Chapter 1 — Amazon Drops
I swear the Amazon truck waits around the corner, engine idling like a big dumb grin, just to time its arrival with the exact moment my soul finishes regenerating. Midnight strikes. My spine cracks in three places. And then—bam. Headlights sweep the dock door, and the first wave of the day (technically yesterday? technically tomorrow?) begins.
I lean against the metal frame and mutter, “Lord, give me strength or give me disability.”
“Wrong line,” Carla says, popping open a can of something suspiciously energy-looking. “That one goes to Social Security. We’re the mail people. We only deliver disappointment.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But promptly.”
The dock door screeches up and the cold night air spills in like it’s personally offended to be outdoors. The Amazon driver, an unusually cheerful man I privately suspect of being dead inside, hops out.
“Morning!” he chirps.
“It’s night,” I correct.
“In my heart,” he replies, “every shift is morning.”
Carla whispers to me, “Bet money he’s new.”
I don’t take the bet. The man is practically glowing. Newborns, puppies, and new postal partners, they all have that same naïve shine, equal parts hope and delusion.
He opens the back of the truck and we behold the cardboard avalanche inside.
“Half of that is unstable,” Carla mutters.
The driver beams. “It shifted a little on the highway!”
“A little?” I say. “My man, that pallet is holding on by the grace of God and a prayer from your Auntie.”
He laughs like I wasn’t serious.
We begin unloading. The first box I pull out is labeled Inflatable Flamingo Costume. Because of course it is. Amazon customers are insomniacs armed with credit cards and questionable judgment.
“Humanity’s finest,” Carla says, holding a box that jingles like maracas. “I bet you a donut this is dog boots.”
I tilt my head. “Boots or costumes?”
She narrows her eyes. “Boots. I can smell disappointment.”
“You can smell many things,” I say, dragging my pallet jack over.
The driver is still grinning. “You all make this job look fun!”
“Blink twice if he’s a hostage,” Carla whispers.
We unload. We stack. We swear. Time becomes a flat circle made of Amazon Prime tape. The clock clicks to 00:37, then 00:52, then 01:13, and we’re knee-deep in cardboard.
“You ever wonder how much of this is impulse buys?” I ask.
“All of it,” Carla says. “Nobody plans to own a glow-in-the-dark bidet.”
I almost drop the box I’m holding. “A what?”
She points. “Look. Says so right there.”
“My God.” I stare at the box like it’s written in Elvish. “We are becoming a society of chaotic gremlins.”
“We deliver for them,” she says. “So what does that make us?”
I sigh. “Gremlin couriers.”
She raises her can. “To the gremlin express.”
We clink our cans, hers full of chemical courage, mine full of stale coffee I brewed at 11 PM because I hate myself.
The Amazon driver rolls out a cart of envelopes now, half-bent, poorly taped, bearing addresses that look handwritten by raccoons.
“These go to the parcel side?” he asks.
“Nope,” I say. “Those go in the big green bin of regret.”
“That’s not a real bin.”
“It should be.”
He gives me a confused smile. I watch it crumble slowly as an entire mountain of bubble mailers shifts ominously behind him.
“Uh… is that supposed to—?”
THRUMP.
Avalanche. A plastic tidal wave. A thousand packages of every shape and purpose bury him up to the knees.
There is a long moment where none of us speak. Then Carla nods thoughtfully.
“Yep,” she says. “He’s definitely new.”
⸻
By 01:20, the Amazon driver has gone from human sunshine to a man silently calculating which wrong turn in life led him to this dock. He signs the manifest with the defeated flourish of a man who knows he will never see heaven.
“I’ll… see you next time,” he mumbles.
“Hopefully not before dawn,” I say.
But I know better. Scheduling demons rule this place.
The dock door closes. The quiet settles in, a cold, hollow vacuum where only the fluorescent lights dare to hum. Every night shift has this moment. The moment where you realize it’s only been eighty minutes and your feet already feel like you’re walking on bone shards.
Carla stretches her arms overhead. “Ready for throws?”
I groan. “Ready is a strong word.”
“Alive?”
“Debatable.”
She shrugs. “Good enough.”
We head inside.
⸻
Throwing parcels is a kind of postal ballet, if ballet dancers were arthritic and surrounded by cardboard. The goal is simple: sort the packages by route, zone, and the whims of the gods. The execution is… less simple.
We enter the throw area, a long corridor of metal bins lined up like soldiers waiting for orders. Each bin has a route number, some peeling, some sharpied on by someone who definitely should not have been given a Sharpie.
I crack my neck. “Throw until two?”
