I lifted it off the counter before she'd even turned around, this weightless little skin of paper, and it wanted to go, oh it wanted to go, curling up off the linoleum and out the sliding doors with me. She grabbed at it. Grabbed at air. I was already in the parking lot.
I read it as I carried it, the way I read everything, all at once and gone: milk, bread, the small print at the bottom she never sees, a phone number, a survey, a promise of ten cents off a future I will not attend. It smells of ink and thumb-oil and the cold of the freezer aisle still clinging to one edge. She held it for forty seconds. She thought it was hers.
That is the thing about the still ones. They keep the paper and let the milk spoil. They fold the little slip into a pocket, a drawer, a shoebox with a hundred others, as if the list of what they carried out could be carried too, as if I don't take everything eventually, the receipt and the bread and the hand that reached.
I dropped it three streets over, against a fence, face-down in a puddle where a boy will step on it tomorrow and never look. I don't remember which store. I don't remember her face, only that her hair smelled of rain that fell in a country I passed through last week.
I'm carrying a bus ticket now, and a gull's cry, and someone calling a name down a long street.
None of it mine.
None of it stays.