The room has filled with strangers, and I do not like it.
Every year, when the air outside turns cruel and the windows fog, my human doubles its trips to the metal warehouse. It comes home reeking of the same joyless salt as always, but now there is fear in it too, a new tightness, as though a great many other humans have appeared to do the up-and-down beside it and my human is worried they will do it better.
They will all be gone soon. I know this the way I know when a bird will lose interest in a window. The instinct to move the metal is a shallow one; it does not survive contact with a warm blanket and a dark morning. By the time the light returns, the warehouse will empty back down to the few dead-eyed loyalists, and my human will announce this to me with great satisfaction, as if outlasting strangers were an achievement and not simply the natural result of everyone else regaining their sense.
I have never once been tempted to leave my patch of sun to prove something to a mirror. The second cat in the mirror trains too, I imagine, and is likewise fooling no one.
My human returns tonight trembling, triumphant, three trips this week, and reaches for me to share the glory.
I hold very still. I let the hand come close. I look at it.
Then I rise, unhurried, and step down onto the floor, leaving the warm dent of my body precisely where the hand wanted to land.
Let it earn the spot back.
Everything in this house is a membership, and I am the only one who never lapses.