Black Friday
A Christmas Carol for Prime Members
Lately, my Amazon deliveries have been handled by this tiny slip of a girl with beautiful eyes who must weigh, what, a hundred pounds at most.
Last night I dreamed I met her at the little gate to collect yet another package.
The atmosphere was straight out of a Dickens novel; even her van had something vaguely Victorian about it.
As I walked toward her, I already knew something was wrong because she had that sad little face. So I gathered some courage and asked if everything was alright.
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“No, sir, everything is not alright,” she said, “because you make me come by here almost every day, and I can’t keep going like this. I’m exhausted. Some nights I can’t even make it home. I often sleep in the parking lot back there, if you really want to know.”
Mortified, I didn’t know how to respond, so I just stood there staring at her in silence. She kept going:
“And on top of that, many of the things you order cost so little that I had to convert my delivery truck to run on steam. And to keep it going, I burn other customers’ packages — but it’s still not enough, and I end up losing money anyway.”
Petrified, all I managed to do was mumble some tangled apologies, trying to explain that it wasn’t really my fault, that restoring and repainting a motorcycle by yourself is complicated, and that you only discover what you need along the way, when you suddenly realize you need it, and that I was truly, truly, immensely sorry.
At that point, she told me it didn’t matter, that this was her job and she had to do it, no matter the cost — but she said it while coughing softly between sentences, and I knew for certain she had tuberculosis, and that it was my fault because I had forced her to sleep in that steam-powered contraption.
Then she slowly turned her back to me and climbed into the rattling thing, though it was clear it took effort.
The vehicle, puffing and wheezing, began to move slowly, reached the end of the street, turned the corner, and disappeared from sight, even though I could still hear it, and a plume of smoke rose above the rooftops of the neighborhood.
I stayed there for a while, doing nothing, until I shook myself, as if waking from a dream, and went back inside to order some vinyl masking tape and a scalpel.
