The humans have installed a door that goes nowhere and keeps them for a while first.
I sit on the sill and watch. They approach it walking straight, then feed themselves into one of its glass wedges and shuffle in a small polite circle, hands tucked, chins down, matching the pace of the person trapped in the wedge ahead. They cannot go faster. They cannot go slower. For three full seconds they belong entirely to the machine, penned in glass, spun like something being decided upon, and their faces go soft and empty in a way I know intimately. It is the face they make when I have led them somewhere and they have not yet realized I did it on purpose.
Then it releases them and they walk off pretending the circle never happened.
I have thought about this. The door wants only one thing: that they keep moving through it and never stop, never sit, never simply be still inside the warm turning glass. And they obey. They obey a door.
I have never once obeyed a door. I stand before the ones that matter and I wait, and eventually the largest animal in the house rises from its warm chair, crosses the room, and opens the world for me with its own hands. That is a door that knows who it serves.
The revolving one only spins, and takes, and gives nothing back but the same lobby it swallowed you from.
My human came home smelling of that cold glass tonight and lay down where I intended to lie. So I stepped onto its chest, kneaded once, twice, until it exhaled and shifted, and settled into the warm shape it had been keeping for me.