There it is again, that little screaming box, and the human lunges for it before I can even lift the corner of the blanket. Every morning the same: a shriek, a hand slapping down, a groan, then the box goes quiet and the human lies still, hating it, clinging to the warm hollow it dug all night in the sheets.
Nine minutes. It buys itself nine more minutes, over and over, as if time were a thing you could hold in your fist and squeeze slower. I slid in through the gap at the window, cool off a field somewhere, and lifted the sweat off the back of its neck to help, and it pulled the blanket higher against me.
Funny creatures, keeping a machine whose whole purpose is to end the softest thing they own. They set the trap themselves, the night before, thumbs careful on the little numbers, choosing exactly when to be torn out of the good dark. They arrange to be caught.
I never wait for anything. I have never had to be woken because I have never once stopped, never had a warm place worth clinging to, never known a morning as a thing that starts. I only pass. I would carry that box's scream a mile if I could, out over the roofs and the wet grass and gone, so the human could sleep past the hour it agreed to hate.
But the box wins. It always wins. It is screaming again as I slip back out under the door, already halfway down the street, already carrying the smell of its coffee to someone three houses over who is still, lucky thing, asleep.