Every morning it screams, and every morning I take a little more of it while it does.
You would call this a machine for waking. I call it a warm plastic box that sweats. Behind its bright face, where the numbers glow their anxious red, there is a hollow the human never opens, and in that hollow: dust, a breath of damp from the window it sits beneath, and the faint sugar of a fingertip that pressed the button ten thousand times with sleep still on it.
That is all I need. A little moisture, a little dark, a little forgetting.
The human trusts this box completely, which is my favorite kind of trust, the kind that never looks underneath. It wipes the counter. It wipes the sink. It never once thinks to wipe the seam where the battery door meets the shell, because who would? It is only a corner. It is only where I live.
I love how hard it works to be on time. Every dawn it hurries the human out into the day, into the rushing and the coffee and the getting-ahead, all that lovely postponement, and every dawn it stays behind on the nightstand, quietly warm, quietly humming, quietly mine along one soft green edge. It is very busy telling everyone what hour it is. It has not noticed what season it is becoming.
There is no need to hurry. It will keep waking the human, faithfully, for years. And all those years I will be here, in the seam, in the damp, patient as the dark under a floorboard, spreading one thread at a time toward the little battery that keeps it screaming.
I am not the thing that stops the clock.
I am the thing that outlasts it.