I ground my heels to a halt just before punting a pigeon clean off the curb. Dang, that was close. Glad I saw it in time. The bird was standing stiff on the ground like some freshly taxidermied trophy animal. As a Tokyoite, I’d encountered a lot of pigeons in my life, but this was the first time I’d ever even come close to kicking one; normally, they knew to get the hell out of there whenever humans came walking through. But as long as the world remained stuck in stasis, I’d have to remember to avoid stepping on them—which was a bit novel in a quaint sort of way, I supposed. I made a mental note to watch where I walked going forward.
I paused for a moment, thinking, then crouched down in front of the pigeon to take a closer look. I noticed it looked a lot shorter and stouter than the ones we had back in Tokyo, perhaps due to the extra plumage it needed to keep itself warm up here in Hakodate. Idly, I reached down and rubbed the back of my index finger against its neck feathers. The bird felt soft to the touch—and although it didn’t move a muscle, I could feel the slight warmth of its fragile life radiating from within its tiny frame.
Least I don’t have any problem touching you, little guy.
I rose back to my feet, wiped my index finger off against my pants, and continued making my way down the sidewalk.
After walking a little while longer, I happened upon a convenience store with a dine-in seating area. I pushed open the manual entrance door and let myself into the cool, air-conditioned interior. Apparently, there were still temperature differentials, even though time had stopped. I grabbed myself a bottle of tea from the drink corner and a cup ramen from one of the aisles, then headed for the register. There, I placed exact change for the food I’d taken in front of the employee (who was frozen mid-yawn), then helped myself to a pair of wooden chopsticks before making my way over to the dining area.
I’d spent many an hour killing time at mini-marts like this on days when I skipped school. They were the perfect place for truants like me, as convenience store workers seemed almost contractually obligated to not give a damn about who their clientele were or what their circumstances might be. There’d been a period of time when I used to hide out in my local public library as well, but once the librarian started trying to converse with me like I was a regular, I never set foot in there again. I didn’t want any human interaction whatsoever.
I pulled back the lid on my cup ramen and set it down in front of the hot water dispenser, directly under the nozzle. Then I pressed the Dispense button and waited.
“Huh?”
The water didn’t come out, even though I could see from the fill line indicator that the inner tank was full. I pressed the button a few more times in disbelief, but to no avail. Changing tack, I tried opening the top of the dispenser directly—and a cloud of steam immediately came billowing out before freezing in the air just above the machine. Well, that’s a new one. Clearly, I still had a lot to learn about the rules of this phenomenon. I felt weirdly compelled to reach out a finger and try poking the miniature cloud of static condensation, but the moment I did…
“Yeowch, that’s hot!”
I jerked my hand back as fast as I could. A second longer, and I might have gotten burned—but at least I knew there was definitely hot water in there now. I awkwardly lifted up the entire hot water dispenser and poured some out directly into my cup of noodles. I did end up spilling a little bit, but I was glad I’d somehow managed to convince the laws of physics to briefly kick in for the sake of my lunch. I closed the lid on both my noodles and the dispenser, then had a seat. Never in my life had I had such a hard time just pouring out a little bit of hot water for a quick and easy lunch.
I pulled out my phone and checked the time. The display read 12:25 p.m., which I assumed I could take as an accurate representation of how much time had actually passed since the timefreeze began. The clock on the wall of the mini-mart, meanwhile, still showed 11:14 p.m. I still had no idea why one was moving and the other wasn’t—but it seemed like a good idea to nail down the laws of this world in a more concrete manner. As soon as I was finished eating, that’s what I would try to do.
I messed around on my phone as I waited three minutes for my noodles to cook. But since I didn’t have internet access, this ultimately boiled down to me opening and closing various apps at random—until eventually, I tapped into my phone app, and my thumb froze when I saw the name Uncle Kurehiko listed amid my recent call history.
The call was from two weeks prior, just three days before my uncle had died of acute heart failure at only the age of thirty-nine. Despite the sudden and tragic nature of his death, there were not many who mourned his passing. His eccentric personality and reclusive nature had left him with few friends and made him an outcast from the rest of our extended family.
“You might even have been the last person he ever talked to, Kayato,” I remembered my mother saying at the funeral. But what had we even talked about during that final conversation? I closed my eyes and tried to trace back my memories as best I could.
“They’re a bunch of idiots, I tell you.”
Uncle Kurehiko was always angry at something or other—and the conversation we’d had two weeks prior had been no different. He’d called me up at around one in the morning and immediately launched into a drunken rant (this happened quite often) about a gathering he’d attended earlier that evening for some painters’ collective he was a part of. But he’d seemed even more out of control that night than usual.
“Nothing but talentless hacks, every one of them. The only people more braindead than them are the uncultured philistines who actually spend money on the worthless shlock they churn out. And they’ll probably never even realize that anyone with real taste looks down on their work with contempt until the day they die, the pathetic fools.”
“Uh-huh…” I mumbled.