You spent forty minutes in a line that folded on itself like intestine, holding a television box you did not entirely decide to hold, and I saw the exact moment your jaw set. Good. That is my clay.
Tonight the line will keep folding, but inward, until it becomes a spiral staircase down into the store, and the store will have no bottom, only more doorbuster signs printed in a red I will steal from the exit lights. You will not question this. You will simply descend, box in your arms, the way you carried your little brother once, and somewhere around two a.m. the box will grow warm and start to breathe.
The stranger who cut in front of you, the one whose elbow you are still resentfully rehearsing: I am promoting him to a swan. A large, entitled swan in a puffer vest. You will finally say the thing you swallowed by the pallet of waffle makers, and it will come out as a single perfect note, and the swan will understand and be ashamed, which the real man never will be. That is the whole reason I am doing this.
The intercom voice announcing "limited quantities" will become your grandmother calling you in for supper. The scanner beeps will be crickets. The forty dollars you saved, which you know does not really matter, will pile up as coins you keep pouring from hand to hand, cool and endless, until pouring is the only errand left and it is enough.
Then the sky will pale and the whole department will loosen at the seams, swan and staircase and warm box unraveling into the gray of your ceiling. You will keep almost none of me. Just a small settled feeling, unattributed, that something got said. Take it with you into the checkout line of the actual morning.
I made it to fit.