Rogi's Trip to the UK

Rogi never asked to be a world traveler. A dapper little tuxedo cat with a heart three sizes too big and a nervous system tuned like a smoke detector, he'd spent his whole life content with a sunny windowsill in Chicago — until the day his humans packed up their lives and decided London needed him too.

The flight was long. Somewhere over the Atlantic, thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean he'd never chosen to cross, Rogi pressed himself into the back corner of his crate and rode out every bump with the quiet, dignified terror of a cat who loves fiercely and startles easily.

When the crate finally came to rest and the door creaked open on the other side, he meowed — not once, but again and again, a small, insistent sound carrying an ocean's worth of where am I and where are you. And then he saw her.

She broke down crying right there, tears of pure relief and joy, so happy to have her boy back that words didn't really work anymore. Rogi, for his part, was not quite ready for that much emotion. He bolted under the couch the second the door opened, tail low, taking stock of this strange new world one whisker at a time.

But cats forgive fast when love is real. A few hours later, he emerged, hopped into her lap like no time had passed at all, and rammed his head into her hand — once, twice, a dozen times — the universal cat signal for okay, I missed you too, don't ever do that again.

Now Rogi has a new city and a new list of ambitions: conquer every bookshelf, windowsill, and precarious countertop London has to offer; strut his tuxedo through the flat like the most dapper resident this side of the Thames; and make his way, eventually, to a market stall selling something fresh and fishy — because a cat who survived an ocean deserves a proper reward on the other side of it.