R. C. Weissenberg
To be exiled from the moon was to be kicked out of a reject colony. He sailed on the satellite of a satellite, and not a very good one, either. It was a cheap plastic thing that could barely hold him, much less this wretched glowing cat. It meowed.
“Be quiet,” he hissed at the cat.
And what did he do to deserve this? Nothing, he’d reply.
And he’d be right. He had reduced an immensely important object to absolute nothingness. He had permanently removed, from existence, a noblewoman’s daughter’s precious cat.
Little by little, the fabric of the cosmos, or at least this corner of the cosmic rug, frayed and unraveled. The daughter’s mood warped, her parents were tilted off their axes, events that weren’t supposed to happen occurred anyways, with terrible consequences. The watchers outside the world observed this and deemed him fit for deletion. But to remove him from existence would be to set the same sort of thing in motion, so they just moved him a little bit. To a plastic satellite. With the de-incarnated holograph of the cat.
The cat meowed.
He could never go back to the moon, which he hated anyway, and was stuck on this puny plastic planet, which he hated more. He wondered why he deleted the cat in the first place, but he couldn’t remember.
The anti-cat meowed again.
“Can you shut up,” he yelled at the phantom feline.
But the cat didn’t – couldn’t – listen. It didn’t really exist.
He doubted if his crime merited such punishment, seeing as the cat was still around, in its own way. But he could do nothing about it now. From this angle, the moon reflected no light from the sun. The only thing that shone in the dark, unfortunately, was the holographic cat, the emblem of his crime.
It meowed.
***
R.C. Weissenberg is a writer of various things, who spends most of his time in the Southwestern United States. He enjoys sketching, playing guitar, and reading obsessively.