The building smells wrong tonight. Loud and dark and thumping through the floor, and my human left the house in stiff clothes it kept tugging at, the way I tug at a burr caught in my fur.
I know this posture. My human does it too, in the mornings, before the abandonment: the small nervous grooming, the checking of the reflection to see if the coward-cat approves. Except tonight there were more of them. A whole room of half-grown humans, all pressed to the walls, all pretending not to watch each other, all vibrating with the exact readiness of a cat who has spotted a bird through glass and cannot decide whether to pounce.
None of them pounced. That is the part I would correct, if they'd let me teach a class.
They stood in clumps at opposite ends, the way I circle a strange cat in the yard, and the space in the middle stayed empty and glittering and untouched, an enormous warm patch of floor that not one of them had the nerve to claim. Hours of this. The bravest of them shuffled toward another and then thought better of it and retreated, as I do when the vacuum wakes.
I could have shown them. You want the warm spot, you take the warm spot. You want the attention, you sit on the thing that isn't you and you stare until it looks.
But they are young, and stupid, and mine to raise slowly.
My human came home smelling of sugar and sweat and something bright it called "the best night," lying, its face doing the thing my face never does.
I let it sit down. I let it settle. Then I stepped up, turned once, and took the exact center of its lap.
Someone in this house had to be brave.