In 1989, architect and photographer Andrei Pandele photographed a queue for cheese in central Bucharest. The COURAGE Registry preserves it within a series on queues for food and ordinary goods during Romania’s final communist years. The Ceaușescu regime had reintroduced rationing under the language of “rational nutrition,” while shortages deepened as policy prioritised repayment of foreign debt. Pandele later drew attention not only to people but to small physical details: buckets of cheese on pavements, empty shopping bags marking space, and bottles of milk frozen outdoors. Containers could preserve a place even when their owners stepped away. This article is related to the milk-queue photograph in the same series, but records a different commodity and the material grammar by which a pavement became an ordered list.