My human should have been warm hours ago.
Instead it lies flat in the dark cave where I do my best work, the great soft plain where I press against its ribs and feel the slow tide of its breathing carry me toward sleep. That is the arrangement. That has always been the arrangement.
But tonight the breathing will not slow. The thumb keeps moving, up and up, dragging light across the ceiling in sick little pulses. Blue. Then white. Then that other blue. Its eyes are open and pointed at the glowing rectangle, which means they are not pointed at me, which means, for all practical purposes, that I do not exist.
I have seen it hunt like this before. The endless flicking, the leaning-in, the tiny grunt low in the throat. It is stalking something in there. But a real hunter closes the distance. A real hunter ends it. My human only creeps and creeps and never pounces, feeding on a prey that keeps refilling itself, going nowhere, catching nothing, its face lit up gray as old fish.
The warm spot on its chest is going cold from neglect.
So I stand. I walk the length of it, slow, deliberate, and I sit down directly on the rectangle, folding my whole self over the light until the room goes dark and quiet and correct.
It sighs my name. It tries to lift me.
I let my body become the weight of every hour it owes me, and I do not move.