Dead Hours — Track Seven, Page 14
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: Kaito stands with his eyes closed, blissful, the mop still in both hands, listening to the ceiling speaker in the dawn light. Panel 2: His brow begins to furrow, eyes still closed. Something is quietly wrong. KAITO: ...Where's the xylophone. Panel 3: Close-up as his eyes snap open, realisation dawning. KAITO: That isn't whistling. KAITO: That's humming. Panel 4: Wide reveal: Rin at the counter, her phone connected by a thin cable that runs up the wall to the ceiling speaker, one earbud in, entirely deadpan. RIN: It's you. Panel 5: Close on Rin, flat, the tiniest smirk, her thumb resting on her phone. RIN: The real player died in April. RIN: I have been the music since April. Panel 6: Kaito stares at her, soul visibly leaving his body, the mop slipping out of his hands. RIN: The whistling was ruining my audio, so I cut it. KAITO: You cut track seven.
Image description
Six panels. The song is not whistling but humming. Rin's phone is wired to the ceiling speaker: she has been the store's music since April, and she cut track seven out.
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.