A Room with No Echo

The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, the kind of tired hum that grew louder the longer one sat in the silence. Haruki slouched over his cluttered desk, bathed in the sterile white glow that coated the entire floor of Yamazaki Accounting like a layer of fog. The office was long past closing time, the other employees having trickled out one by one, some with casual goodbyes, others with practiced indifference. No one said anything to him, but he didn’t mind, since he didn’t particularly want them to.

He was still tapping numbers into a spreadsheet that no one would check until Monday. The work wasn’t hard, but neither was it meaningful. It was the kind of job that was done by simply surviving. Haruki, in many ways, was its perfect servant – unambitious, quiet, and largely invisible. He wasn’t a failure, not exactly. He had a stable job, a modest paycheck at this young age, and an apartment that didn’t leak. But there was no fire behind his eyes. Not anymore. If there ever had been one, it had gone out long ago.

His reflection in the dark window stared back at him, a faint ghost against the city lights. Early 20s. Average height. Slight frame. Short black hair flattened by the day. But what always stood out, what he could never quite get used to, were his eyes – a piercing yellow that looked almost golden under the right light. An unusual trait, all things considered.

Haruki finally saved his work and shut down the computer with a relaxed sigh. The office was cold as he walked out, locking the door behind him with a practiced motion. Tokyo at night was a different beast. Less polished, more honest. The streets were still pulsing with movement, but it all passed him by like wind through a sieve. He didn’t stop anywhere. He never did.

His apartment was a shoebox tucked between a laundromat and a closed-down ramen bar, the kind of place you could live in for years and never be noticed. Inside, the space was cramped but familiar. The glow of a small TV screen filled the room, casting soft shadows over stacks of manga and faded anime posters peeling slightly at the corners. As he loosened his tie and dropped into the sunken cushions of his couch, he picked up the remote and flicked through the usual options until he found an old Western movie. It was something from the 90s, or early 2000s. Probably American. Something dumb and loud and comforting.

Haruki mouthed the lines under his breath as they played, his pronunciation was surprisingly clean. He had never left Japan. Never had friends abroad. But somehow, English came to him easier than speaking with his coworkers. It wasn’t a skill he showed off. It wasn’t even something he was proud of. Just... a thing. A part of him.

The screen lit up with gunfire. He quoted the next line just a beat before the character onscreen could speak. He chuckled to himself, quietly, not necessarily because the joke was funny, he had seen this movie a couple of times now, but because it felt like something a person with a life might do. Then the smile faded, and the quiet came back.

Outside, the wind rustled through the thin cracks of the window, and the world continued to move on.

Without him.

Another day…

Another day of light.

Another day of work.

Passing by.

It was colder than usual this next night. Haruki walked the same path home as always, briefcase in one hand, his coat only half-buttoned against the wind. The streets were nearly empty, the hour growing too late even for the bars and ramen stalls to keep their doors open. Overhead, clouds hung low and heavy, smothering the moon.

The bridge here was nothing special, just a concrete pass over a narrow, winding river that cut through the edges of the district, like an old scar. But tonight, it felt… different. Ever so slightly. A liminal place where the world grew quieter, and the hum of the city thinned to a whisper. The water below was black, rippling faintly with the rhythm of unseen currents.

Haruki slowed his footsteps.

He didn’t know why. He wasn’t tired. But something about the stillness drew him to the railing. He leaned against the cold metal and looked down. The river didn’t reflect the sky; it swallowed it. Just motion and shadow.

He stayed there for a long time.

No phone in hand. No earbuds. Just silence. The thoughts came slowly at first, like strangers at the edge of a crowd. Then closer. More familiar. Too familiar. He didn’t flinch away. He just let them be. The weight of nothing in his life. The silence of his apartment. The fading memory of parents he barely remembered. The creeping sense that maybe this – whatever ‘this’ coud be – was all there would ever be.

He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t trembling. There was no dramatic pull of gravity, no final decision balancing on a ledge. Only the stillness. Only the water.

But something changed.

The air thickened, as though the night itself had taken a breath. The hairs on his arms stood up. The wind stopped. Everything stopped.

And then came the white.

It wasn’t light. It wasn’t color. It was... absence. A swallowing silence, opening before his eyes like a door without a frame, like a hole in reality itself. No sound. No flash. Just the instant erosion of everything around him.

The river vanished.

The bridge vanished.

The sky vanished.

Even the cold on his skin fell away, like a coat shrugged off mid-step.

And Haruki fell forward, though not downward. He wasn’t sure where his feet were. Or his hands for that matter. Or if his eyes were even open anymore. There was no sensation. Just a rushing motion.

Merely falling, and falling, and falling.

And in the end:

A breath

The white was gone.

And the world had changed.