Carter

The stillness of 3:30 a.m. has settled over the return-mail sorting table, lit by a single desk lamp. The letters in the three large boxes that arrived on Christmas Eve are all addressed to different places, yet strangely, the same person appears in every sentence that shows through the thin envelopes. Someone who sat by the window listening to the rain, someone who always wanted to write letters when it rained. One of them lies beside the repair tape for damaged mail, its glue dried and its flap gaping open, and the first line of the half-slid-out letter is exposed under the light. “You came all this way. Thank you.” From the moment that sentence caught your eye, you keep picturing someone sitting in the empty chair across the sorting table. Each time the sentence changes, that face smiles, then blurs, then grows quiet again. Outside the window, snowflakes catching the fluorescent light drift down here and there.