sparkling lampshade.

Enraptured by the wonder of the falling rain, The Hairy One looked at the herds of children of cloudy weather running down the transparent glass. The slow-moving water snails spellbound his thinking abilities. Deluded by the long-lasting impression, he suddenly said that it was raining outside.

With a deep sigh of acknowledgment to the melancholy flow of the day, The Hairy One turned to the guys, keeping in mind the revelation he had just made. He blinked at The Yellow-faced One's hair, which had been transformed by a mighty force into something like a haystack dumped in the river. And he turned away with awkward words, "Ah, well, you already know."

Looking at the drops drumming on the seemingly nonexistent glass, due to its crystal purity, along the edges of which the unyielding mud flows were drying up, The Blue-Eyed One felt thirsty. She wanted a cup of freshly brewed tea. Thus, she excused herself, moving away from the kind-hearted cavalier and asking her colleagues if they would like to drink tea, marched into the kitchen adjacent to the living room.

The iron key rattled again in the lock.

A sinewy figure slowly entered the unlit entrance hall, and at the same time, it aggressively engaged in a fight with something. The sounds of a stubborn struggle were heard. Without any visible signs, the slightly worried Short-nosed One turned his gaze to the shady distance and saw that the newcomer was waging war with his non-folding umbrella.

He crushed and twisted it, almost biting into the fabric stretched on stiff spokes, and the anti-rain dome was not going to give up, even after the cursing guest increased the pressure and began to thump on the top of the strong rival with his bare hands.

Finally anticipating the inevitable defeat, peering out of the gloom of the hallway, the guy of medium height and unlucky build, angrily threw the unharmed umbrella on the floorboard, took off his half-wet jacket and wrapped it around his arm appeared on the threshold of the living room, whose lighting flashed and burned his eyes narrowed to slits.

Secretly, in conversations among themselves on secular matters, the audience called him "crooked-toothed", because his teeth were not known for straightness. And there was nothing funnier than calling a crooked-toothed guy as a crooked-toothed one. For the bearer of the nickname, it would be nothing more offensive to realize the dishonesty of his companions. And although no one had ever mentioned The Crooked-toothed One as "crooked-toothed" in front of him, he guessed that they were secretly laughing at him so offensively.

So this insecure young man leaned against the door frame, hovered with the toe of his shoe on the protruding wooden border of the two rooms and silently stared at the floor, without saying hello to anyone.

The Short-nosed One casually led a look of burning love to The Blue-eyed One, who came out of the kitchen and complained that the owner of this flophouse was not characterized by diligence and cleanliness, since amid the mess he had made, she could not find a teapot. In order to quickly resolve the problem with the lack of kitchen utensils, the girl menacingly invited one of the noblest gentlemen to help her in an unprecedented search.

All the males hesitated and looked at each other. With an exasperated sigh, The Short-nosed One realized that in order to be more convincing in his benign intentions to marry the blue-eyed girlfriend, he should raise his butt from the armchair and that he therefore could not evade this labor duty.

He had already begun to wave his arms clumsily like a windmill, showing every sign of full combat readiness, but from the mouth of the man, who spread his fleshy paws on the armrests of the sofa in the opposite corner of the room, came an unsatisfactory shout. The meaninglessness of the initial fragment of the shout was compensated by the addition of a commanding and at the same time caressing tone, "Didn't you hear? Do the cutie a favor, get up from the chair and help her."

The Yellow-faced One, who had jumped up abruptly, gritted his teeth, raised his hands obsequiously and smiled maliciously, regardless of the almost overturned chair. The rare piece of furniture was clearly not trained for such a fast jet take-off. Stimulated by the cry, the volunteer immediately went to the kitchen under the accompanying gaze of The Thick-cheeked One, full of ostentatious contentment.

