“Huh? Wh-what happened here…?”
Yoshino stood there for a moment in complete astonishment. The bakery was gone. The building itself was still there, and it still looked as cute as ever. But inside, there was nothing. No stone oven, no fresh bread, no customers. The person in the teddy bear costume sat slumped against the wall outside.
“E-excuse me… Wh-what’s going on here? What happened to the store?” Yoshino hesitantly asked the person.
She tentatively reached out and gently shook the person’s shoulder. The teddy bear head tipped forward and fell off, revealing…nothing. The suit was empty.
“Wh-why…why is this happening? Oh! What about the sign?!”
Could that have something to do with all this?
Yoshino ran around the store to the far corner of the lot. The Store-Calling Sign hadn’t vanished or fallen over; it was in the same place as before. But something was different now.
“What the—? The words I wrote are…disappearing?”
For some reason, the parts of the sign in red paint had faded away and were almost unreadable. In other words, the parts describing what kind of store Yoshino wanted and what she wanted it to sell were gone. They were fading into the white background.
It looked strangely familiar—as a matter of fact, Yoshino had seen this before. Sometimes old roadside signs would have sections that were so faded she couldn’t even tell what they were supposed to say. The only thing left would be a thin, washed-out-looking layer of red paint.
That’s it! Red paint stands out a lot, but it also fades faster than other colors!
The paint she’d used to fill in the blanks on the sign had been a vibrant shade of red. After all this time out in the open air, it had been weathered away by the sun. The sign no longer knew what kind of store it was meant to be calling, which was why the building was empty. That must have been how it worked.
“B-but it’s okay! The sign itself is still there, so if I just paint in the words again…”
Yoshino tried to reassure herself as a cold sweat broke out on her brow.
A moment later, she realized she was wrong. That plan wouldn’t work. What was it the man in the Signage Seller had said?
“You must use this exact paint to fill in the blanks for the sign to work properly.”
Yoshino couldn’t go back to that store to get more of their special paint. She’d erased it—and replaced it with a “butcher shop that sells piping-hot, deliciously fresh potato croquettes.”
✦ ✦ ✦
As the days went by, the new stores started to disappear. One by one, in the same order Yoshino had placed them, the signs lost their color. The red paint faded, leaving only a blank sign, an empty building, and the hollow shell of an animal mascot sitting on the street.
Eventually, the very last store vanished, and the town became empty, too. New or old, trendy or boring, there wasn’t a single store left there anymore.