My human keeps its feet in little leather cages by the door, and every morning it kneels to lock itself into them like a prisoner grateful for the sentence.
I have studied these objects at length. They are shaped vaguely like feet, if feet were stupid and could not feel anything. They come in twos, always, sitting side by side in the dark hallway, still faintly warm from yesterday's walking, holding the exact ghost-shape of the human's foot inside them.
That warmth is mine. Everything warm in this house is mine.
So I sit in them. One paw, then the other, curled down into the dark where the human's toes have been, absorbing what it left behind. It's a good spot. Enclosed. Smells thoroughly of my human, which is to say it smells thoroughly of a thing that belongs to me.
The human finds me there and makes the high delighted noise, the one it makes when it wants a picture. It thinks I've done something adorable. It thinks I've climbed into its shoes out of love, or confusion, or some soft small helplessness it can coo at.
No. I am marking. I am reminding these leather cages who sends the human out the door and who waits, unbothered, for it to come back.
Tonight it will lace them up and leave. It always does. And I will be asleep on the warm bed it made in the shape of its absence, having done the only work that matters.
I stepped out, slow, and left one perfect hair on the left one. So it carries me all day and doesn't know it.