Tanya’s parents refused to let her get a cat.
No matter how many times Tanya argued that the planet’s environment was fully approved for cats, or that cats had already made their home among the rocks and dust and blue bamboo plants of Odin III, they wouldn’t budge.
Tanya suspected they didn’t want the responsibility of a pet, so she did the next best thing and showered attention on her neighbor’s felines.
That morning, a gray cat with a notched ear rubbed around her legs. Tanya pulled a bag of freeze-dried protein snacks from her backpack. Galactic provided them to its mining crews, but no one enjoyed eating what tasted like paper pulp with a fishy aftertaste. Tanya always rescued trashed snack bags because, as it turned out, cats adored the taste. The gray gobbled the treat up.
Tanya hadn’t seen the gray before, but he seemed happy to see her. He butted his head into her legs whenever she stopped petting him, begging for more attention. The young girl scratched around the fuzzy chin until her watch buzzed. She really needed to get to school or she’d get a tardy card.
Her skinny ponytail threatened to come undone as her feet pounded the road. She slowed upon reaching the communications office near the school. Strangely, the gray cat was sitting by the office door, licking its paws as though it had been there all along. Yet there was only one road into town, and the cat certainly hadn’t been running alongside her. How’d it get there so fast?
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Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative author whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, Stupefying Stories, and others. Her writing has been recognized on the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fiction Longlist, and she has become a fan favorite here for her finely crafted flash fiction pieces on the Stupefying Stories website. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com.
It’s impossible to overstate how crucial Carol has been behind the scenes here, for all her help with The Pete Wood Challenge, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from the Brahma, and more. Therefore, if you haven’t already read it, you really should check out “Six Questions for… Carol Scheina,” if for no other reason than to get the complete (we think) list of everything by her that we’ve published in the past four years.
If you don’t have time for that, though, you should at the very least read “How to Return an Overdue Book to the Summer Library.”
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