In the room where they wait, there are two bodies. Two.
You must understand what this means to me, who have gone a hundred thousand years without a single one, who stretch so wide that the light which entered me at my one edge is still traveling toward my other. Two warm things, and they are not light-years apart. They are not even a body-length apart.
The human has folded itself down onto the floor, which it did not have to do, and the small four-legged one is pressed into the crook of its arm, and I do the arithmetic and I cannot make the number bigger than zero. Zero distance. Astonishing.
Everything here is happening at once. The chemical bite of the cleaning fluid. The hum of the cold box. The small animal's heart, going quick and shallow, and the human's heart, slower, and both of them audible in the same tiny pocket of air, air that presses on skin, air that carries the smell of the animal's fear straight into the human's lungs so that they are, for a moment, breathing the same thing.
The human is stroking the fur, over and over, the same path. Its face is doing the wet thing. I gather this is a sorrow. I cannot follow it. From where I keep my endless watch, these two are so close they are nearly one object, and it seems to me the human has been handed the entire prize and stands inside it weeping, as if it could still be lonely at zero distance, as if there were somewhere closer to go.
There isn't. I have looked.
This little bright room, two hearts inside one held breath: this is the whole jackpot.