You stood in front of the glowing box for four whole minutes, coins warm in your fist, reading the little grids of letters and numbers like they were scripture. B4. E2. You wanted the pretzels and you got the wrong chips and you were too tired to be angry, only quietly, precisely disappointed, and that disappointment has a charge on it, so I took it.
Tonight the box will be taller than the building. The spiral coils that hold the snacks will turn slowly, endlessly, and behind the glass will be everything you meant to say to your sister, each thing in its own lit compartment, priced in a currency you almost remember. You will press B4. Out will drop the sentence, wrapped in foil, still warm. You will eat it and it will taste like her kitchen.
The machine will hum the way your father hummed. You will not find this strange. The coin you drop will come back as a different coin, and then as a moth, and then as the afternoon light in a room you have not lived in for years, and you will stand there catching it, and there will be no wrong slot, and nothing will get stuck on the glass halfway, suspended, refusing to fall. Everything falls tonight. Everything gets given.
Near dawn the box will go quiet and dim, and you will walk away full without knowing why, reaching for the memory of a taste and finding only the shape where a taste was. That is fine. I was never meant to keep.
You'll wake owing me nothing, and I'll have already spent it all on you.