“They always said cats answer to no one. Turns out, they were piloting the ship the whole time.”

The saucer had been sitting in the field behind the house for three days when Tangerine found it. The dome was cracked open just slightly — just enough for a curious cat to push inside and take a look. He had taken a look. He had also knocked the red button with his paw, entirely by accident.

The craft had lifted very smoothly. He had barely spilled.

What surprised him most about space was not the silence, not the stars, not even the breathtaking curvature of the planet below. It was that, from up here, everything smelled like absolutely nothing. No birds. No garden soil. No other cats. Just clean, empty, endless nothing — and somehow, Tangerine found this deeply restful.

He had figured out the controls by the second orbit. The joystick responded well to his right paw. The red button, he now understood, was best left alone. The green lights meant something good. The panel hummed at a frequency that was almost indistinguishable from purring, and so he purred back at it, and something in the craft seemed to settle.

He did not know where he was going. He had never been the kind of cat who needed to know. He curled his tail, rested his chin on the console edge, and watched the stars scroll past the dome with the same expression he had once worn watching fish in a tank — completely absorbed, perfectly at ease, not going anywhere in particular.
Going everywhere, all at once.