Dead Hours — Track Seven, Page 3
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: Kaito leans both palms on the counter, uncomfortably close to Rin, intense and urgent. KAITO: It's the one with the whistling. Panel 2: Rin, blank-faced, one earbud in, lowers her phone an inch. RIN: The what. Panel 3: Kaito raises both hands and conducts an invisible song with his eyes shut. KAITO: Sixty-eight seconds. Whistling, then a xylophone, then a woman says 'have a nice day'. Panel 4: Rin, flat and deadpan, chin propped on one hand. RIN: That's three songs. Panel 5: Kaito brings one palm down gently on the counter, eyes wide, defending his life's work. KAITO: It is ONE song. I mop to it. Panel 6: Rin lowers her phone slightly, the tiniest smirk, Kaito answering from off-panel. RIN: You mop to a song. KAITO: I mop ON it. It is when the mopping happens.
Image description
Six panels. Kaito leans across the counter describing the missing song in obsessive detail while Rin picks his description apart.
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.