He walked out, leaving Arthur alone with the beige walls and the hum of the vending machine selling stale pretzels.

“But that’s the point,” Arthur said. “I’m trying to tell them I’m moving.”

“Thank you,” Arthur said.

It would come. Eventually. The system was slow, and stupid, and cruel in its mindless way. But it was also patient.

The USPS wasn’t rejecting his card because of a typo or a hold or a fraud alert. It was rejecting his card because, in the only way that mattered to machines, Arthur Pendelton did not exist anywhere except a place he no longer had the right to call home.