Free Undeliverable by Rebecca Demarest Page B

from an old Melville novella he read in his intro level English class. It was about the insanity-inducing burden of working with the lost letters, something about those who died unhoping. He had thought at the time that it was just more old-fashioned melodrama, but after being here for a few days, he could almost see the truth in the passage.
    They managed to get through the backlog of carts fairly quickly, which left their afternoon free to catalog items for the auction once more. Focusing on books, they managed to prep sixty items for the next sale.
    “I just still can’t believe the magnitude of stuff that gets lost.” Ben tossed the dual-language copy of Chekov into the box labeled “Lot 34 – Fiction” before logging out of the shared auction document.
    “It just seems like a lot because you have to move it not once, but something like four or five times around the warehouse. It’s really not all that much. I mean, how many books are in that lot?”
    “So far? Twenty. And I’ve only scanned about half the shelf looking for the appropriate items.”
    “I think the estimate last year of books mailed through the postal service was in the neighborhood of twenty million. So your twenty? Nothing.”
    “I guess if you look at it that way.” Ben stood to stretch and then picked up the box to take it to the auction preparation section.
    “Grains of sand on a beach, that’s all this is.” Sylvia picked up the armload of stuffed animals that they had also entered. A teddy bear with a worn nose and a missing eye escaped her grasp and fell to the floor with a muffled clatter.
    “Did you hear that?” She dumped her armload into Ben’s arms and stooped to pick up the ragged bear.
    He struggled to maintain a grip on the box that was now piled high with fake fur. “Heard you drop something. What was I supposed to hear?”
    “It didn’t sound like a stuffed animal. There’s something in here.” Sylvia shook the bear, but nothing rattled, and it didn’t look like there was anything inside but stuffing. She poked its body and arms, trying to determine what it was.
    Ben stifled the urge to mutter a curse and started to make his way back to the auction bay, struggling to see over the pile of stuffed animals. “It probably just fell on its eye or something.”
    “I swear there was something else in here. Ah ha!” She had the bear by the nose and was squeezing. “Something in here all right.” She gave it a tweak and nearly dropped it again when an artificial voice box coughed into action.
    “I love youuuuu…” It trailed off into silence with a gargled moan.
    Sylvia handed the bear to Ben as though it were a child, turned, and walked out of the warehouse. Ben juggled to keep the bear aloft along with the other eight animals in his arms as he turned to take them to their new shelf. He knew how she felt; the decaying recording had sounded so melancholy and despairing, an unrequited love lost in the mail center. As he put them down, he adjusted them carefully so that they were sitting upright and facing each other in a circle. He straightened the bear’s head and ran a hand over its ears before heading back to his desk. He cleared his throat a couple of times before continuing the paperwork.
    The rest of the week passed in a similar fashion. It seemed the bear incident had cut through the last of Sylvia’s ire and she was interacting normally with him again. Or, at least, normal for her. They dropped easily into a habit of cataloging and organizing the incoming objects and then spending their extra time prepping items for the auction. They had one more claim during the week, a painting that appeared to be done by a fourth or fifth grader. It had apparently been addressed by the child as well because the address had been entirely illegible. It was forwarded on to the appropriate grandparent. Sylvia also kept up with her shredding, and those few times she was out of the warehouse, Ben turned on a radio to help cut