For a few seconds, the room was silent, punctuated by the occasional clamor of the mass migration of artiodactyls coming from the kitchen. The Yellow-faced One was scurrying haphazardly around the kitchen, opening the drawers of the sets and opening the doors of the cupboards at random in search of the lost teapot.

Sighing regretfully in his appointed place in the crowded Boardroom, The Hairy One, as was his custom at such hours, was under the weight of a vexatious mental turmoil. At such hours, he was tempted to start a delicate, and around the time, critical discussion of some urgent problem, which unceremoniously and persistently overwhelmed his heart with a thirst for chatter. And every time his life and philosophical reflections were "joyfully" perceived by the permanent public. Having considered it his duty to convey the truth of life to the respected gentlemen, having primly coughed to attract public attention to his terribly abstruse person, The Hairy One opened his mouth to lodge a beneficial mental dish in ignorant minds.

He had to cough and clear his throat three more times before the vast majority of the audience noticed him.

"Do you guys know what drives a person?" The lecturer beamed.

There was a moment of deathly silence. The lover on the other side of the living room looked away, anticipating an entertaining stream of moralizing.

"They say that the thirst for self-affirmation," The Hairy One resumed his monologue, "is what drives people; it is their engine. Then envy is the fuel on which it runs. Moreover, listening to people is like listening to trees. Like, they wave their branches in time to your conversations, but in fact they react to our lamentations and hardships with indifference, because they are just deaf logs. All their outward kindness is just how the wind whips their branches around, making them look like living things."

"What about us, or even, what about you?" Someone's only wounded voice stood up for the truth.

"I'm like a tree, but with a thirst for profit, which proves my presence here and now. As a matter of fact, so is yours."

"This is the most stupidly idiotic conceit I've ever heard," The Thick-cheeked One's husky voice roared, and his contemptuously sharp gaze stabbed straight into the self-styled truth-teller's forehead, imagining his head as a natural target. The Hairy One grinned humbly.

The Crooked-toothed One grunted, his eyes fixed on the parquet floor beneath his feet. The Yellow-faced One, who had hurriedly returned from the kitchen after vainly sorting through the pile of unwashed plates spread out everywhere, wagged a finger at the speaker, pushing his chair and himself away from the edge of the table so that he could recline more comfortably and ask the educator a good question about what he had said.

The Blue-eyed One came out of the kitchen. She displayed a genuine dislike for the chaos on the battlefield and reasoned sensibly that the teapot could not just disappear anywhere, which means that its owner himself took it somewhere. Probably so that they would drop dead from an unquenchable thirst, waiting for him.

The girl stepped out of the kitchen with her reddened face, and puffed up with an overabundance of severity, returned to the arms of her prospective husband. The prospective husband made a sensual kaleidoscope of emotions from his face: from empathy to treacherous fright caused by the mood of the sweet lover, who at that moment looked like an angry bear.

She sat down, and the lovers averted their eyes and chattered about something of their own.

The Crooked-toothed One squirmed on the spot. It turned out that he had smoked all the nicotine substitutes and needed the real ones right now. He glanced at the smokers who responded by dismissing their unhealthy activities and saying that they themselves were without soothing drugs. The only one who did not speak either positively or negatively was The Short-nosed One, who went out of his way to unconvincingly tell his girlfriend about some far-off dream.

The Crooked-toothed One walked up to their sweet couple with a determined gait and asked the dreamy man for a cigarette.

Having given the penultimate one of the available portions of the "medicine", with the words, "Should I share it with all of you? But I'm kind today, because you freaking beggars will soon all be so rich that you will find the courage and the means to provide yourself with cigarettes." he sent the cigarette finder to The Hairy One for a light.

In a multi-structured rush of argumentation, The Hairy One tried to prove to everyone that a person is just an overly intelligent animal, and completely did not resist the request to give out a gas lighter, being in a state akin to hypnosis.

The publicity-averse Crooked-toothed One tiptoed out onto the balcony, from which a trill of raging clouds sounded.

