“Hey mom, it’s your favourite space rover, Bandit (Baby when I steal your slippers!). Swapped Pawsburg’s grass for star-studded skies and my banana toy for a starship wheel. Chasing adventure, fighting space pirates, meeting extraterrestrials – it’s ruff out here but my bravery pulls through! Love and howls from across the Milky Way!”

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Bandit was hellbent on leaving Pawsburg as dusk dropped its curtain. A course charted for the studded canvas of the great cosmic wilderness. “Yep, tomorrow it is. Off to the grand beyond!” He said while gnawing on his banana-shaped toy, tasting the imagined flavors of universal adventure.

“But how?” You see, the tricky part about being a Podogorean–a dog from Postatlantean Pawsburg–was our inability to survive in the void. Our homes were lush grasslands, circumscribed by White Westie Woods, Poodle Pond, and Bullmastiff Boardwalk, not great vessels maneuvering through sheets of cosmic emptiness.

“Bravery,” he replied, eyes gleaming in the soft twilight, comparably radiant to the constellations scattered above us. It made sense he’d resort to that. It always got him through Pawsburg’s daily misadventures. Whether rescuing Frisbees stuck in towering, ancient trees at the park or diving headfirst into Poodle Pond to retrieve an errant tennis ball, bravery was his essence.

We were at the Cat’s Meow Sushi, our favourite spot in town. Bandit had suggested it, out of a bizarre fondness for the ironic name of the place. Fetch-N-Bites, with its doggy bagels, would’ve been my preferred choice. But Bandit’s adventurous appetite couldn’t resist the fishy treats at Cat’s Meow. And honestly, who am I to deny my friend’s peculiar tastes?

“Are you barking mad? You can’t just up and join the StarDogs,” said Growler, a stout Bulldog who hailed from the briny walks of Bullmastiff Boardwalk.

But Bandit, being Bandit, playfully twitched his caramel-colored ears and shot a toothy grin, “That’s where you’re wrong, Growler. Not can’t, but will.”

The next afternoon found us at The Howling Husky Hardware Store, snagging every bolt, nut, and piece you could think of. Bandit dreaming his space odyssey into reality. Every evening thereafter, over The Cat’s Meow sashimi or Fetch-N-Bites’ meatloaf, he would regale us with tales of interstellar trade with alien races, heroic encounters with space pirates, and his discovery of distant exoplanets teeming with life.

These tales defined our nights, rendering Pawsburg a twilit stage for his extraordinary space epics. His shimmering narratives outshone the starlight. But beneath the bravado, Bandit, always afraid of being alone, was terrified of the isolating expanse of space.

The day came when his spaceship–a hodgepodge of dogged determination and nuts and bolts–was ready. Sitting by Poodle Pond, under the silver glow of the moon, we wished him godspeed.

Adventure has a way of finding him—or rather, he has a way of finding adventure. Bandit, the brave Podogorean, is out there now, a bold explorer in the celestial opera. And down on Pawsburg, over sushi or meatloaf, we howl along to his far-flung tales, dialed directly to us from the star-streaked waltz of the cosmos. We’re never alone as long as we have Bandit’s interstellar shenanigans to keep us company.

The End.

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