The man who works these hours has heard a lot of stories from people who swear that they are killers.

Are they true stories? They are certainly real stories, in the sense that they exist.

He tends to shrug them off as being routine — or even routines, as the tellers have told them so many times they don’t change a word from one telling to the next.

It could be said that this would indicate their objective truth; it could indicate a long-rehearsed falsehood; it could denote a certain rote or ritual nature to the telling that has long ago created a fundamental irrelevancy to the stories’ objective truth.

Each teller approaches the man on the night shift, no matter how long they have known him, as if he is once again their first time and only time confessor.

He must nod, act frightened or sympathetic as is required by the teller before him, and send them on their way until the next time.

The man who works these hours must be efficient in his feigned empathy toward the storytellers. Nights are only so long. There are only so many deaths one can squeeze into them. He knows that there are only so many opportunities for a guilty man to squint, imagine the open face of a caring man before him in the night, and with a leaden sigh begin to tell a tale he swears is true.

This is what the man who works these hours does. It doesn’t matter to him what the particulars of anyone’s story are, as long as all the telling is done before dawn.