Confession received through the anonymous form. We did not reply.
Our building has ninety-six apartments and two hundred and thirty-one people, plus the dogs and the cats, who had to be fed too and who were counted separately. For sixty-two days, I was the one who decided who ate what.
Nobody fought for the job. On April 1st, when the blue barriers went up in the night and by morning you could no longer get down to the gate, the building group was running four hundred messages a day and not one of those four hundred knew how you order three tons of anything. Me, I've been in logistics for eleven years — light fixtures, import, containers, Ningbo — and I opened a spreadsheet. Column A, apartment number. Column B, number of people. Column C, what they had already received. They started calling me the tuánzhǎng, and within a week nobody in the building used my first name anymore.
On the eighteenth day, I took one apartment off the spreadsheet.