Dead Hours — Track Seven, Page 8
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: Kaito sits bolt upright at the counter, receiver to his ear, suddenly hopeful. KAITO: Hello? Yes. The whistling track. Sixty-eight seconds. Panel 2: The colour drains out of his face, his mouth opening slightly. KAITO: ...Pulled. KAITO: Say that again. Panel 3: Extreme close-up: Kaito's knuckles white around the phone receiver. KAITO: From every store? In April? Panel 4: He hangs up the receiver very gently with both hands, dead-eyed, staring at nothing. Panel 5: A wide shot of the counter. Rin films him from the side. Kaito is frozen in place under the fluorescent light. KAITO: It played last night. RIN: And they said? KAITO: That it wasn't them.
Image description
Five panels. Head office tells Kaito track seven was pulled from every store in April. He hangs up and says it played last night; they said it wasn't them.
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.