There is a cold white cave in the wall, and my human worships at it the way I worship a sunbeam: constantly, and for no result.
The door swings open with a sucking sigh and a light comes on inside, revealing shelves of things sealed in crackling skins. My human stands there. Bathed in that pale glow, hunched, staring into the cold as if the answer to something lives behind the milk. It never does. The human closes the door.
Two minutes pass. The human opens it again. Nothing has changed. The cave has not restocked itself in the interval. Yet the ritual continues, this pilgrimage of the perpetually unsatisfied, and I watch from the counter I am not allowed on with the patience of a creature who already knows how it ends.
The cave hums. A low, endless purr, and I resent that it purrs without me, at no one, all night.
Once, and only once, the door hung open long enough that I understood the true nature of the place. Cold air spilled across the floor like a river. And the smell. Fish, somewhere in there, wrapped and hidden, mine by every law that matters.
The human caught me leaning in and said my name in the sharp voice, the one that means it has mistaken my property for its own.
So I have adjusted my terms.
When it next kneels before the cold cave, murmuring to the leftovers, I will thread myself between its ankles, slow and deliberate, until it must choose between me and its balance.
It will choose me. They always choose me.
I simply prefer to remind it before it forgets.