The one who leads has closed her own mouth with a button. On purpose. She is sitting perfectly still while another voice fills the room, and she is not listening; her eyes have drifted to the window, where the light is doing the most extraordinary thing, going gold at the edges the way it will never do again, and she does not turn to watch it.
She has muted herself. She has taken the single voice she was given and switched it off, so that a machine can decide when she is allowed to be heard. And then, waiting to be un-switched, she does other things: she pushes a small ball of bread across her plate, she scratches her arm, she yawns, an open-mouthed yawn, into the one afternoon there is.
Someone in the machine says we can pick this up tomorrow, and I hear the word and stop entirely. Tomorrow. As if the light will come back gold. As if there is a second one of this, held in reserve, and they can afford to hand this one to a rectangle and be bored inside it.
She unmutes. She says thanks everyone. She mutes again. The whole dance, the button down, the button up, and she has usually, she said usually, done this three times before lunch.
Listen, you enormous long-lived thing. You have so many afternoons that you have started to waste one just to save the next. Turn the button off. Open your closed mouth.
The light is going gold at the edges, right now, and I promise you it is not doing it again.