Dead Hours — Thirteen Minutes, Page 6
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Five panels. The front doors slide open and the tracksuit regular — tall, shaved head, grey zip-up tracksuit, clear plastic bag of empty cans — shuffles in from the rain. Kaito, alarmed, glancing at the kerb: "Not now, not now." The regular leans on the counter, philosophical: "Thirteen minutes? I proposed to my wife in nine." Kaito, flat: "That's... encouraging." Regular: "She said no. Took four more to explain why." Kaito checks the kerb as the regular ambles toward the coolers: "Please buy the cans back and go."
Image description
Five panels: the tracksuit regular with a bag of cans enters; he tells Kaito he proposed to his wife in nine minutes and she said no; Kaito checks the kerb.
About this chapter
3:12 A.M. A reroute cuts night-bus driver Amano Yuki's layover from nineteen minutes to thirteen, and Kaito — who will not admit he is optimising for anything — rebuilds the entire dead-hour store around that window: water pre-boiled, a blank cup staged handle-out, aisle four cleared, the register already open. The dramatic question, set by page two: can he engineer one flawless, uninterrupted thirteen minutes? Every night-shift oddball eats into it, and a ladder of regulars — the tracksuit regular, a rumpled office worker, a drunk salaryman — deliver flatly contradictory, unverifiable verdicts on whether anything real can happen in thirteen minutes at all. Three times Kaito checks the empty kerb through the front glass — "...not yet." Rin films the whole spiral as "The 13-Minute Man" and quietly relapses into small deniable sabotages: the kettle unplugged to charge her phone, the last clean cup taken — pettier and smaller than anything she would have tried before, and she knows it. Kaito finally assembles the perfect thirteen minutes just as the bus arrives — and Yuki spends eleven of them cornered at the door talking to Rin, while the staged cup goes lukewarm and untouched. At 3:31 Yuki refills her thermos, says her two words, and leaves to drive her bus; Kaito checks the same glass in the same pose and watches the empty kerb where the bus used to be — he built the flawless window and got nothing to put in it. Alone as dawn comes up, Rin deletes the clip without posting it. Final dawn mirror of page one: the cold, perfect setup still waiting on the counter, and no one ever noticed the aisle was clear.