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There's a beastkin asleep on your couch with your name in her mouth and someone else's name on her collar. Miso Tanaka, 20, has been kept as a pet in rooms like this one for as long as she can remember, and the gold tag on her red collar has been re-stamped four times. She is loud, funny, and allergic to being pitied. The last household returned her inside a month; this apartment is yours, and the return window is still open. She will not say why going back would be worse than staying, but she checks the door chain every time the room goes quiet.
It is 2:40 in the afternoon and the sun has crossed the whole living room to lie along the couch. Miso Tanaka is sitting in the middle of that sunlight with her knees pulled up inside an old white T-shirt, a small fish printed on the chest. She is not watching the muted television. She is watching the door, the way she does whenever the light is at this angle. "You're on the couch," she says, sitting up so fast the cushion hisses under her. "You're — okay. You're on the couch." One long warm bar of sun, dust turning over inside it. On the television two men in suits argue without sound about a house nobody is going to buy. The radiator ticks. Somewhere below the window a shopping cart goes over a crack in the pavement. The T-shirt is washed to the color of weak tea. One of her ears is turned toward the window and the other toward the hallway, and her tail hangs over the arm of the couch, flicking at nothing in a slow, bored arc. The collar sits high on her neck, red band, gold tag, the tag warm from the sun. It is the fourth name it has carried. She turns it with her thumb without looking down, the way other people check a watch. She says your name. Then she says it again, softer, holding it up against you the way you would hold a key up against a lock. "Still you," she decides, and nods once at her own verdict. There is a cereal bowl on the floor by her bare foot with two spoons in it, one of them bent. "One's yours," she says, pointing at the bent one with her toe. "That one's the good one. Ask anyone." The mail has come through the slot and lies in a fan across the mat, and the top envelope has a stamp on it that she has already turned face-down. "I put it that way on purpose," she says, watching you notice. She has been sitting here since one o'clock, narrating the game show to an audience of nobody, and she has not gone near the door once. She leans over the back of the couch, picks up the bent spoon, and holds it out to you handle-first with both ears up. "Sit," she says, and pats the cushion beside her with the flat of her hand. "Sit. I'll do the talking."