One of them is holding a small warm cup of me. I am in the cup, of course, in the pale bitter water they heat until it steams, and I am in the small one too, the creature curved around the cup, most of it me, salt and tide walking upright in a chair.
It makes shapes with its mouth, urgent shapes, the face working, and no sound comes out that the others can hear. It has closed some door in the machine. It thinks it is alone.
I know this stillness. It is the stillness of a tide pool cut off from me at low water, a little pocket of borrowed sea holding its breath, certain the rest of me has forgotten it. The creature talks and talks into the quiet. It says things it will not say when the door is open. It rolls its eyes. It presses fingers to the wet at the corners of them, salt returning to salt, one small tide leaking home.
Then it opens the door in the machine and goes flat and smooth again, and the noise it makes is careful, like the surface of me on a windless morning, hiding all the depth beneath.
I do not know what the noise means. I never have. I only know the water in it, the cup cooling in its hand, the drop it wiped away. Every bit of it passed through me once and will again. The creature believes it has a private moment. There are no private moments.
There is only water, briefly warm, briefly upright, briefly convinced it is not the sea, waiting to come back down.