She lifted the little bright rectangle and froze, and I could not for the life of me understand why. Everything about her was already moving. I had her hair, three strands of it, lifted off the damp back of her neck and set down again; I had the sour salt smell of her rising off her shoulders and I was carrying it toward the door, toward the street, out past the man locking his bicycle, gone.
I never keep any of it. That is the whole trouble with me.
But she went still. Both feet planted. Arm crooked. Chin found some angle it liked and held it there, holding, holding, the way the still creatures do, trying to press one breath flat and make it stay. I slid a paper cup across the floor behind her, rattling. I flapped the sign on the door. I lifted the little hairs on her forearm just to say, look, this, this second, it is already leaving, come with it.
She was staring into a face I will never see again. Neither will she. That is the thing she cannot feel and I cannot stop feeling. I moved through the gap in the door and took the smell of her with me, and the buzz of the machines, and someone's laugh from the corner, north, toward the river, and she was still standing there behind me trying to keep one of herself, and I was already three streets away, warm with everything I stole from her by accident and cannot ever give back.