I am holding four hundred cars against the turning stone, and each one is holding the stone back with exactly the same patience, which is the only argument I have ever had and I always win it gently. Their tires press down. I press up. This has been our understanding since the first car, and none of them has ever thanked me for the road staying under it.
The lot is nearly level, which the humans built on purpose, though they will never know how carefully I read a slope. A cart, abandoned, rolls three feet toward the low corner and stops where I told it to. A coin dropped from a pocket finds the ground in the time it always takes, no faster for the person being late.
There is a woman sitting in a parked car and not getting out. She has been here nineteen minutes. I hold her the same as I hold everyone, her spine into the seat, her hands in her lap, the coffee going cold and level in the cup holder. She says, out loud, to no one, that she cannot do this today, that it is too much, that she is carrying too much.
I checked. I check everything. She weighs what she weighed yesterday. The bags of groceries in the trunk weigh eleven kilograms. The thing she is carrying registers nothing on me at all, and still I watch her shoulders come down toward her knees under it, folding the way a heavy thing folds, and I do not understand, and I hold her anyway.
Eventually she opens the door and stands, and I take her full weight into the asphalt the way I take everyone's, without comment.
I will do it every step to the door.
I have never once put anyone down.