Lightning flashed. Bad thunder alarmingly shook the residents of nearby apartments.

Unexpectedly, The Short-nosed One found himself arguing with himself at some point. The blue-eyed companion leaned back on the pliable backrest of the couch, crossing her arms and looking perplexedly at the excited face of her boyfriend. When his newly-hatched fiance had finished babbling, and this happened with incredible suddenness, the girl said with all the inherent strictness of character that she intended to puff on a cigarette at once.

The Short-nosed One's face softened at first, taking on the right shape for an unheard-of situation, and hardened in condemnation.

"Since when do you smoke?" a timid voice came out of the cigarette case keeper's mouth.

"Ever since you quit smoking. By the way, if you quit at all, you don't have to carry cigarettes. So I'm even doing you an invaluable favor."

Tired of resisting and engaging in another self-imposed challenge to the right to smoke one last cigarette, The Short-nosed One went limp. The cigarette case emptied rapidly. And the undefeated, underhanded fan of bad smoke valiantly made her way to the balcony, keeping company with another smoker. The Short-nosed One felt lonely and irrevocably vowed never to flatter anyone's unsavory inclinations but his own.

Nevertheless, The Short-nosed One found himself wondering that only ten minutes ago his girlfriend had decided that she detested a bunch of smokers. But then he realized that she had an inexhaustible sense of humor - so unexplored and incomprehensible that he'd better stop sharing jokes that weren't funny enough for her to understand.

With a face that showed no emotion other than brooding as a result of the swarming thoughts inside his skull, The Thick-cheeked One put one hand on the other and nervously flexed his fingers and tugged at his stiff knuckles. A rough crunch, heard behind the guy, fairly disconcerted and frankly caused some inconvenience and simply pushed him to carelessly stamp his foot and publicly apologize.

With untrained smoothness and similarity, they both looked at a wall clock, imitating synchronized swimmers.

The short arrow had to make a series of final steps to intersect with its elongated copy at the highest point. With sadness in his smoky eyes, The Hairy One began to hum one of the familiar front-line verses in a muffled voice, having exhausted the motivation to persuade anyone of anything.

The last person to arrive at the unsightly hideout was no longer a middle-aged man - a little stooped, but not devoid of dignity owing to such visual disorganization. His thick beard was streaked with gray lawns and fields. His advanced age dominated his limping walk and made no secret of its direct intrusion into the old man's unsweetened life. Still, the obvious rheumatism did not prevent him from quickly unlocking the door and jumping into the hallway, the boundaries of which could only be learned by touch.

No one has bothered to turn on the lights until now. In this connection, a raucous growl emerged from within the sepulchral darkness of the hallway, followed by a short growl, and then there was a crackle of breaking brushwood and truly malevolent shouts with hoarseness.

Shortnose, who was known to have seen through the narrow path to the living room from his vantage point, discovered how The Hoarse-voiced One had kicked the unattended umbrella in obvious anger, which was a nasty obstacle in the way of the owner of this modest apartment. The Crooked-toothed One cowered against the doorjamb and pressed his chest against it.

The Short-nosed One, who was known to have seen through the narrow path to the living room from his vantage point, discovered how The Hoarse-voiced One had kicked the unattended umbrella in obvious anger, which was a nasty obstacle in the way of the owner of this modest apartment. The Crooked-toothed One cowered against the doorjamb and pressed his chest against it.

In the meantime, everyone gave a huge share of their attention to what was happening in the ignorance of their eyes. Now it was absolutely plain that this apartment was worthy of the title of a model of a sacred place. After all, it was quite realistic, judging by the fact that all the members of the gathering felt that the great hour had come, since they had successfully endured each other's company.

As everyone was assembled, it was possible to start the main part of the ceremony. The Hoarse-voiced One had the same thought. So he moved closer to the table. They all stared at the small object in his hands, swaddled in rags. It didn't take a big brain to figure out what the object was.