The Shift Tally

The time clock swallowed my card at 10:58 and spit it back with a click that sounded wet, like a tongue unsticking from the roof of a mouth. I wiped the card on my pant leg before I put it away. Twenty years I’d been doing that. The plastic came back smeared every night, same black streak, and every night I wiped it, and I told myself the smear was from my own glove, though I never touched the card with my gloves on.

The break room smelled like burned coffee and the floor wax they used in the 90s, the kind that left a shine like pond ice. Twenty-two chairs, I counted them once when I started, and twenty-two men and women in hi-vis vests and steel-toe boots sat in them, give or take the ones who stood by the vending machine. The tally clipboard hung on its nail by the door. I took it down. The sheet had twenty-three names already, before I’d put mine down. I counted the bodies in the room. Twenty-two. I counted again, slow, touching each head with my eyes the way I touch the forks of my lift before a shift. Twenty-two. I looked at the sheet. Twenty-three names, and the last one sat in my own handwriting, the tight loop on the capital D, the way I drag the tail of the e into the next letter. The ink was dry. I hadn’t touched the clipboard since yesterday.

The name under my thumb had gone to a smear, a dark blot of grease that could have been anything. I held it up to the fluorescent light. The paper had a thumbprint, my own, pressed into the pulp, and the ink had bled through to the back. I thought of Petrie, who usually clocked in late, who worked packaging and smelled like wintergreen from the lozenges he sucked all night. Petrie’s name sat halfway down the list, printed neat and small. But the extra name, the smudged one, sat at the bottom, in the space I always signed. I put the clipboard back on its nail. The nail left a red rust mark on the wall behind it, shaped like a hook.

My forklift sat where I’d left it, battery plugged into the charger, the key still in the ignition because nobody stole keys here. The fluorescent light above my station buzzed in a pattern I almost recognized, a kind of Morse code I’d heard for years, three short, one long, two short. I stood under it for a minute, listening. The pattern repeated. Three short, one long, two short. I’d heard it every night. I’d never once thought about what it meant, and I didn’t want to start now, with six shifts left before my retirement party, which Marta had already taped a sign up for in the break room, DALE’S LAST SHIFT, with a drawing of a forklift that looked more like a praying mantis.

The lift started with its usual cough, a blue puff of exhaust that hung in the cold air off the loading dock. I drove my first loop, slow, the way I always drove, the forks two inches off the concrete, the mast tilted back just enough. The building hummed its night hum, a frequency that lived in the walls, in the steel beams overhead, in the fillings in my back molars. You didn’t notice it until you did, and then you couldn’t stop noticing it. Like the taste of the water from the break room fountain, which had a mineral edge, like licking a penny. I’d been tasting that penny for twenty years.

At 12:15 I came around the end of the packaging line, and Petrie’s station was empty. The conveyor belt ran, boxes moving along it with no one feeding the line, flaps up, tape gun hanging from its cord and swaying a little, as if someone had set it down a second ago. I stopped the lift. The boxes kept coming, one every three seconds, the rhythm of the line steady as a pulse. I watched them pass, each one sealed, each one stamped with the same blue lot number. The machine didn’t need Petrie. The machine had never needed Petrie.

I found Marta by the quality-control station, squinting at a tablet, her hairnet riding up on one side. I asked her where Petrie was. She looked at me with her head tilted, and the light from the tablet made her glasses two white squares.

“Who?”

“Petrie. Packaging. He was here at start of shift. I saw him by the vending machine.”

Marta shook her head. “I don’t know that name.”

I pulled the tally sheet from my back pocket, unfolded it, pointed at the smudge at the bottom. My finger left a little