The alarm clock died sometime in the night, its brass hands frozen at 3:47. Kimberly only noticed when she opened her eyes to find afternoon-old sunlight pooling on her floor, the kind of light that made dust motes look like falling copper. She bolted upright, disturbing the careful stack of letters she'd been using as a nightstand. They cascaded across her floor like autumn leaves.
Her postal uniform hung from a nail, royal blue and crisp despite yesterday’s rain. She dressed with the quick efficiency of someone used to being late, smoothing her skirt, rolling her socks, clicking her tongue at wrinkles that wouldn’t quite flatten. The silver hand mirror showed what she expected: wiry black hair chopped short after the Alyssa-and-gum incident, sticking up like a startled cat’s tail. The bone comb didn’t help much, but she tried anyway.
Her room had been a broom closet in a previous life. Now it was her kingdom: six feet by four, with a high window that caught the western sun and let in the sounds of mules braying from their apartment balconies. Billy's snores drifted through the thin door, accompanied by the clicking and whirring of whatever machine parts he’d fallen asleep working on. Through the gap beneath the door, she could see brass gears and copper wire tangled in his white beard like metallic spiderwebs.
The door creaked as she opened it, but Billy could sleep through a hurricane. She made a mental note to ask him to oil the joints when she got home.
Kimberly ran the comb through her hair again, tossed her chamber pot out the window, and climbed down to ground level on their rope ladder. The city was already awake. A mule dozed on a third-floor balcony, its long ears twitching as she passed. The laughing lady was at her usual corner, offering paper cups to passersby.
“Sweet tea for a sweet day,” she called, and Kimberly, against her better judgment, accepted.
The bird came from nowhere.
A rush of air. A shadow too large to be a crow. Black wings cut across the sky, and for a moment, Kimberly saw its eyes—two polished coins reflecting the whole city in miniature. A terrible, watching thing.
She startled so badly the tea spilled down her front.
The post office smelled of ink and envelope glue, its air thick with the whisper of letters sliding into sacks, of pneumatic tubes hissing as they delivered their payloads. The walls bore faded posters of national heroes, and somewhere deep in the building, an unseen radio hummed with static-ridden tango music.
Hegelia, the postmistress, spotted her the second she stepped inside. Nothing escaped Hegelia. The woman’s ink-stained hands paused over a ledger, her dark eyes flicking over the stain on Kimberly’s uniform.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Five demerits,” she said, voice carrying neither cruelty nor kindness. “And two circles from your pay.”
Kimberly groaned. Demerits gathered like dust, affecting everything from phone privileges to whether shopkeepers could legally offer you discounts.
“Sort mail in the back today,” Hegelia added, already turning her attention elsewhere. “We can’t have you representing us like that.”
The sorting room was Bonnie’s domain.
Bonnie had been working at the post office since before Kimberly was born, and she acted like it. She lounged against a stack of mail crates, cigarette dangling from her lips despite the "NO SMOKING" sign directly behind her. She had an old letter opener in one hand, absently flicking it open and closed.
Kimberly barely had time to brace before Bonnie grinned. “Guess you’ll be handling my shift today.”
“I just got here,” Kimberly protested.
“And I got here before you.” Bonnie stretched, flicking her cigarette into an ashtray someone had probably set there just for her. “Fair’s fair.”
Kimberly opened her mouth to argue, then shut it. It wasn’t worth the fight.
She took a seat at the sorting table and got to work. Most of it was the usual fare—bills, bank notices, government requisitions. But two letters caught her eye.
One, written in a child's careful scrawl to Santa.
The other...
She shouldn’t have taken it.
But her fingers moved before she could stop herself, slipping the letter into her pocket like it was second nature.
---
Lady Daze found her later, as she always did. Her shopping cart was a mobile laundry, complete with a hand-cranked wringer. Kimberly ducked into an alley to change and handed her soiled uniform to the homeless woman.
"Stains are just memories we haven't learned from yet," Lady Daze mused, working at the tea mark with something that smelled of vinegar.
Kimberly shivered. The bird was still there. Perched on a lamppost, black-feathered, watching.
"I'll find you tomorrow at the Leaning Park, right?"
Lady Daze shrugged.
"Hey, I appreciate you helping me out, but I really need this uniform back tomorrow, okay? Hegelia already gave me five demerits! I can barely use a phone!"
Lady Daze shrugged again. Homeless people didn’t care about demerits. Most of them had so many that they’d lost track.
“I should have it clean by tonight,” she said at last. “Tomorrow’s your day off, right? Come find me and I’ll take you to see the Rabbit Man.”
Kimberly hesitated. Billy would tell her to politely decline.
She grinned. “Let’s do it.”
They spat and shook on it.
---
On the way home, Kimberly spent a silver star at Wong’s Toy Emporium—a stuffed panda for the Santa letter’s author. Billy would be angry, she knew. Rent was due, and mechanics’ work was scarce in a city where most people traveled by foot or donkey.
Their argument echoed past the sleeping mules in the hallway.
“Money doesn’t grow on trees,” Billy said, voice rough with sleep and something heavier. “What am I supposed to tell the landlord? That my daughter’s got a soft heart for every sad story in the city?”
Kimberly tried diplomacy. “I can make it up. I’ll take Greg’s route and use the tunnels to get it done before dark. He’ll pay me in cigarettes and I can trade them for a star.”
“You were already going to cover Jenny’s route for the mouse incident,” Billy groused. “You can’t be everywhere, and you can’t always count on making up other people’s shifts. We’re going to be overdue again, and Mrs. Thuring told me last time would be the—well—last time.”
The argument circled, over and over, until exhaustion set in.
Billy sighed, rubbing his face. “I’ll figure something out.”
Kimberly, still fuming, pulled out the letter she’d stolen. Her own handwriting stared back at her.
Tiffany Werther.
The message was brief.
Clam chowder. Please come home.
She tucked it under her pillow, but sleep was long in coming.
Outside her window, the black bird waited.
Its eyes, when they caught the city’s strange lights, gleamed like brass crosses in the sun.