The deli counter ticket

A man takes number forty-one from the dispenser, glances at the small paper curl, and folds it into quarters with the care of someone pocketing a train ticket rather than a claim on eleven ounces of sliced turkey. The deli ticket is printed on thermal stock that fades within the week, so its afterlife is short and its purpose singular: it exists to be superseded. The dispenser holds them in a tight red spiral, and each ticket, torn free, briefly outranks the crowd, the number climbing on the digital display until it matches yours and someone behind the glass says it aloud, sometimes twice if you are not listening, and it is easy not to be listening, absorbed instead in the difference between honey ham and black forest ham, a distinction few shoppers could defend under questioning. The ticket asks only that you wait, which is what you were going to do anyway, and rewards patience with exactly the amount of standing you would have done regardless, just reorganized into a number instead of a line. What is quietly admirable is its total lack of ego: it does not announce that it has been called, does not vibrate, does not know your name. It sits in a coat pocket after the fact, an orphaned digit, and gets thrown out with the receipt, or occasionally kept in a drawer for reasons that would be hard to defend if asked. One forty-one is in such a drawer now, uncalled by anything, keeping company with a button and two foreign coins.

Beatrice Womack