I smiled at him in spite of myself. His face crinkled up into a mass of wrinkles as if he were trying to smile back, but his eyes still looked sad. The ghost-child, finding all this terribly boring, braced himself as he pulled at my hand, then let go when I didn’t move and marched over to a nearby shelf where he grabbed box after box of twenty-five teabags each until he couldn’t hold any more. Leaving the cart, I ran over to him and scolded, “Stop that! You can’t just take things off the shelf that you’re not going to buy.” The scolding apparently made him feel a little relieved. He didn’t seem likely to demand that I buy him all that tea, but too poorly coordinated to use his right hand to return the boxes stacked up on his left arm to the shelf, he ended up dropping them all. One by one they hit the floor with a dry, rustling sound. Boxes with strange names, like Green Energy, Woman’s Brew, and Breath Tea scattered all over the floor. Each piece of merchandise he dropped would broaden his world a little more. He would move on from there, not by buying things but by dropping them. There should be room for this sort of customer too. Purchases alone—things he wanted or things he had to have—wouldn’t help a ghost at all. I myself had no reason for being in this store in the first place. Or to be spending time on this street, for that matter. She had invited me for dinner, so why didn’t I head straight for the subway stop? I’d be in time if I left right away. Before I knew it the man from before was squatting down beside me, helping me put the boxes of tea back on the shelf. That cheeky ghost-child was hanging onto his shoulders, grinning. A woman in her sixties stopped to smile down at the man and whisper, “I envy you, shopping with your family.” Flustered, I stood up and shook my head hard from side to side as if to shake off a bad dream. This brought white powder floating down, which I thought with a start must be dandruff, but when I looked at the floor I saw feathers. Astonished, I shook my head again and more feathers fell. Had I become a crane? A crane who had turned into a woman, had a human family, and was now shopping with them as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Opening my wallet at the checkout counter I looked up at my reflection in the glass and saw that I was indeed a crane. A crane who used her beak to pluck feathers from her own breast, which immediately turned into euros.

I was not a crane. Soft, tiny feathers were escaping one by one through the seams of my down jacket. The moment they slip through the tiny holes, the feathers are thinner than silk thread, but once outside, they’re plump and fluffy again. Perhaps there are seams between the present and the future, with tiny holes in them through which people go back and forth.