A Tale from Pete the Cat

It was a Tuesday, a day that typically held the promise of a particularly foolish robin who frequented the feeder just outside the living room window. I was settled in for the show, my tail giving a slow, anticipatory thump against the velvet cushion. That’s when my human appeared on the *other* side of the glass, armed with a spray bottle and a small, flat tool. A sense of dread, cold and sharp, trickled down my spine. With a strange precision, she began applying ghostly circles to my window. One by one, they appeared like cataracts forming over the eye of the world. My pristine view of the garden was being systematically vandalized with these sterile, frosted crop circles. My initial investigation was thorough. I pressed my nose to the glass, attempting to sniff out the nature of this intruder. I batted gently at one of the circles, but my paw met only the familiar cold of the pane; the true culprit was outside, beyond my reach, a fact that was profoundly irritating. The world beyond was now a maddening mosaic of clarity and blur. The robin arrived, but he was no longer a sharp, vibrant creature of detail. Through the frosted film, he was a smudge of red, a soft-focus dream of a bird. The thrill of the imagined hunt was gone, replaced by a vague, impressionistic melancholy. I turned my back on the window in disgust and retired to the rug for a protest nap. I was awoken not by a sound, but by a shift in the very atmosphere of the room. The late afternoon sun, now low in the sky, was streaming through the window. But it was not the usual golden rectangle on the floor. The light, filtered through those 21 cursed discs, had been transformed. Drifting across the far wall and onto the ceiling were soft, shimmering orbs of light. They moved with the silent, stately grace of planets, glowing gently as they sailed through the air. They were uncatchable, untouchable, and utterly mesmerizing. My cynicism wavered. This was not a toy to be shredded or a creature to be stalked. It was a phenomenon. I rose and began a slow, deliberate dance with the floating lights, leaping not to catch, but to pass through them, to feel the ghost of warmth on my fur. The human saw me and made a cooing noise, believing it to be a simple game. She was wrong. This was a celestial event. They had taken my birds, yes, but they had given me a galaxy to command in my own living room. The stickers were not a toy; they were a tool that had inadvertently created a masterpiece. A worthy trade, I decided. But I’ll never let them know they got it right.