Dead Hours — Burnable, Page 12

About this chapter

3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. A young woman finishes a small silver drink pouch by the sliding doors, stands in front of the store's three waste bins, cannot decide which one it belongs in — and simply sets it on a lid and walks out into the rain. Kaito, physically unable to leave a thing sitting in a category it does not belong to, declares quiet war on one piece of rubbish and resolves to sort it correctly before his shift ends, spiraling all night over how an object can be foil and plastic and a straw at once and therefore belong nowhere. All night he stands square before the bins, arm fully extended, holding the pouch out over the open bin, frozen, dead-eyed, and mutters '...no.' He escalates through peeling the layers apart to test them, hunting the blank unmarked surface for a label that isn't there, and forty minutes of head office's hold music, while a ladder of night-shift regulars each deliver a verdict nobody can verify — the tracksuit regular with his clear bag of cans says any bin will do because they're all the same bin, a drunk salaryman insists everything is burnable and that fire doesn't check, a cheerful jogger beams that everything is recyclable now. Rin livestreams the whole vigil, sipping an identical pouch of her own from the very first minute, and has one flicker of near-sincerity — that the woman couldn't decide either and just left it where someone else would have to, and he's the only person alive who'd carry that — before raising her phone again. Near dawn, hollow, Kaito finally stops agonizing, sits with the pouch in his open palm, then takes the same stance one last time — serene, faintly smiling — and lets it drop, the running beat inverting into a quiet, triumphant '...burnable.' Then the morning-delivery driver slides the doors open into daylight, pulls all three bin bags out, and drops all three into one single sack on his cart: same truck, always has been. The sorting was never real, and his six-hour war sorted nothing. Rin holds up her own identical pouch — hers went in at ten, she didn't even look — and her stream hits four hundred thousand viewers who watched a man hold a pouch. Kaito reaches into the sack to retrieve his; Rin plucks it first, drops it back in, and walks off filming her outro. He is left with an empty hand and nothing, not even the decision. Morning daylight fills the spotless store exactly as the night began, the three bins empty and lined up by the doors — and on the counter someone has left a snapped plastic spoon jammed into a crumpled foil cup, Rin's phone already raised, already live.