Celeste swallowed the lump in her throat and took a deep breath, as deep as a little mouse could take. She turned, her eyes following the railing up, up, up into the shadows, and started to climb. Her little claws clinging, she scaled the slope higher and higher until the hallway below her looked distant and foreign. Never in her life had Celeste been so high or felt so dizzy, or so exhilarated. She had to pause about halfway up, a bit out of breath. She glanced down. A flashing sense of vertigo filled her, and her ears blazed pink with a rush of blood. She felt enormously tiny in the cavernous hallway.

But she began to notice things that she had not seen before. There was the top of the tall, looming hallway clock. She had never known there was a painting of the sun and moon on its face. The hanging ceiling fixture, seen up close, had tiny figures and wrought-iron vines on it that she had not been able to spot before. And the carpet runner, viewed from such a distance, now revealed a pattern of lines and flowers.

“What a palace I’ve lived in!” whispered Celeste.

She spent a moment looking at the world from this new perspective. The railing sloped up, beckoning her on. She kept climbing.

She climbed until the handrail dead-ended abruptly at a wall. By now it was nearly dawn, and the basket sagged heavily, and her shoulder ached. There was no sign of the cat.

She partly slid, partly climbed down to the floor.

Where to now? She had never been directionless before. It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling to have nowhere to go.

The soft light of early morning crept from beneath a door. Celeste scurried cautiously down the hallway and, sniffing anxiously, peered under the door.

She was looking into a small room. It had one window. The window sash was raised, and Celeste could hear birds singing as dawn awakened the garden outside. Under the window stood a small desk, which was covered with stacks of paper. Several jars of water lined the desk, each holding the stalks of a variety of plants.

An old shirt hung on a nail in the door. On top of a tall armoire was an empty cage. Tacked on the wall Celeste saw a series of small paintings, each one of a plant or an insect.

A small, low cot faced the window. The dark recesses under the cot looked quiet and undisturbed, covered with a layer of dust. A leather boot lay on its side.

Celeste was completely exhausted; the night had been a long one.

The old boot looked inviting enough, although as Celeste crawled into the toe, she saw it was a little dark and stuffy, and it smelled of human perspiration. But the space fit her perfectly; she even imagined herself inside one of her baskets, in the domed darkness. And she felt protected; should the cat ever roam the upstairs rooms, its claws couldn’t reach deep enough into the boot.

But it needed sprucing up, and Celeste needed a bed. Cautiously exploring the room, she found several dried leaves that had fallen to the floor from the plants on the desk. She stuffed them into the toe of the boot. To these she added chewed bits of paper from several sheets she had nibbled through. Her prize find was an old woolen sock; she dragged the whole thing across the room with her teeth, then nibbled and unraveled it until she had made a satisfactory nest.

She liked her new home. “Well, I guess ‘cozy’ is a word for it,” Celeste told herself. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.