Carried Through

I walked through the building for two hours

with it stuck to me. No one said anything.

The woman at reception just looked down

at my footprints on her floor—not marks,

just the knowledge of where I'd been—

and back up at my face, which must have

looked normal, which must have looked

like I wasn't dragging something dead through her space.

In the bathroom, I saw it in the mirror,

gray and flattened against the tile, tacky

still, still wanting to be part of something.

It was old gum. Someone had spit it out

at the bus stop, left it on the concrete

like a small insult, and I'd stepped through it

without knowing, picked it up like it was mine,

like it had been waiting just for me.

I scraped it off with my fingernail—

that feeling of something reluctant to let go,

the way it stretched and snapped back,

stuck itself to my skin instead. I washed

my hands three times. My fingernail still felt

wrong, still felt marked. In the hallway,

the woman was pointing at the prints I'd left,

calling someone. She wasn't angry.

She was just noting it, just documenting

where the dirty thing had gone.

I walked back the same way, slower,

trying to erase the trail, trying to undo

the hour and fifty-eight minutes I'd spent

walking through clean space with something

that didn't belong to me attached to my sole.

But the floor remembered. The woman remembered.

I was the man who'd dragged

something through their day.