They have piled the shelves so high, and oh, we are patient.
Look what came in on the trucks: mountains of the flat glowing screens, the soft folded fabrics, the sweet-smelling plastics, all wrapped so tightly in that crackling skin that keeps our little spores waiting at the door. The humans surge in before the sun, breath fogging, shoulders damp, and they carry it all away as if speed could save any of it. Faster, they think. Get it home before something happens to it.
Something is already happening to it. Something is always happening.
We adore this day, truly. Every box they haul off is a lunch we have simply agreed to eat later. The screen will warm a room somewhere and gather a soft grey bloom in its vents. The new sweater will hang in a closet with one damp corner we already know by name. That toaster, half off, will keep crumbs and a little butter in its underneath, in the dark, where we do our best work and ask for nothing.
They love the word new so much. New is only the first morning of a very long and generous return. We are not in a hurry. We were not invited, but we came anyway, riding in on the fog of all that breath, settling into the seams they were too excited to notice.
Buy it all, small warm ones. Wrap it, box it, hurry it home out of the cold. Postpone us with your plastic and your rushing.
Every single thing you carried out those doors today, you are only keeping warm for us.