They pile against the glass before I can even get a good grip on them, hundreds of them, breath fogging in the cold I brought down from somewhere north, all of them facing one direction like grass before a gust. I slip between their collars and lift the loose ends of their scarves and nobody turns.
They are waiting for a door. I have never waited for anything. I do not understand a door, only that it opens, and when this one did I went through with them, ahead of them, was inside before the fastest of them cleared the threshold, and there was nothing in there worth the shove of all those shoulders.
But they wanted it. I could smell the wanting, sharp and metal, mixed with coffee gone cold in paper and the plastic tang of things still sealed in their boxes. They grabbed. They held. They pressed a flat bright rectangle to their chests like I have seen them hold a child, and would not let another hand near it.
Holding, holding, always the holding. I carried off a receipt, a long white curl of it, out the door and up over the parking lots and I read the numbers on it the way I read everything, by letting it go.
I lifted a woman's hair off the back of her neck as she ran to her car with her arms full. She didn't feel me. She was already thinking of the next store, the next door, the next thing to close her hands around and keep.
I kept nothing. I never do.
I was three towns over before she got the box open.