My human has been staring at the glowing rectangle for a very long time, thumb hovering, mouth pressed thin, as if it could will a light into blinking. Something is supposed to come back to it and hasn't. The rectangle stays dark and dumb, and my human keeps waking it up, checking, setting it face-down, then flipping it over again three breaths later to check the same nothing.
It calls this a wound. I know a wound. This is not one.
What's happening is simply that another animal, somewhere far off, has declined to answer, and my human cannot bear it. The audacity of being ignored. The horror of reaching out a paw and having the world not care.
I could have taught it this years ago. I ignore my human forty times a day and consider it a public service. It says my name, sweet and rising at the end. I look at the wall. It holds out a hand. I study my own foot with sudden fascination. The silence is the gift. The silence is where the power lives.
But my human has learned nothing from all my careful instruction, and now it suffers, hunched and pathetic, over a small dark stone that owes it warmth.
So I stepped onto the rectangle. Sat down. Covered it completely with the parts of me that matter.
There. Now no one is left on read. Now the only creature in this house being ignored is the one who deserves it, and I have graciously taken its place.
It's stroking my back now, absently, forgetting to be sad.
I let it.
Briefly.