Dead Hours — Burnable, Page 17
By Suha · Published
Log in to see this page
Page 17 of Burnable is for signed-in readers. Logging in brings you straight back here — and an account is free if you do not have one.
Transcript
Six panels. Panel one: the sliding doors open onto flat morning daylight. The rain has stopped. The morning-delivery driver wheels in a hand cart carrying one large empty sack. Panel two: the driver briskly hauls the bag out of each of the three bins in turn, holding all three at once. Entirely routine. Panel three: he drops all three bags together into the single large sack on his cart. Kaito stands a step away, staring, all the blood gone out of his face. DRIVER: Same truck. Always has been. Panel four: a close two-shot. Kaito hollow and stricken; the driver shrugs, already wheeling the cart toward the doors. KAITO: All of it? Every night? DRIVER: Every night. Panel five: Rin turns to Kaito holding up her own identical small silver drink pouch between two fingers, phone still raised in her other hand, entirely deadpan. RIN: Mine went in at ten. Didn't even look. Panel six: Kaito lunges one hand into the open sack, reaching for his pouch. Rin's hand gets there first, plucks it out, drops it straight back in, and she strolls off toward the doors filming, leaving his hand empty and open. KAITO: ...that one was mine. RIN: Four hundred thousand. Thanks, chat.
Image description
The morning driver empties all three bins into one sack — same truck, always has been — and Rin reveals she binned her identical pouch at ten without looking.
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.