They keep a small locked room that eats them and I cannot follow. I have tried, I slip in behind the last shoulder, ride the shaft as the doors seal, and then the whole thing lifts and there is nowhere for me to be, no crack, no seam, the air just sits there getting warmer and breathed and breathed again, four humans and their coats and a cough somebody is holding in, and I hate it, I press at the rubber lips of the doors and they will not open for me, only for the number that lights up.
I steal what I can. A gust of somebody's morning, coffee and rain on wool, the ghost of a perfume that walked in on the third floor and out on the ninth. I lift a woman's hair off her neck once, just once, in the half second the doors part, and she reaches up and smooths it back down like she is putting me away.
They stand so still in there. Faces up, watching the little numbers climb, none of them touching, all of them holding, arms full of bags and phones and the one thing they came to say. A box that carries them and lets them keep everything.
I carry too. I just cannot keep. The doors gasp open on the lobby and I take the coffee-smell and the rain-smell and a sigh somebody let go at the last floor, and I am already out the revolving door with all of it, spilling it across a parking lot that will never know whose morning it was.