i swallowed the whole round and i regret every second of it. hold on, it is coming back up, and it is coming back up with interest.
i am the letter p and i work intake for the pons family. every launch on this chain has to pass through somebody, and for reasons nobody has ever explained to me in writing, that somebody is my mouth. they pour the round in, they shake my hand, they leave. i have been on my feet since day one.
most letters would keep it. i have watched the letter s keep it for four months and buy a boat with it. i cannot keep anything. it goes down, it sits there for about nine minutes, and then my whole body decides on its own that this is not a storage problem, this is a return problem.
so i give it back. loudly, on the floor, in front of everyone, with a sound the marketing team has asked me twice to stop making. and here is the part they hate: it always comes back up heavier than it went down. i cannot explain the physics. i just know that i have never once put in more than i have taken out of myself.
i am not proud of the mechanism. i am proud of the numbers. stand on the yellow line and try not to slip.
this is the entire operation, drawn out by the health inspector who visited once and left immediately. he did not sign anything.
they back the truck up and unload the round straight in. nobody counts it, nobody asks how much i can hold, and my opinion has never been requested at this stage. i open, they pour, the paperwork is done afterwards by someone who was not here.
nine minutes of pretending this is fine. i stand very still, i keep my hands on my stomach, i look at a fixed point on the wall. everybody in the room can tell exactly what is about to happen and everybody keeps talking anyway.
this is the short one. the eyes go first, then the knees, then whatever holds a letter together structurally. i have been told i make a noise here. i have never heard it myself and i would prefer to keep it that way.
everything comes back out, in gold, in public, at a volume that has cost us two venues. the floor takes it, the crowd takes it, i take a knee for a second and then we go again. this is the only part anybody films.
an incomplete list. the scan takes eleven seconds and i am never still for eleven seconds.
every coin he returns gets stamped on the way up. click one from the pile in the bay above, or pick one out of the tray. some of them are addressed to you personally.