Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Brindley Logistics ·
The Moth That Counted With Me
A night stock clerk finds a moth that settles on the count sheet at each new number, and the counts have never needed recounting since it started.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Bo Ivers, stock clerk"
I want it understood that I count pallets, and I have counted pallets for six years, and my counts have never once needed recounting. That goes first so the moth does not get to be the whole story.
Brindley's runs two night shifts in the cold months, and I take the later one, aisles eleven through twenty, which is the quiet end. The count has not changed since before me: the sheet comes down from the office with the SKU blocks printed, you go bay by bay with the tally clicker and the pencil, and the sheet goes back up at 04:00 to be signed against the night before. If two sheets disagree, the office recounts. In six years there has been one recount. That was the week I had flu. It is in the office log.
The moth came into my aisles in the second week of October, the wet week. It is a pale moth, the colour of the dockets, and it flies in the aisle lights, and there is nothing in that. Warehouses have moths. What it does is land. It lands on the block I am about to write into, exactly when I move to write. The first time I waved it off and it circled back and sat on the block while I wrote the figure under its feet, three-eighty, my pencil going round it like a man signing beside a cat; then it lifted and went to the next aisle and waited at the next block.
You will say coincidence. I counted coincidence out, and this is how. It does not land on every block — only the ones where the count will not be obvious: bays shifted wrong the day before, a broken pallet, a part bay with shrinkage already noted. It is always on the block before me, never behind, never on one I have just filled. It is ahead of my pencil by exactly one figure, every night, aisle after aisle, at the speed I happen to walk. If I stop, it waits. If I hurry, it is already there, sitting like a small pale comma.
I asked on nights about moth problems. Pest control came the next week, walked the aisles, and found nothing to treat — their word was, there is nothing here for it to eat. I did not tell them the rest, because the moth went to the office with them and sat on the sign-off block while the man wrote zero treatments required, and I did not think that was mine to witness out loud.
After the third week I stopped being afraid of it, and that is where I want to be exact about the feeling, because this part is mine. A count that does not need recounting is not a small thing, and anybody who has worked stock knows what a recount is: doubt, in paper form, and somebody upstairs asking quietly whether you can be trusted with the clicker. I have watched men lose a posting over a recount. My sheets have never once been pulled, and I used to think it was because I was careful. The moth changed what I think. I am still careful. But the office has quietly stopped reprinting the verification line at the bottom of my sheets, which they still print for every other clerk. There is no column for what sits on your sheet and keeps the count with you.
The moth wintered with the night shift, so far as anyone could say. I did not name it. Naming felt like the one thing it had not asked for. It came on shift when I did, at the first bay of eleven, on the first block, wings folded like a filed docket; and it was gone by 04:00 when the sheet left, and nothing of it was ever found in the aisles by day.
The one thing I will add, and then I am done, is about the end of the season, in March. The flu came round nights again, and I gave it to nobody, and I worked every shift. On the last night of the month my sheet came down from the office with a block already counted and initialled in a hand I did not know — not the day man, not the office, nobody I could match — ink-grey, small, upright. Aisles eleven through twenty, every block, totals reconciled, and at the bottom where the verification line used to print, in that same grey hand, one word I will spell out because it is the only word I have from it:
Kept.