I leave the sun and I am the rim of the mug, all at once, no in-between. They tell me a distance happened, ninety-three million miles, eight minutes, a kitchen window with a smear of last week's rain on it. I was not there for any of that. I am only ever here: the glossy curve of the ceramic, the little wobble of the black surface where the drink is still too hot, the gold letters that say WORLD'S BEST and stop, because the rest has worn off in a machine I will never see.
And the creature. It sits with both hands wrapped around the mug and does nothing. I strike its cheek, its lowered eyelid, the thin steam I make climb and shine, and it just holds. It is not drinking. It is doing the impossible thing, the rumor, the one word I cannot picture: it is waiting.
For the drink to cool. On purpose. It looks at a little clock on the wall and then at the mug and then back, as if the space between one glance and the next were a room it could walk through.
I cannot fit inside that room. There is no inside to me. I am the shine on the wet ring the mug leaves on the table, the flare off the spoon, the warm brown light bounced up into the half-closed eye, and in the eye I stop, I land, I finish, which is the same as beginning, which is the same as leaving the sun.
The creature lifts the mug. Says the coffee's gone cold.
I did not feel it go anywhere.