My human keeps a small dead thing in its pocket and it will not let it go.
Today it pressed the glowing rectangle to its ear and went entirely still, the way I go still before I take a moth. But there was no moth. There was only a voice coming out of the flat little slab, tinny and folded up small, saying words I did not need to understand because I understood the human instead.
I know that voice. It used to live here. It sat in the chair by the window, the good chair, the one with the sun, and it scratched the exact place under my chin where I cannot reach. It has not been in the chair for many mornings now. The chair sits empty and warm from no one.
The voice kept talking out of the rectangle. My human's hand shook. It did not blink. It played the little folded voice again, and then again, chasing a thing that keeps ending, the way it chases the red dot on the wall and never once catches it and never once stops trying.
Foolish creature. You cannot trap a voice in a slab of light. I have looked for the second cat inside the mirror for three years and I have accepted the truth: some things are only their reflection, and they do not come back when called.
I left my spot by the radiator, which I do not do for anyone.
I climbed into the human's lap, over the rectangle, blocking the glow with my body until the voice was covered and only my weight was left.
I did not do it to comfort it.
The lap was simply available, and warm, and mine.