The Smallest Push
Milo pushed off the wall and asked his question before his toes left the floor. "Pip, how does anything hold on up here?" Pip's ears went straight up. He floated beside Milo with his tail out stiff, like a brush. The long corridor of Space Station Nine hummed its low night hum. Milo ran his palm down the handrail. It was ribbed rubber, warm from the lamps, and it squeaked under his thumb. Everything on the station had something to grip: hooks, loops, little rough patches sewn into the walls. Milo's socks had bumps on the soles. Still, he kept drifting away from the floor.
He gave the rail a push, to show Pip how easy it was. The push was far too big. Milo went down the corridor sideways, slow as a leaf in water. He met the padded wall with his shoulder and bounced off it gently. The padding felt like a quilted coat, soft and stitched in squares. Pip turned one lazy circle and ended up upside down, which did not bother him at all. Milo laughed into his sleeve so he would not wake the sleeping shift. "That was more push than I meant," he whispered. He hooked two fingers in a loop and hung there, turning.
The garden room was at the warm end of the station, behind a soft round door. Milo went in slowly this time, one finger on the frame. Inside it smelled of soil and mint and wet string. Leaves stood out in every direction, because up here leaves did not know which way down was. Milo touched a bean leaf. It was velvet on one side and ribbed on the other, like the rail. A small tomato had come loose and was drifting past the lamps, turning as it went. Pip watched it with his nose. Milo caught it in both hands, gently, and held it against his chest.
Pip noticed first. His ears tipped forward and his whiskers twitched toward the tallest bean vine. On the underside of a leaf sat a ladybird, smaller than Milo's smallest fingernail. Her shell was red going brown at the edges, polished like a bead. Milo had heard there were ladybirds in the garden, hired to eat the greenfly, but he had never met one. He came closer without pushing anything. The leaf did not even shiver. "Hello," said Milo, very quietly. The ladybird walked across the underside of the leaf, upside down, perfectly calm, and did not drift off into the air at all.
Milo watched her feet. Each step took hold of the leaf fuzz and let go again, hold and let go, slower than he expected. She never hurried. She never pushed. When she turned, she turned with one foot at a time. Milo tried it on the handrail with his fingertips, walking them along the ribs, holding and letting go. His body swung around behind his hands like a slow flag, but his hands stayed put. "Slow hands, soft feet, and let the air help," he whispered to Pip. Pip floated beside him with his paws tucked in, listening the way foxes listen, with his whole face.
Across the garden room was the round window, and Milo wanted to reach it. He aimed. He pushed off the frame with both feet, hard, the way you push a swing. He crossed the room in one breath and missed the rail completely. He spun past the mint tray, past a hanging cloud of water beads, and ended up pressed against the ceiling netting with his hair standing up. The netting was knotted rope, rough and friendly under his cheek. Pip came paddling after him through the air, slowly, legs going, ears going. Milo breathed out. "Too much again," he said. "Much too much."
Something tickled his knuckle. The ladybird had come too, drifting the whole way on nothing much, and landed exactly where she meant to. Her feet gripped his skin with hundreds of tiny hairs, lighter than a crumb, stickier than a crumb. Milo held his hand very still. She walked from his knuckle to his wrist, over the ridge of his sleeve, and the sleeve did not even crease. Her whole journey across him took as long as a yawn. Pip leaned in until his cream muzzle almost touched Milo's thumb. Nobody moved fast. The lamps hummed. The mint smelled green and cold.
So Milo tried it her way. He let go of the netting with everything except one finger, and pushed with that one finger only. He moved. Slowly, but he moved, with the leaves sliding past his shoulder. He had time to see things he usually flew by: a bead of water sitting in a hole in the soil, the fuzz on a new leaf, a bean curled up like a sleeping ear. He reached the handrail and caught it with two fingers. No bump. No spin. The ladybird rode on his wrist the entire way, holding on with her hundred small feet.
Pip wanted to try. He pushed off the edge of the mint tray with one back paw, hardly at all, and floated out into the middle of the room, russet and round, turning very slightly. Milo put out his arm, and Pip bumped into his sleeve and stuck there, paws in the wool. His fur was cool at the tips and warm underneath. "Slow hands, soft feet, and let the air help," Milo told him, and Pip's ears flattened happily. Together they moved along the rail, finger by finger, paw by paw, past the vines, toward the big round window at the end.
On the way, Milo gathered the loose things. The tomato went back into its clip. Three water beads came together when he herded them with a cupped palm, and he tipped them into the soil, where they soaked in and went dark. He carried the ladybird last. He held his wrist flat against the leaf she had come from and waited. She stepped off, one foot at a time, with no hurry in her at all, and went on under the leaf to look for greenfly. Milo stayed a moment longer than he needed to, just to watch her walking upside down.
Then the window. Earth was turning below, blue and white and slow, with a thin bright line around its edge. The glass was cold under Milo's palm, and a soft fur of frost had grown in one corner where the pane met its frame. He touched it, and it melted under his finger into a wet dot. Pip put his nose on the glass and left a small cloud there, which faded. The night lamps dropped one notch, the way they did at this hour. The hum went lower. Milo's eyes felt heavy in the nice way, the way that means soon.
He did not push off hard. He gave the rail one small nudge with two fingers and let that be enough. The warm air from the garden moved toward the sleeping end of the station, and it took them with it, Milo first, Pip tucked against his chest with his tail wrapped over Milo's arm. They passed the quilted wall. They passed the loops and the rough patches. Nothing had to be grabbed. "Slow hands, soft feet, and let the air help," Milo said, almost without sound, and the corridor carried them both along like a river carrying two leaves.
The sleeping nook had a blanket with a zip and a pillow strapped at the top. Milo slid in and the blanket closed around him, brushed and soft on the inside. Pip settled along his chest and went heavy, the way foxes go heavy when they decide to stay. Milo could feel the ribs of the rail still in his fingertips, and the fuzz of the leaf, and the tiny grip of six small feet. Below them, far below, Earth kept turning, holding the station up the way it always did. Milo stopped holding on to anything, and was carried into sleep.
