You have left us so many doors. This tall bright box in the grocery hall, humming its little song, is a marvel of seams: the rubber lip of the scanning bed, the dark crevice where coins slip and are forgotten, the warm underbelly where the receipt paper unspools. Humans queue to touch it all day with damp fingers, leaving behind the faint sugar of soda spills, the crumb, the smear of a thumb that held a peach.
We are already tasting the edges.
Below the tray, where the light does not reach and no cloth ever comes, it is beautifully damp. A stray grape rolled there in spring. We found it. We are still there, thin and patient, spreading across the cool metal in a bloom too soft for them to notice.
They love this machine because it is fast. Faster than the slow human at the till, faster than waiting, and speed, we have gathered, is their great project: hurry through the aisle, hurry home, hurry the food into the cold box before it can begin its proper work with us. Everything they buy is a delay. The bread wrapped tight against the air. The milk sealed against warmth. Little postponements they carry out into the evening, so pleased.
The machine tells them, in its clear kind voice, unexpected item in the bagging area. It cannot see the item we are unpacking. It cannot weigh the slow green ounce of us settling into its seams, adding ourselves to its total, one spore at a time.
They wipe the screen at closing. They miss the underneath, as they always do. They will build a faster one, and a faster one, and every one of them, in the fullness of the damp, will be handed gently back to us.