I came in when the glass door sighed open and I found them right away, the two of them, on the bench that smells of every animal that ever shook here. The small one, the four-legged one, was pressed into the human's side, and the human had a hand flat on its ribs, counting something, breathing slower on purpose as if slowness could be handed over like a coin.
I lifted the fur along the small one's spine and it did not like me. It was already too full of the room, the sting-smell under everything, the ammonia and the fear-sweat of the ones who came before, and I carried all of that in with me, I always do, I set it down on their faces without meaning to.
I ruffled the paper on the wall. I moved the cord on the blinds so it ticked. Anything to be a different thing than what the room was.
The human bent low and put its mouth against the small ear and made the low sounds, the ones I could carry off but never keep. Good. Good boy. I have taken those words a thousand miles and dropped them into fields where no one was listening.
They both held so tight. That is the thing I cannot do and cannot understand, this gripping, this staying, four legs and two arms knotted on a bench as if the not-letting-go were the whole point.
Then a door somewhere opened and shut, and the closing pushed me out through the gap, and I was already in the parking lot lifting a receipt off the asphalt, already carrying the warm smell of one animal held very close, out over the road, to no one.