Leonard (My Life as a Cat), Carlie Sorosiak [7 ebook reader .txt] 📗

my pockets: a Swiss Army knife, a butterfly net, a variety of pens for writing. Humor is a valued trait among humans, so for an entire year, I exclusively prepared jokes.

How many park rangers does it take to change a light bulb? Twenty-two. Do you get it? Twenty-two! (I wasn’t entirely sure that I understood humor; my species is pure energy and can’t exactly feel in our natural state. But wasn’t there something inherently funny about the curve of a two, let alone two twos?)

Setting off from my home planet, I imagined the feeling of laughter, how it might rattle my belly. It was a nice distraction, considering the strangeness of it all. My species is a hive mind, meaning we think and exist as one, like drops in the ocean of Earth—and I wasn’t prepared for the sensation of leaving them. There was a quiet pop as we separated. Then I was alone, for the first time in three hundred years.

Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with myself. In the distance were the crystallized mountains of my planet, rivers of helium gleaming under stars, and all I could summon was a single thought: For now, goodbye.

The beam of light hummed as I latched on.

To kill time on the journey, I practiced more jokes. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he was genetically hardwired as an Earth creature to do so. Knock-knock? Who’s there? No one. Doors are a human construction and do not exist on other planets. (Ha!)

It’s unclear when things started to go wrong.

Perhaps it was when I began to sprout a tail.

I was four thousand miles above Earth’s atmosphere, and there it was—crooked, with striped fur. I didn’t have the ability to gasp; otherwise, I would have done so. A tail? Unless I was missing something dramatic about humans, that was incorrect. Quickly, I took in my surroundings, awareness hitting me with slow, terrible force: this wasn’t the right route to Yellowstone. In my eagerness to perfect the knock-knock joke, I’d strayed off course, interacting with the wrong elements along the way. Those elements, mixed with Earth’s atmosphere, would turn me into . . .

A cat.

I was a cat, crashing into North America. Faster, faster, landing paws-first in a tree. My claws dug into the branch beneath me, and immediately I coiled around, observing the zigzagged tail attached to my backside. It twitched—almost on its own—as if speaking to me. I could feel my paws tensing, the wind sifting through a large notch in my ear.

And what a sensation: to feel. To feel, finally. To have a body, even if it wasn’t the one I expected. Yet my heart scrambled. Nothing in my studies had prepared me for this. Apart from a few anecdotes, I knew exceptionally little about cats. How could I live for a month as one?

On Earth, I had been very much looking forward to speaking words. I already knew what my favorite ones would be. Tangerine: so festive, rolling from the mouth. Yellowstone: a park that was home to bison and bears, forests and canyons. Soul: the beating in your body. Now I tested them with my throat—with my prickly tongue, horrible fangs poking into my lips—and only gurgling emerged.

The whole thing was entirely my fault. I knew this. Never get distracted is the first rule of space travel. But that didn’t make it any less terrifying: to be alone in a tree, on a new planet, without knowing the language of cats. Was it even possible to communicate with humans this way? Did cats moo, or was that birds? There were all these new sensations, too—things I didn’t expect to feel. The desire to spring from tree branch to tree branch, testing my balance. The way my ears were swiveling. The realization that if I saw an umbrella now, canopy flying open, I might actually be afraid of it.

Suddenly, the tree began to shiver with bursts of wind, and I arched my spine on instinct. I have a spine, I thought. A part of me was thrilled, while a bigger part yelled, Storm! A storm was coming. I contemplated lurching from the tree, but the ground looked soggy, like it would squelch beneath my toes. As a ranger, I would’ve worn boots, so I vowed to find some later, in whatever size was suitable for cats. Preferably leather boots. With some nice streaming shoelaces, and—

Oh! Scents began arriving from all directions: bitter smells, sweet smells. My nose sniffed the air, and I started peering around. The clouds were turning an alarming shade of plum. In my field of vision, I could see only sky, bushes, and a few tall grasses, swaying violently in the breeze.

My tail puffed with fear, which startled me even more. I didn’t know that tails could puff. It seemed to say, Where are we, exactly? And what happens now?

Within fifteen minutes, rain began and refused to stop. Flicking water off my ears did little good; the storm poured sideways, flattening my entire coat. Can cats swim? It was a pressing question, one I asked my tail. But my tail was ignoring me, hiding behind the curve of my legs. Something told me I might not like the answer anyway.

Around the base of the tree, dark water was rising.

And rising.

And—

I saw it in the distance then. The speck of a rowboat bobbing toward me. Through the thunderous rain, closer and closer she came: a tiny figure dressed in overalls, a yellow slicker, and boots three sizes too big. Her boat careened wildly in the floodwaters as she yelled words in my direction. They sounded like: “I’VE COME TO SHAVE YOU!”

Could this possibly be right? I wasn’t immediately fond of my fur, but would baldness improve my look? The idea alarmed me. More alarming was the wind, which was picking up speed. Imagine you are on a new planet, experiencing gravity for the first time. Now imagine that hurricane-force winds are threatening to lift you into