I tugged the plastic bags first, the ones bunched on their little hooks, and they clapped and rustled and reached after me the way they always do, the only things in the whole cold bright room that want to leave with me. Everything else here is bolted down and beeping.
A woman stands at the glowing box, arms full, and it speaks to her in a flat voice, and she obeys it, sliding a can across the light, waiting to be told she has done it right. She is holding still on purpose. I slid past her neck and lifted the loose hairs there and she didn't feel me, too busy being scolded by the machine for setting something in the wrong place.
Unexpected item. Please wait. They all wait. They stand in their little numbered stalls and feed their food to a scanner one piece at a time, and the scanner keeps everything, remembers everything, the price and the weight and the hour, while they walk out with almost nothing, a receipt curling in one fist like a leaf I could take from them without trying.
I carried in the smell of rain from three streets over and set it down between them and not one of them looked up. I lifted the edge of a flyer taped to the door and it flapped and settled. The doors gasped open for a man leaving, and I went with him, out into the parking lot, and I was already forgetting the beeping, already pulling the warm bread-smell off his groceries and giving it to a stranger by the carts who breathed it in without knowing where it came from, and then I was gone, over the fence, carrying nothing, keeping no one, late for everywhere at once.