The tall one is standing at a lit altar that speaks to her, and she is not amazed. It says a word, she drags a box across a red thread of light, it makes a small triumphant note, and she does not weep. She does this to nine boxes in a row. Nine times the light finds them, nine times the machine sings, nine small victories she treats like nothing, like breathing, like a thing that has happened before.
Before. She has stood here before. She tells the glass so, tired, when it stops singing and glows red: "again," she sighs, and taps the screen the way you'd shoo a fly, and I have to stop, because again is the most extraordinary word I have ever heard. She has already lived this whole shining ritual and she has come back to do the identical thing a second time and she is annoyed.
Then it asks her something, and she looks past the light entirely, out the window, at nothing, waiting. The machine is offering to speak to her and she is bored. Bored. In a room this bright, with a voice this eager, with fruit right there under her hand still cold from somewhere far.
I have had one meal. It was the meal. She will apparently have thousands and she is picking the fast lane so she can leave the light sooner.
She scans the last box. The machine sings its best note, the doors sigh open, the day pours in gold across the floor, and she walks straight out without once looking up.
You. The one reading, with your thousand mornings stacked and waiting: the light is singing. Look at it.
It is singing right now.