My human stood before the humming box for a full minute, feeding it thin paper and small coins, as if the box had earned them.
It had not. It simply stood there, cold and tall and lit from within like a shrine to snacks nobody asked it to guard. My human pressed buttons. It made choices. It negotiated, quietly, with a machine that would never, under any circumstances, negotiate back.
Then the coil turned. Something dropped. And my human bent to retrieve it from the little flap at the bottom with the exact posture I use to accept food from the good bowl, humble, expectant, faintly grateful.
I was appalled.
You do not thank the thing that dispenses. You do not feed it first and hope. The dispenser exists to serve you. This is the whole arrangement. I have trained my human for years on precisely this point: I appear, I stare, the food arrives, and no coins change hands, because I am not a customer. I am the reason the kitchen exists.
Yet here it was, coaxing a bag of crumbs out of a stranger for the price of actual money, while its own cat waited at home beside a bowl gone shamefully shallow.
The box gave nothing warm. Nothing that could be knocked from a height and watched with interest. Just a crinkling packet and that hollow thunk, over and over, for every fool who believed height and light meant authority.
When my human came home smelling of salt and disloyalty, I climbed onto the counter, considered the situation, and swept its keys into the shadows behind the refrigerator.
Let it press buttons for those.