The Wool and the Bark
Cato held the wool square in one hand and pushed off the wall with the other. The square was grey and nubbly, thick as a slice of bread, with one corner worn smooth. He used it on the round windows. Rosa drifted beside him, ears steady, one up and one flopped over. "Feel this," Cato said. "Tell me what it is." Rosa pressed her nose against it and thought for a moment. "Wool," she said. "And a little bit of dust from the garden." Cato laughed and buffed the glass until it went clear. Earth turned below them, blue and slow and quiet.
The station hummed the way it always hummed, low and warm. Cato kept his soft things in a mesh pocket beside his bunk: a strip of crinkled foil, a knot of string, a rubber washer, the wool. He liked how each one answered his fingers differently. Rosa liked them too. She had one treasure of her own, and she carried it in a small net bag. It was a curl of birch bark, pale and papery, ridged like a fingerprint. She had brought it up from the forest floor. "Feel this," she said, and Cato took it in both hands.
The bark was cool at first, then warm. One side was smooth as skin. The other side peeled into thin pale layers, light as breath. Cato held it flat against the humming wall and put his ear to it. The hum came through changed. It sounded like wind moving through a great many leaves at once. Cato had seen trees from the window, in green patches, small as moss on a stone. He had never heard one. He listened for a long time while Earth slid by underneath, and Rosa waited beside him without hurrying him at all.
Later, in the sleeping alcove, Rosa hooked her net bag to the wall and settled into her hammock. The netting was strong and clean and rough. In the morning Cato saw the marks it had left, faint squares pressed into the fur of her cheek. She rubbed them away with one paw and said nothing about them. She had slept in that netting for eleven nights. Cato floated there, turning his wool square over and over. One corner was worn smooth from all the windows. The rest was still thick and nubbly and warm from his hand.
He tried the foil first. It crackled and went cold. He tried the knot of string, which was only string. He tried the rubber washer against his own cheek, and it squeaked. None of them were right, and he already knew which one was. The wool had come up with him from home, folded small inside a sock. It smelled faintly of the garden and faintly of the sock. Cato held it a while longer. Then he pushed off the wall and went to find Rosa, who was watching the sunrise come up the curve of the world.
"Feel this," he said. "Tell me what it is." Rosa took the wool and pressed it to the side of her face, the way she had been pressing at the netting marks. Her flopped ear lay over it. "Wool," she said. "And a little bit of home." "It fits the netting," Cato said. "If you tuck it underneath." Rosa thought about that for the length of one slow breath. Then she opened her net bag and held out the curl of birch bark. Cato took it in both hands. Neither of them said thank you. They did not need to.
They stayed at the round window while the lamps dimmed to their night setting. Rosa folded the wool and held it against her cheek, and her whiskers settled flat, and her flopped ear came down over her paw. Cato kept the bark by his ear. Wind, again, in all those leaves. Earth turned below them, dark and edged with blue, and the hum went on, low and warm, the way it always did. "Feel this," Cato said, slower now. His hand went loose. The bark floated a little way from his fingers and stopped.
Rosa pushed off the wall with the wool still tucked under her chin. She caught the bark in one paw and Cato's sleeve in the other, and she towed him down the corridor, past the dark garden, past the fans. He floated behind her with his heels drifting. In the alcove she guided him into his hammock and clipped the strap across him, and set the birch bark in the mesh pocket where his hand could reach it. Then she climbed into her own netting with the wool against her cheek, and the station carried them both around the world again.