Every morning my human enters the small tiled cell and voluntarily stands under falling water. Not a trickle, not the noble drip of a leaky faucet worth investigating. A downpour. Summoned. On purpose.
I have watched from the doorway, appalled, for years. It steps in dry. It steps out defeated, wrapped in cloth, dripping and diminished, its fur flattened into wet dark strings against its skin, all its volume gone. Whatever it was hunting in there, it did not catch.
And the sound it makes. That thin, tuneless drone it hums with its eyes shut, believing itself alone, believing itself unheard. I hear everything. I simply choose to let it think it has privacy.
Here is what confuses me most. It could be groomed. It has a perfectly good tongue and an entire evening. Instead it uses slippery bottles and steam and its own hands, badly, and emerges smelling of flowers that grow nowhere, a scent designed to erase the one true scent it had, the one I put there myself by sleeping on its pillow.
So each time it finishes, damp and proud and ruined, I do the necessary thing.
I wait until it has dried and dressed. Then I climb into its lap and press my whole warm body against the clean cloth, and I work my scent back into it, patiently, where it belongs. It calls this affection and scratches my ears.
It has no idea I am correcting an error.