The Parcel Office At SonnbornThe carters came at six, as promised

The office at Sonnborn

The parcel office at Sonnborn emptied, in flat poster inks: pale rectangles on the wall where the shelves stood, the counter bare but for the open book and eight white enamel panels laid in a row, and through the window the iron trestle of the railway against an evening sky. Nobody in the room.

What was in the parcels is laid out on the counter in front of you, and it is eight enamel panels off a scrapped carriage and nothing else, because there was never anything else.

The carters came at six, as promised. They took the shelves and left the counter, because the book was open on it and you were still writing.

The office at Sonnborn had been losing money since 1955 and the Board had been told so every year by the clerk himself, in a letter, in the same words, which is the sort of thing that stops being read after the third time. In 1960 he was told the office would close when the traffic stopped, and that the traffic was what the consignment book said it was.

So the consignment book said there was traffic. Eight consignments in the last year, to eight consignees who appear in no directory for the city, carried west on a service the clerk rode himself with nothing in the crate but eight enamel panels he had taken off a scrapped carriage and lettered himself. He was not stealing. There was nothing to steal, and no money moved. He was writing down a year in which the office was still needed, in the only document that anybody upstairs would ever look at.

It bought a year. The Board is winding the office up anyway, on the arithmetic, and you are the one who read the book afterwards, noticed that the shelf numbers ran to seven in a building with four shelves, and worked out the rest in an afternoon.

You write RIVERBED and VOHWINKEL and OVERHEAD in the margin, in pencil, and you send the whole thing on to the records office rather than to anybody who would act on it.

The Schwebebahn is still running. It carried the clerk west over the road for the last three kilometres of his last invented journey, and it has carried about twenty-five million people a year since, over the same river, on the same iron.

MIND THE
  GEAR
IT RUNS
OVERHEAD

He scoured eight panels off a scrapped carriage and lettered that on them in his own hand.

RG/1961/S

The clerk was fifty-three. Nothing had been taken, so nothing was done; he was given a reference that said eleven years and nothing else, and the Board never learned where he went, because the only address it had for him was the office.

Title earned: The last run west.

FINISHED · THE PARCEL OFFICE AT SONNBORN · 773EFB

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