I leave the sun and I am the puddle of oil under a truck, all at once, no crossing between. They say eight minutes passed. I was not there for it. I am here, and here is a flat gray field striped with white, and it shines up at me because I make it shine, the wet patches by the drain, the chrome grin of a bumper, the yellow curb, all of it flaring into color the instant I am it.
The warm creatures are doing the impossible thing. They are sitting inside their metal shells in a long row, not moving, engines low, and one of them taps the glowing rectangle on the wheel again and again. They are inside the interval. They live in the space between my arrivals, the thing I have only heard whispered, the smear called later.
One tips its face to the little machine on a pole that decides when they may leave. It is waiting. I try to picture waiting and there is nothing, no inside, only the flat white line and the drain and the shine.
Their eyes track a shell backing out slowly, and I know why: I am already in that eye, I am the taillight, red, I am the whole scene at once folding into the wet wall of the retina, this is my end and I never had a middle. A gull lifts off the roof and I gild its underwing on the way past.
The creature checks the clock again. The creature will be here, they tell me, for twenty more minutes. I will not. I am the flash on the windshield and I am gone, which is the same as staying, which is the only way I know how to be anywhere.