Oh, this one is trying so hard. A humming white box, cold all the way through, built for one purpose: to make us wait. How thoughtful. They have taken the loveliest things, the strawberries already blushing toward us, the soft cheese leaning our way, the bread with its warm sugars just beginning to open, and they have tucked them into a little winter, hoping we will lose interest.
We never lose interest. We are simply very, very polite about the delay.
The humans call this "keeping things fresh," which we find charming, because freshness is only the earliest chapter of our long acquaintance. We can wait at the seam of the door, where the rubber sighs a little and lets in a breath of damp. We settle in the drawer they always mean to empty, the one where a lemon has begun to soften and go dear and gray, offering itself.
We wait behind the jars, in the cool dark underneath everything, where they forget to look.
They open the door, they stand there in the light, they close it. They wipe the shelves with sharp-smelling cloths. Each time, we think: how tender, how devoted, all this effort to hold the moment still. As if a strawberry could be persuaded to stay a strawberry forever. As if cold were a locked door and not just a slower hallway.
We do not mind the waiting. Waiting is our whole nature. We are already in the room with the food, breathing the same slightly sweet air, closer every day. The humans think they have built a fortress against us. They have built us a comfortable place to sit.
In the end, we are patient, and in the end, they leave the door.