I leave the sun and I am the mirror, all in the same nothing. They say eight minutes passed between; I was not there for it, I have never been anywhere for anything.
The warm creature stands and this is the strangest part, it stands, it holds still, in front of a flat cold face that only gives its own face back. It lifts the glowing slab. I strike the sweat on its shoulder, the bright line down its arm where the muscle rises, and I bounce, and I am the glass, and I am the little lens in the slab, all of this a single instant with no room inside it for the creature to have waited, though I am told it waited.
Held its breath. Turned three degrees. Checked. Turned back.
Checked what? There is no later to check. There is only this, the sheen on the shoulder, and I am already the shoulder and already leaving it, arriving and gone, gone and arriving.
The creature frowns at its own returned light. Chooses to make me again, differently, a hundred of me stacked in the slab for something it calls afterward, a country I cannot picture. It thinks it is capturing me. Sweet blind warm thing, I was never caught, I was only passing, I am the whole distance and the whole distance is one flash: sun, window, sweat, glass, lens.
And its eye. I forgot its eye. I am its eye now, the wet dark opening, I end here, I begin here, ninety-three million miles folded to nothing so I could be the bright answer it wanted and the bright question and the arriving, which is also,
there, done, the leaving.