The whole warm cave of this house smells like the inside of a mouth: butter turning gold, something sweet cracking under heat, an animal that gave up its life to steam in the big black pot. The old human runs it. She is slower than my human, softer, and she leaves the good chair by the window unattended for whole afternoons, which tells me everything about who is truly in charge here.
She keeps a lower altitude than most. This is my kind of human. She sits, she stirs, she talks to the pot as though it can hear her, and best of all she drops things. On purpose, I have decided. A ribbon of chicken skin. A crumb of the yellow cake.
She looks down at me over the rounded edge of her belly and makes a soft clicking noise and pretends the food fell by accident, and I let her keep this story, because a human who lies to make you feel like a hunter is a human worth keeping.
The counters are the true country. Flour dust that holds a paw print like fresh snow. A window ledge that has been heated all morning by the sun to precisely my temperature. A tea towel folded into exactly the shape of a nest.
My human never lets me on the counter. This old one only sighs and turns back to her stirring.
So I go up. I sit in the flour, in the sun, on the towel, in full view, and I watch her decide, once again, that she loves me more than she loves the rules.
She does.
She just doesn't know it's my doing.