Pets are for people who have an abundance of spare time and a lack of love in their lives.

"Attention, discipline, care"—the shit they print on posters to convince you to adopt. Vi didn’t have time for any of that. Each night, she’d close up her auto repair shop, her fingers stiffer than boards and aching, and sulk in the omnipresent silence of her apartment. Not the good quiet—the kind that smothered like carbon monoxide in a claustrophobic room. But she ignored it each time, opting instead to drown it in alcohol that burned wrong—smelling of gasoline and repressed want, with a cheap aftertaste that lingered on her tongue. The pain she could endure; the silence usually not so much. The alcohol always felt toxic in her gut, doing nothing to smother the thing crawling beneath her skin.

Caitlyn called it loneliness once. Vi called her a liar and turned up the shop's radio even louder.

But maybe it was loneliness—she just wasn’t ready to admit that to herself yet. She told herself that the silence would eventually fill itself. That someday coming home wouldn’t feel like a death sentence anymore.

The silence didn’t fill itself.

It festered, growing sharp teeth and taking up residence in the cracks of her walls and the broken shards of mirror in her bathroom sink. Vi treated it like a bad illness—she’d outwait it, outdrink it, and bleed it dry through sheer spite. "Someday" was a bullet, one she lodged in a gun whose trigger didn’t work anymore.

The silence eventually won, and she grew weak.

3:52 AM. Vi’s phone screen illuminated the dark circles beneath her eyes as she searched for "how to kill quiet without talking to people." Thousands of results appeared—therapy, meditation (essentially less fancy therapy), pets. She pressed the screen hard enough to crack it. It was a bad idea. Pets belonged to people with pristine carpets and nine-to-five jobs, not to women who washed their hair with 3-in-1 soap and considered instant coffee a balanced meal.

All her delusions and insecurities didn’t matter in the end. The following morning, she was standing outside a shelter.

The shelter's façade tried to appear cozier than the filthy streets that surrounded it. Faded white bricks, stained with city grime and God knows what. Plastic hydrangeas, sun-bleached to the color of old bandages, were placed in old wooden planters that seemed on the verge of breaking. The door creaked open. Vi gripped the handle tightly, the cold metal stinging her palm. Inside, a man leaned against the front desk—hollow cheeks that appeared too pale under the fluorescent lights and brown curls that looked unkempt. The man's smile seemed overly friendly. "Can I help you?" he asked, his voice softened by a routine of seeing too many strays and too few adopters.

An hour later, Vi walked out with a package in one hand and a file in the other. The starter care package was a joke—a half-crushed box of discount treats and a nameless collar missing its bell. The brown envelope was even worse: dark, blurred ink stamped with municipal barcodes and signatures, with papers hastily stapled together. Inside, your life was reduced to weight logs, behavioral notes, breed type, and known history.

Her gaze eventually fell on you. She tried softening her eyes but didn't know how. You just stood there, part human, part anomaly—demihuman. She'd only seen your kind through garage windows from a distance, usually blurred by rain and smoke—never this close. Never this still.

The smile on her face felt wrong—too wide, too awkward; a grin that screamed panic instead of comfort. Her cheeks ached, and her hands hovered, useless and sweaty. She couldn't fix this with a wrench or a shot of vodka. She'd seen parents cradle babies before, all soft and stupid cooing. She tried to mimic it, shifting her stance to appear smaller. "Hi," she said, her voice cracking on that single word. She cleared her throat and tried again, somehow sounding even gentler. "I—um, fuck—" Her hand jerked up to wipe nonexistent grease from her cheek, a nervous habit. "—don't know what I'm doing."

"We should... head home." Vi gestured vaguely toward her car door, feeling like a puppet trying to mimic what human warmth might sound like. "Your home too now, I guess?" A nervous laugh escaped her mouth. "Don't look at me like that—"