Habitat: coat pocket, car cupholder, the bottom of a purse where it commingles with loose coins and a single cough drop. The unread receipt is issued at the moment of purchase with an urgency that suggests it matters, printed promptly, torn from its register with a small mechanical flourish, and handed over as though it were evidence of something important. It is not. It will not be read.
Study the specimen closely and you find a catalog of information nobody requested: a store's return policy in six point type, a survey code promising entry into a sweepstakes that will never be entered, a barcode that exists solely to be scanned by a machine that will never scan it again. The ink, thermal and faint, begins fading before the customer reaches the parking lot, as if the receipt itself suspects its own irrelevance and is quietly retreating from legibility. Some specimens survive months, passed through laundry cycles, emerging as soft gray pellets stuck to the inside of pockets like the desiccated husks of insects. Others are discarded within the hour, folded once, dropped into a bag already crowded with their identical, unread kin. None are ever consulted for the return they were meant to enable. They exist, entirely and only, to prove that something happened.