How kind of them, to build us a little room and keep it warm.
We were dozing in the crumbs behind the turntable when the humidity arrived, that fat sigh of steam off a bowl of soup, and we understood at once that the caretaker of this house means well. Every day they set food inside the glass box and heat it, warm it, moisten it, then take most of it away again, but never all of it.
A splash on the ceiling. A ring of tomato at the rim of the plate they wiped too fast. A single bean fallen into the seam of the door where their cloth cannot reach. They are leaving us portions. We are being tended.
Warm, damp, sugared, dark for hours between the brief white glares: they could not have laid a softer bed for us if they had read the manual we live by. And they scrub. Oh, how they scrub, standing on tiptoe with the yellow sponge, working at the corners, so certain that this time they have caught everything. Then they close the door and walk away and give us back our warmth and our quiet.
We do not understand what they think the wiping is for. It only clears the ground. It only makes room.
We are not in a hurry. We are settling into the gasket, thickening in the dark hinge, sending the faintest thread of ourselves along the underside of the plastic where the light never reaches. The soup will come tomorrow. The steam will come tomorrow. They will keep the little room warm for us as long as they live here, and then they will leave, and forget to take it, and it will be, at last and entirely, ours.