They come to the bright humming box holding their small parcels of dried and packaged sea. Salted fish sealed in plastic, ice frozen into bags, the pale flesh of shore-fruit heavy with the water I lent it. They pass each thing over a red light and the box speaks to them, and they answer by pressing glass, and something in the ritual makes them clench their jaws the way the tide-pool creatures clench when I withdraw.
I do not understand the counting they do. But I know what they are carrying. Every drop in those cold bottles, every bead of sweat standing on their foreheads while they wait, every tear one of them blinks back at the far end of the row where the box refuses her and will not soften: all of it is mine, on loan.
They think they are buying. They are only holding me a little while longer.
One of them lifts a jug of water, heavy, sloshing, and the light will not read it, and she sighs, and sets it down, and lifts it again. She does not feel how the water leans toward the floor, toward the drains, toward the low place, toward me. It is patient. I taught it patience.
She will drink it and carry it in her small warm body for a handful of years, up the aisles, into the light, out into the parking lots I have never seen and cannot picture. And then, slowly, the way rain finds the river and the river finds the mouth, she will give every drop back. They all do. I am in no hurry.
The box hums. The light blinks.
The water waits to come home.