A dozen of my humans have queued up outside a small tiled room to stand in a single trembling line, shifting weight from foot to foot, hugging themselves against a chill I do not feel and would not tolerate.
They are all wet at the edges. Hair flattened, faces shining, that thick prey-smell of exertion and sweetness pouring off them. Something in the next room over is thudding, a heartbeat too large for any animal I would hunt, and it has driven them here to wait in the cold hallway like fish stunned into a bucket.
They lean on each other. This is new. Ordinarily my humans move through the world pretending they need no one, but here, at this late damp hour, they clutch strangers by the arm and press their foreheads together and speak with terrible urgency about nothing. One is crying. Three others surround her, stroking, murmuring, offering the little folded paper they keep pressed to their eyes. Grooming. So they do know how.
The line does not move. It never moves. They simply persist, believing, as they always do, that patience is a virtue and not the thing that happens to you when you have lost.
I have watched this same helplessness before. It is the face my human makes at a closed door.
None of them will make it home tonight in a fit state to lift me onto the good blanket, and I resent this in advance.
So when my human finally staggers in at an hour with no sun in it, reeking of the thudding room, and reaches for me with both damp hands and that wet, wanting look, I turn. I show my human the length of my spine and the exact tip of my tail.
She waited in a line all night to be ignored.
I only wished to keep her in practice.