“Why not?” said Joe. Now that the hangover had dissipated, he found that he was ravenously hungry.

“Don’t you ever look at what you’re eating?”

Joe examined the coconut flake between his fingers. The coconut flake waved a spindly limb at him and stared back at him with beady, multi-faceted eyes. Normally, Joe would have dropped the strange creature right then, but instead he squinted harder at the flake. What he had mistaken for coconut fur initially turned out to be two long antennae swooping back from a tiny head, and six small, white limbs protruded from what he assumed was its torso.

“Are you talking to me?” he asked the flake.

“No,” said the disembodied voice. “That is a Cryomiscum. Although they do seem to have some sort of language, they are incapable of imitating human speech. They, like myself and my colleagues, are here to assist you, and incidentally are also highly toxic if consumed. The Cryomisci, that is. Though I don't imagine my colleagues would agree with your digestive system much, either.”

“Well, is there anything else to eat around here?”

“Breakfast will be provided shortly. In the meantime, we suggest you make yourself comfortable and try to avoid trampling on the Cryomisci. It’s bad for public relations.”

Joe carefully maneuvered the coconut flake creature to the palm of his hand where it skittered about examining the creases and crevices, much like a rather excited miniature praying mantis. For its size, the creature seemed very cold, like a small, living shard of white ice. It leaned its head over the side of his palm and chittered excitedly. The other coconut flakes, who had moved into an apprehensive huddle near Joe’s feet, chittered back.

This continued for a few moments before Joe decided holding his hand up in the air was making his arm tired, and certainly wasn’t passing the time until food arrived effectively. He lowered his hand to the ground, but as soon as it was close enough for the one Cryomiscum to jump off, all the others on the ground jumped on instead and began scurrying around in the same fashion that the first one had, examining the crevices and creases of his hand, chittering back and forth the whole time. An unpleasant thought occurred to him, that perhaps he was not the one who would be receiving breakfast, but it quickly vanished. It would be no stranger than anything else that had happened this morning.