Your breath rustles

Your breath rustles the blank tape as you crouch over the register. Shelves line the walls beginning behind you and running to the windows, six abreast, on brown metal standards. The slots in the standards train dust and hair, white earthenware fragments in fine drifts down the vertical line and the shelves are mostly empty. They bow upward between supports even where there is an item or object, unidentifiable. A list of items is on the counter beside the register. The list is meaningless under any banner and the cans and bottles speckling the walls are covered over with a gelatinous fatty brown ooze that drapes the labels or is clotted with powdered rust. Every room is empty or stopped. You stop in each. It is the curse of your footfall and of your eyes, stopped each morning on the sand when you have walked east all through the daylight and twilight. You make things, but not for commerce, and what would that be in a napping city. You make movement and you make trails that bind the pointless disparate cells of the day into action, continuous and seamless. The disconnects lie in the failures of the city and its failed and languishing bodies. Neither of which can move forward, or rise up to seal their pact with the day that they will race toward its return. You are continuous.