My human has gathered five other humans into the glowing rectangle at once, and none of them will stop making noise.
Usually the rectangle holds a single small face that my human pretends to care about. Tonight there are six, stacked in little lit boxes like a shelf of trapped birds, and every one of them is talking, or preparing to talk, or waiting for a gap to talk into. My human nods at the shelf. My human says "totally" to the shelf. My human has not looked at me in forty minutes.
I sit on the good warm keys anyway, because the good warm keys are mine, and I feel it flinch when the shelf goes quiet. It moves me aside, gently, the way it moves everything that matters aside now: with apology and without stopping.
One of the birds is not doing its share. I can tell because my human's tail, which lives in its jaw, has gone tight, and its voice has gone smooth and terrible, the voice it uses on the vet. It says "let's circle back." It means: I will remember this.
I understand nothing of what they hunt together. I only know it never gets caught. Night after night the shelf assembles, chatters, disperses, and returns unfed, and my human calls this progress.
The rectangle finally goes dark. The lap, empty. The warmth, unclaimed.
I take it before the chair has finished cooling, and when my human reaches for me at last, hollowed out and wanting comfort, I rise, stretch, and go sit precisely one body-length beyond its fingers.
Let it circle back.