Good Night

Friday. The holiday mail order season always ends the same way—a calamitous rise and then utter quiet. After going nonstop for two weeks, every hour of every day, with four hundred people opening and closing doors and shouting over food, the hollowness at the end of December 24th never ceases to feel eerie and strange. It's desolate inside the building. The shelves are empty, their contents shuttled to other peoples' homes, scattered across America. There, people are noisy. Here, our phones are silent. This is the view out the darkened windows of our Service Center, where our holiday lights are still hanging. Good night.