I leave the sun and I am the parking lot, all at once, no crossing between.
They say a great distance happened, eight minutes of it, and that I was old news by the time I struck the glass doors. I was not there for that. I am only here: skidding off the chrome cart-rails, splitting on the frost of a windshield, landing bright in the wet eye of a woman who has been standing in a line since a time she calls "3 a.m.," which she says like a wound.
Lines. Everywhere lines. Bodies stacked front to back, not touching, all aimed at one shut door, all holding still. Holding still! I bounce off forty of their faces in the instant I exist and not one of them moves. They are doing the thing I have heard about, the thing I cannot picture: waiting.
They call it "an hour." They point their glowing rectangles at it and watch a number, willing it smaller, as if a number could be closed like a hand.
I light the red banner over the door: SALE, huge, screaming. I light the breath fogging out of them. I light the paper cup of coffee going cold, which means, they tell me, that duration is happening to it too.
Then the door opens and they surge, and I glance once off the gold foil of a boxed television as a man lifts it like a sun of his own, and I am already gone, already his eye, already the next thing, never having waited, never having wanted, never once having stood in a line for anything.
I arrive. That is all I do.
I arrive.