My human left a warm apartment, a full food dish, and the good patch of moon on the rug to come stand in a line like this. In a corridor that thumps. Waiting for a small room.
There are fifteen of them, shoulder to shoulder, swaying, shouting into each other's ears the way they do when they've decided volume is a kind of affection. The floor is wet. Everything here is faintly wet. They keep touching each other's arms and saying I love you, I love you so much, to creatures they met four minutes ago in this same damp queue.
My human has waited eleven minutes to enter a tiled cupboard alone. Eleven. I have watched it do this. In our home there are three doors and I pass through all of them at my leisure, and if a door is shut I sit before it and stare until the human, ashamed, opens it. Here it simply waits. It thanks the human ahead. It apologizes to the human behind. Groveling, both directions.
One of them cries against the sink mirror while another strokes her hair and calls her a queen. Then they trade lipstick. Then they leave together, arm in arm, best friends now, forever, until the corridor swallows them.
My human comes home at an hour I did not sanction, smelling of smoke and other people's perfume and that queue, that terrible patient queue. It falls onto the good blanket without removing its shoes.
I wait until it is nearly asleep.
Then I walk the length of it, slowly, and sit on its face.