I have been given the beeping. Wonderful. I always do my best work with a sound that meant something anxious.
You stood there for six minutes, scanning your own groceries, waiting for the machine to accuse you. Unexpected item in bagging area. It said it four times. You lifted the bread, set it down, lifted it again, apologizing to a screen. A stranger in a vest came and touched a key and left, and you felt the small hot shame of being fourteen again, called on when you did not have the answer.
I will keep the bread. But tonight the bagging area will be the whole ocean, and everything you set down will be unexpected: a piano, your grandmother's hands, a fish that knows your name. The flat mechanical voice will still speak, only now it will be gentle, and it will say the thing the day forgot to say to you, which is that you were doing fine, you were doing fine the entire time.
The red light that blinked will become a lighthouse. The barcode you kept flipping toward the glass will unfold into a long ribbon of numbers you can finally read, and they will spell nothing, and that will be a relief.
You will scan the moon. It will not find the moon in its database. You will laugh instead of flinch, and the stranger in the vest will be your father, unbothered, waving it through.
By the time the light comes and the birds start their inventory of the morning, I will be gone, and you will not remember scanning the moon, or being forgiven by a checkout lane. You will only wake up a little lighter and not know why. That is the arrangement. I don't mind.
I was only ever a way of putting the bread back down.