Dead Hours — Track Seven, Page 6
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: The sliding doors open. A tall man with a shaved head in a grey zip-up tracksuit steps in carrying a clear plastic bag of empty cans, wet street and rain behind him. Panel 2: Kaito intercepts him in the aisle, uncomfortably close, urgent. KAITO: The whistling song. Sixty-eight seconds. Do you know it. KAITO: Every night. Three fourteen. Panel 3: The tracksuit man holds up his clear plastic bag of empty cans, expression completely blank. Panel 4: He tilts his head back, closes his eyes and hums, the bag of cans dangling from one hand. TRACKSUIT MAN: Hm hm hmmm... hm hmm. Panel 5: Close-up of Kaito's face collapsing into flat horror. KAITO: That's the coffee machine. KAITO: You hummed the coffee machine. Panel 6: The tracksuit man sets his bag of cans on the counter and shrugs. Rin is behind the counter with her phone up, filming. TRACKSUIT MAN: It's got a whistle in it. RIN: He's not wrong.
Image description
Six panels. The tracksuit regular arrives with a bag of empty cans, is ambushed by Kaito about the missing song, and hums the coffee machine instead.
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.