Dead Hours — Track Seven, Page 11
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: Kaito stands in the doorway of a cramped back stockroom — stacked cardboard boxes, a dusty metal shelf, one bare hanging bulb. On the shelf sits a small featureless grey box with a single cable. KAITO: Nobody has been in here since spring. Panel 2: He crouches and lifts the grey box off the dusty shelf, dust on his fingertips. KAITO: This is the player. Eleven tracks live in here. Panel 3: Extreme close-up of his hands: the box's cable end hangs loose and disconnected, furred with dust. Panel 4: Kaito stares down at the dead cable, completely uncomprehending. KAITO: It isn't plugged into anything. KAITO: It hasn't been for months. Panel 5: Rin fills the stockroom doorway behind him, backlit by the store's fluorescent light, phone up, unreadable. RIN: Huh. KAITO: Then what is playing.
Image description
Five panels. In the dusty stockroom Kaito finds the store's music player unplugged and dead for months, and asks what has been playing.
About this chapter
The store's 47-minute music loop has run unchanged for six years, and Kaito can name every track by its first note. Tonight, at 3:14 A.M., track seven — sixty-eight seconds of whistling, a xylophone, and a woman saying 'have a nice day' — simply does not play. The loop goes six, then eight. Kaito spends the entire shift trying to prove a song he has heard eleven thousand times ever existed: he waits out four full cycles, interrogates the tracksuit regular, hears track seven playing as head office's hold music, and is told it was pulled from every store back in April. Rin films all of it. At dawn track seven returns — except it isn't whistling, it's Kaito's own humming, looped, because Rin has secretly been the store's music since the real player died in April, and tonight she cut the whistle out because it was ruining her audio. He gets nothing. She gets four hundred thousand listeners.