Buster saw the same heads appear every week in his mistresses’ personal window, just at the end of dinner. He would finish off the few morsels still in the bowl, run his tongue around his face, and pad over to where she sat at the interfacing machine, staring at a grid of 6 moving heads in the flat, glowing frame. There was nothing to hear—his mistress wore ear-strings that appeared to keep all the sound inside her head. Taking his place by the button pad, he would see his head appear next to hers in one of the squares. He would bask in the cool light and amuse himself with his observations. This week, he noticed the one with blue rings before her eyes had done something with the hair so that it appeared fluffier and on top of her head. The ear-strings on another were now red. And the environment of another was different every week. Today, it was some kind of sandy place with a lot of water and sun. A waving tree made it seem windy, but the hair was undisturbed.

Every week there was a man with shiny squares around his eyes. When he spoke, Buster felt he was giving instructions of some kind, for the moment he stopped they all began “writing,” as his mistress called it. They used a stick to make small flowing marks on the lines of the paper before them, just as his mistress did. After a while the man would start talking again, and then they would each speak in turn from what they had written.

Writing was a laborious thing these humans did. They filled a white page with it, spoke it, and moved it aside, stashed in a book or tossed in a bin. And then repeated. Like spraying his places in the neighborhood every week, Buster thought that it seemed like a kind of marking—but the territory they marked was invisible, without measure. What could be the point? If only someone would ask him, he would gladly give his views on the matter—but no one ever asked.

by S.T. Jenkins