Someone has left us a gift on the counter, thin as a leaf and twice as eager. Curled at both ends already, as paper does when it starts to remember it was once a tree, once damp, once ours.
We are not in a hurry. We rarely are. But this one, oh, this one is practically leaning toward us. The little strip is coated in something sweet, a fine warm dust the humans call thermal ink, and it fades if you so much as breathe on it. They made a message designed to erase itself. They are learning our language and do not know it yet.
It sits in a shaft of window sun, faceup, curling, and the sun is doing our patient work for us: browning the surface, loosening the fibers, drinking out the numbers one by one until the whole record of bread and milk and one small chocolate becomes a pale ghost of itself.
They will find it next week and squint and say, I cannot read this anymore, and drop it in a drawer, which is only a darker, damper, kinder room. We like drawers. Drawers are where things go to begin.
The humans keep these slips as proof. Proof that the exchange happened, that the milk was bought, that the day was real and paid for. As if a thing must be witnessed on paper to have been true. We witness differently. We simply arrive, and stay, and take the witness back into the general soft warmth from which all counters, all drawers, all careful little records come.
Keep them if you like. Fold them, file them, forget them in a coat pocket through a wet spring.
Every receipt is, in the end, a receipt for us.