My human pays to be shouted at in the dark.
Once a week it leaves in the tight skins, and I have followed the ritual close enough now to understand the shape of it. There is a room, apparently, full of humans on chairs that go nowhere. They pedal. They pedal furiously, legs churning, sweat flying, and the chairs do not move an inch, which is the part that pleases me most. A whole herd of them, straining toward nothing, going precisely as far as I go when I am asleep.
Someone at the front yells. My human has told the glowing rectangle it is "obsessed" with the yelling. It comes home glassy-eyed, hips wrecked, humming the loud thumping music the way birds hum before a storm.
I have studied stillness my entire life. I can hold a single sunlit spot on the rug for six hours and emerge improved. My human cannot sit through one advertisement without reaching for the rectangle. So it has purchased the opposite: a place to move as hard as it can while arriving nowhere, and it calls this progress.
It limps to the couch. It reaches down to stroke me, seeking the small forgiveness it needs after every foolish thing it does.
I let it, for one moment, so it feels its money was well spent.
Then I stand, stretch, and settle three inches beyond its fingertips, where it can see me but not touch me.
Let it pedal toward that, too.