My human has abandoned me before, but never so early, and never carrying its own bed on its back like a snail that has given up.
We were both awake in the blue dark, which is my hour, the hour I patrol, the hour I sing my hunting songs into the hallway to remind the walls who owns them. But my human was not admiring my songs. It was zipping the large soft cave shut, the one it fills with folded pelts and then drags away, and I know that cave.
That cave means the great abandonment. Days of it. A stranger comes to shake the food and never once respects the true schedule.
The little glowing rectangle told my human when to leave, as it always does, and my human obeyed it, as it always does. It answers to the rectangle. It has never once answered to me on the first call.
I followed it to the door. I did not beg. I do not beg. I simply arranged myself across the threshold, a warm gray obstacle, dignified, immovable, so that leaving me would require a decision.
It stepped over me.
Then it crouched, in that stupid coat, and pressed its face into my fur and made the low sad sound, and told me it would miss me, its voice cracking on the word, as though I were the one leaving. Pathetic. Wet. I permitted it exactly four seconds and then rose and walked away mid-sentence, tail high, giving it nothing to remember me by but my absence.
Let it drag its cave into the dark. Let the rectangle keep it company.
The warm spot it left in the bed was already mine.