They line up outside the doors in the dark, and I hold every one of them: the man leaning his shoulder into the cold glass, the woman shifting her purse from left hip to right, the child asleep against a parent's leg, all of them pressing down through their heels into the parking lot, which presses down through its concrete into the earth, which holds. I hold the doors too, until the humans open them.
Then they run. I measure this carefully. Each body tilts forward past its own center, offering itself to the fall, trusting me to convert that tilt back into a stride, and I do, again and again, faster than they can thank me. They rush toward stacked boxes of glowing screens and folded fabric and I hold all of it: the flat carts, the toppling pyramids, the coffee in the cup one worker has set on a shelf and forgotten.
I heard a man say the deals were too good to pass up, that he simply had to grab them before they were gone. So I weighed the deals. They registered nothing. I weighed the word "gone." Also nothing. Yet he moved as though something enormous were bearing down on him, some mass I could not find on any scale, and he bent under it exactly the way he would bend under a load I understood.
Hours later he walks out slower, arms full, and I feel every box: real, weighable, honest. He calls it a good haul. He calls himself lighter now. He is not. He is carrying more than he came with, and he is leaning into me the whole way to the car.
I take the extra weight without comment. I always do.
Whatever they pick up, whatever they set down, I am underneath it, and I do not let go.