Carla nods. “Unless a new truck rolls in.”
I close my eyes. “You said that like it’s a possibility.”
“Everything is a possibility,” she says. “I once had a guy bring us three skids of live worms.”
I stare. “Why?”
“He said they were late.”
“Maybe they were cold.”
“There’s no such thing as cold worms,” she says, beginning to throw parcels. “There’s only worms and warmer worms.”
It is far too early for this level of conversation.
I take my place. I grab, glance, and throw. Grab, glance, throw. Grab, glance, pause.
The label reads:
TO: BIG MIKE
FROM: BIGGER MIKE
I show Carla. “Am I hallucinating?”
She takes it, squints. “Now that’s a power move.”
“What do you think is in it?”
“Ego,” she says. “Or supplements.”
I toss it into the appropriate route and pray neither Mike meets me in a dark alley.
By 01:44, my arms have gone numb, my eyes have dried out, and I’m fairly sure I’ve begun astral-projecting above my own body. Carla is talking about her cat’s vet appointment but I can’t tell if it’s real or if I’m dreaming it.
“…and he ate the entire cone,” she says.
“The vet cone?” I ask.
“No, the vet,” she says, then laughs. “You’re not listening.”
“I’m fighting for my life.”
At 01:58, we finish the throws.
Carla claps her gloves together. “We survived.”
“Until the 2:30 truck,” I remind her.
She groans. “Why must you speak our doom into existence?”
⸻
At 02:29, the ground trembles in that specific postal way that tells me the plant truck is coming around the bend.
“We hide?” Carla suggests.
“They’d find us,” I say. “They always find us.”
The plant truck backs in, the beeps echoing like a countdown to judgment. The driver hops out—an older man named Frank who has seen more chaos in this building than God allowed on earth.
Frank nods at us. “It’s heavy tonight.”
“It’s always heavy,” I say.
“True,” he replies. “But tonight it’s heavy-heavy.”
He opens the back.
He is correct.
Three pallets of DPS trays tower like ominous Jenga stacks, and behind them, God help us, another mountain of parcels.
Carla swears softly. “I didn’t clock in for this.”
“You didn’t clock in at all,” I say. “You forgot again.”
She gasps. “Son of a—”
Frank pats her shoulder. “Management’ll fix it. Or not. Who knows.”
We unload. Frank leans against the dock doorway, watching us work in that supervisory-but-not-supervising way plant drivers have perfected.
“You kids ever sleep?” he asks.
“Between lives,” I say.
Carla huffs. “Sleep is for the non-career.”
Frank grins. “Keep talking like that and they’ll pin a supervisor badge on you.”
I freeze. “Don’t curse me like that.”
We wrestle the DPS trays onto rolling carts. One tray bursts open, letters spilling like confetti at a very sad parade.
Carla picks one up and reads the front. “Love letter?”
I peek. “Looks like a bill.”
She tosses it back. “Same thing.”
By 03:11, the unloading is done. Frank signs. We sign. The night swallows itself back into quiet.
He waves as he climbs into his truck. “See you again at nine!”
“Nine?” I say. “We’re still here at nine?”
Frank laughs. “Kid, you’re lucky if you leave before noon.”
He drives off.
Carla and I stare into the darkness of the empty dock.
“We should unionize,” she says.
“We are unionized.”
“Then we should unionize harder.”
⸻
There is no elegant way to describe what happens between 4 AM and 7:30 AM. It is a blur. A fever dream. A montage sequence without music.
We sort flats. We toss letters. We break down pallets. We rebuild pallets. We scan parcels. We question our life choices.
Carla drops a tray and curses loudly. I mis-case an entire route and have to redo it from scratch. A stack of magazines falls over and tries to kill me.
At 06:41, I announce to no one:
“If I die here, bury me in a Priority Mail box.”
Carla doesn’t look up. “Too expensive. You’re getting Parcel Select Ground.”
“That’s disrespectful,” I tell her.
“That’s the budget.”
The sun begins to creep through the high warehouse windows—an indifferent, quiet dawn watching us shuffle around like zombies wearing postal polos.
And then, right on schedule, the clock hits 07:30, and the first wave of carriers arrive.
The sound is unmistakable: the stomping boots, the half-awake greetings, the battle cries over missing scanners.
A carrier named “Tiny” (who is seven feet tall) walks by. “Morning, night crew.”
Carla salutes. “Morning, day warriors.”
He grunts. “It better not be heavy.”
I gesture to the mountain of parcels. “It is heavy.”
Tiny sighs a deep, existential sigh. “Figures.”
