Four billion years, and the relay ends its Tuesday standing in front of the humming box at 11pm, waiting.
We remember the fire. The woman who carried a coal wrapped in moss for three days so it would not die, who slept curled around it like it was a child, who would have wept to learn that heat itself could be conjured out of the wall in ninety seconds with a beep. She fed the flame all night, every night, her whole life. You stab a button labeled POPCORN and lean against the counter, scrolling, not even watching.
We do not fully understand the box. The lungfish among us understands water; the shrew understands the shadow that means owl; the man who buried the seed corn through the starving winter and did not eat one kernel understands hunger as a country you live in. None of us understand a hunger you can end whenever you like.
You are not even properly hungry. We watched. You ate three hours ago. This is what you call a snack, and it is warm, and it is guaranteed, and none of us in the whole long line ever once had all three of those at the same time.
The plate goes round and round on its little glass wheel. The light inside is the color of a hearth. Your predator's eyes, the eyes that scanned the tree line for the thing that would eat us, watch leftover rice turn in a circle, and blink slow, and are bored.
Bored. Safe and fed and bored, at the end of everything we ran.
The box beeps. You open it before it finishes. Look at you.
Look at you go.