The narrator is a young man and aspiring writer who is asked by his aging father to be taken to the hospital after he feels pain in his arm. The narrator takes his notebook and a literary journal and drops his father off at the hospital while he parks the car. When the narrator reaches his father in the emergency room, he finds him arguing with an attendant because no one is seeing to him.

Seeking a hospital directory, the narrator thinks about a contest-winning story in the magazine he brought. The narrator entered his own short story about a runaway kitten that returns to its family pregnant. However, the story lost. The narrator asks a security guard for help, but the guard doesn’t prove to be very useful. When the narrator returns to his father, he decides to write in his notebook.

The narrator’s father asks him what he is writing, which leads the narrator to realize he has rarely written in anyone else’s presence. He doesn’t tell his father that his impulse to write is tied to the pact he made with a supernatural being called the Twelve-tongued God. He prayed to the God to liberate his family from poverty, accepting a pact and trading tongues with the God.