Last Updated on May 24, 2026 by admin
At four-forty in the morning on a Tuesday, in a town that did not yet have any traffic, a waitress at the All-Night Egg on Park Avenue in Worcester, Massachusetts, named Lorena Beckett heard meowing.
She was outside on the curb on her third break. The temperature had dropped to forty-one. The asphalt was wet. The meowing was coming from the storm drain six feet from her left shoe.
She put her cigarette out and got down on her knees.
The kitten was at the bottom of the drain. Black-and-white. Maybe six weeks old. Maybe eight. The drain pit was four feet deep and there was three inches of standing rainwater in the bottom. The kitten was sitting on the half-submerged edge of a flat rock.
Lorena called the diner’s manager. The manager called 911. Worcester Fire Engine 7 arrived at 4:58. They had a junior firefighter on the truck named Adi Solomon who had been on the job eleven weeks. The captain handed Adi the long-handled net.
The thing about a storm-drain rescue is the kitten will run away from the net.
It took twenty-eight minutes. Adi went in on his stomach. The diner’s manager held a flashlight. Lorena talked, on the asphalt, on her elbows, through the grate. She did not stop talking. She said: “Hey, baby. Hey, sweet girl. We’ve got you. We’ve got you. We’ve got you.”
The kitten came up at 5:26 in a Worcester FD towel.
The captain handed her to Lorena. Lorena had not asked for a kitten. Lorena was twenty-six and lived in a third-floor walk-up with two roommates and no cats and a strict no-pets clause.
The kitten sat on Lorena’s coat for thirty-seven minutes while the trucks left and the morning rush started inside the diner and Lorena’s manager said, very gently: “You can bring her inside. Just for the shift.”
Adi Solomon, the firefighter, drove home at 7:14 a.m. He texted his wife: Going to ask you something tonight. He has two daughters, ages four and seven, and a wife named Esther who has wanted a cat for six years and a husband who, until that morning, had said no.
The kitten’s name is Sasha. She lives in Auburn now, in a Cape with a fenced yard, with the firefighter who pulled her out of the storm drain and the seven-year-old who sleeps with one hand on the cat’s back.
Lorena still works the night shift at the All-Night Egg. She calls Esther on Sundays.
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