Dead Hours — Track Seven, Page 4
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: Kaito stands dead still in the middle of the snack aisle, arms folded, the mop leaning against his hip, staring straight up at the ceiling speaker. Panel 2: The same framing later. Kaito is in exactly the same pose; the mop has slid down against a shelf. Rin's arm enters frame from the side, holding up a phone to film him. RIN: It's been forty minutes. Panel 3: Tight close-up of Kaito's face, unblinking, the eyebags deep. KAITO: Forty-one. Panel 4: Rin sits on an upturned plastic crate behind him, chin on her hand, still filming. RIN: What happens if it plays. RIN: And if it doesn't. Panel 5: Low angle. Kaito's eyes widen slightly with hope, head tilting toward the ceiling speaker. KAITO: Then I was wrong and everything is fine. KAITO: Here it comes. Six...
Image description
Five panels. Kaito stands motionless in the aisle for forty minutes waiting for the loop to come around again while Rin films him from a crate.
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.