The doors open at five in the morning and the crowd doesn't walk in, it pours, the way water finds the crack in a hull. I stood off to the side near the cart corral and watched a woman get pressed against a pallet of televisions, still holding her coffee, arm up over her head to keep from spilling it.
Nobody meant to crush her. It was just physics. Bodies moving toward a thing at a price, and the pressure that builds when too many of them want to be in the same small volume at once.
Here is a fact people don't like. All the air you have ever breathed, the whole atmosphere, every storm and every sunrise, is a layer thinner around the planet than the skin on an apple. You cannot see it from orbit as anything but a blue haze at the edge, and it is the only thing between us and a vacuum that would kill every one of us in about fifteen seconds.
I kept thinking about that while a man argued with a stranger over the last one in a box. Both of them red in the face. Both of them, as far as the dark is concerned, statistically miraculous. Warm, breathing, wanting something. There is nothing else out there wanting anything. I checked.
I bought a coffee maker because mine broke. I waited in the line. And when the woman ahead of me got to the register and the price rang up right and her whole face loosened with relief, I thought: that. That small private gladness, on a thin blue shell, in all that nothing. Guard it.
It is rarer than she will ever know.