Shopping lists

In front of the Safeway on 15th and Market there's a gate and two bright, bright lights -- really in front of the Safeway parking lot, so in front of a great dark space of silence, inert but full of potential harm -- a gate and two bright lights that shine down, slightly cockeyed, as if you could walk through them. You cannot. The gate is shut, just a prop for the sign that during the day says "Safeway" and at night says nothing.

There's a woman who sits at a small card table under the lights, resting on a crate that's attached to the same sort of handle and wheels that make carryon luggage work. Or did, before, when there was carryon. She sits on the crate, glowing white in the fierce glare, with a blanket draped over her head and around her face. It's already fall in Seattle, which means it's already winter.

She keeps a book in front of her, and a notebook next to it, and she reads in one and writes in the other. She must choose the spot for the lighting, as abominably direct as it is. Imagine the Nevada desert at noon, without the softness. What do they call those lights? Not Noah's arc lights, but maybe sodium lamps -- pillars of their community, darlings of the righteous.

She is the judge before the void, inscribing sins from out our tangled desires and fears onto clean, blank pages, where they are unobscured and unaswerable.

I like to go around. I'm afraid if I went through the gates -- which you can't go through -- I might not come out in the parking lot. Or I might, but in a lot of a very different sort. Either way, cake would no longer be my destination, and unambitious as it sounds, I'm pretty happy with cake most of the time.