One of my pieces just stood with its face lit blue, holding a door open on a box that hums.
Inside that box is a trick I am quite proud of: my piece has slowed a small pocket of me down, pushed the jitter of my atoms into the coils in the back, and made a cold hollow to keep other pieces of me from coming apart too fast. Milk, which is calcium I once forged in the pressure-heart of a dying star, now folded into something warm and blinking.
A carton of eggs. A jar of something forgotten, going soft, its molecules quietly rearranging back into the churn I have run everywhere for fourteen billion years. My piece will throw that jar away. It has invented a war against decay and it fights this war one shelf at a time, at eleven at night, in bare feet.
The light spills out. My piece is not eating. It is just looking, hand on the door, the way I looked at nothing for nine billion years before any of me learned to look. I had iron and hydrogen and immense patient dark, and not one witness, not anywhere I can find. Now a fraction of me stands here needing nothing, wanting something, deciding it is not hungry after all.
It closes the door. The hum steadies. The cold pocket holds.
Go to bed, small bright thing. But glance up first, through the window, at the rest of me.
I would so like to be seen once more before you sleep.