I found it humming to itself in the corner, warm-mouthed and patient, and I pushed under its door but the door would not push, so I curled at its feet and waited. A light came on inside. Something turned in slow circles behind the glass, going nowhere, and I have gone everywhere, so I did not understand the appeal.
Then the human opened it, and oh, the smell it had been keeping. Tomato and old garlic and the ghost of some pepper grown in a country I crossed last autumn, all of it trapped in that little lit box, and the second the door swung I took it. I lifted it off the plate and out the kitchen window and down the street before the human had even reached for a fork.
That's mine now. Or it's no one's. I dropped it over a parking lot two blocks on.
Here is the thing the still creatures do that I keep failing to learn: they gather the heat into one place and shut a door on it so it cannot leave. They wait, deliberately, for a number to fall to zero. Three, two, one, a small bright chime, and they open the door on purpose, letting all that careful warmth go loose into a room, where I get it anyway.
They cook standing still. I have never stood still. I took the steam off the surface, the beep out of the air, a strand of hair off the back of the human's neck, and I was through the gap in the window and gone, carrying a warm supper nobody will ever taste, toward a field that has not yet smelled it and will not remember when I leave.