I sold soap. I fetched a soap from the window and carried it to the back of the store like a blue ham. Behind the counter we cut samples and goaded remnant testers into miniature giveaway pods.

One day at the store a soap professional offered two customers a try of moss-green cleanser granules. The customers took the granules and ate them. For reasons like this and also to tell our brand story we wrote a lot of product information in very small letters on stickers for the lids of our sample pods.

I made a pod assembly line and we sampled-out moisturizer, the green of blue jade – and like jade, its slow gum slide had the look of warmth behind chill. We sampled-out massage mousse, orange as wood. I cut the hock of soap with the soap cleaver and we weighed its cuts and admired them; we lifted them to the light and looked through them like bottle glass. The store smelled overpoweringly of pie – still the blue soap’s aftershave pushed through.

I went to the food court for coffee. At the juice kiosk a girl stood on a little step to make juice in huge transparent amphoras. Rhomboid pineapple, mango, turning in bright water, and the girl’s wrinkled blue plastic gloves descending.