I came in through the gap under the door and found the human very still, which is how I know something is wrong, because the still ones are always waiting. It held the little bright square close to its chest and did not move, and I lifted the fine hairs at the back of its neck just to feel if it was still warm. It was. Warm and holding its breath.
I do not know what it wanted. I only know it kept looking down at the square and then up at the door and then down again, as if the answer might arrive by two roads at once and it wanted to be ready for either. I have carried words a thousand miles, spoken over fences and out of open cars, and I have never once seen one arrive.
They leave the mouth and I take them and then they are gone, into me, unanswered, all of them.
So I understand the waiting. What I do not understand is the staying. It could come with me right now, out the window, over the wet roofs and the smell of someone's cooking three streets off and the dog that barks at nothing. It could stop needing the one voice by simply outrunning the place the voice did not come. Instead it sat in its box of walls and guarded the silence like a thing worth keeping.
I nudged the curtain. I turned one page of the open book beside it, just to show what letting-go looks like. It did not notice. It was reading something that was not there.
I took the last of its exhale and went.
Somewhere ahead, a screen door, unlatched, already swinging.