Chapter 3:

Chapter 3: The Vending Machine That Remembered

Fractured Hour

The city twisted. Or maybe my memory is.

I thought everything was turning, yet I always put my brain down when the world is not right.

Haruto ran fast leaving abandoned bicycles and door frames with blue lighting, concrete cold to the soles of his sneakers. I crossed the road to a convenience store where I liked to hang- only there the vending machines had been shot and the insides of the machines were all twisted pipes like a nest full of insects, and the best you could see was that door on the back of the store.

He dove inside. There was not the regular automatic click on it, but a dry creaking click was present.

The air was stale, metallic. I jumped and put my knuckles on the ground and struggled to breathe. There seemed to be a dressed-up store about there that was pierced through with the neon signs swinging.

He looked up. The shelves were on the perfect infinite eternal straight line according to which it was quite full until the last bottle of bottled water. Hundreds of them. There comes another, another, the same, Unglamorous, grey labels.

No snacks. No cashier. No humming refrigerators. Everything was quiet on me as dust on a closed shelf.

I checked my wrist.

99:57:44.

More than ninety-nine hours. Still counting down.

"What the hell is going on…" I whispered. My voice didn’t bounce back. It just… vanished.

I strolled over to a shelf, and held on to it without thinking, but instinctively. I bent over and took one of the bottles.

It was ice‑cold.

The tag flashed, made to stick to the gray smud, letters shaking in place--a second, then only one.

Haruto Seno.

I dropped the bottle. It landed with a cheap clack.

And I moved back and my heart began to pound.

I turned toward the counter. There was a cash register, mouth open, empty. It had a corkboard with papers (most blank) on its back, where the few that had doodles looping through them shuffled when no one saw.

And in the corner somewhere of the counter--a queer envelope.

The ordinary cashier slips into delivery notes.

I walked up slowly. There enclosed a black sheet with the top page blank on, and a pen was attacked diagonally across its right corner. I reluctantly took up the pen in writing:

"Is anyone there?"

I blinked.

The words flipped, twisted.

"You are."

My chest tightened.

I wrote again.

"Where am I?"

The response dripped in blood;

"Unfiled. Unsorted. Unchosen."

I swallowed. My hand shook a bit. I tried again.

"What do I do?"

This time the ink barely bled. As if it was deep‑thinking.

“Locate the memory that belongs to another person.”

"What memory?" I whispered. The tip of the pen was floating over a paper.

Nothing else showed up.

I turned a page but the dry skin became paper. the entire pad rolled and crumbled and crackled in my hands.

The register beeped once.

I turned. A phone was ringing.

Not a cellphone. The corner was to receive an old green pay-phone, also two queer fridges that did not come here.

Slowly walked towards it. Another stroke of the ring,--sharp and harsh,--the type of stroke you dream of when you have nightmare-type dreams.

I grabbed the receiver.

"Hello?"

Silence.

Then, low – it was my own voice.

"Hello?"

I yanked the phone away. The same, no recording, came out of the other end of my voice.

"Who is this?!"

And yet in that other voice there was an impossibility.

"Don't forget the kite."

My blood turned to ice.

The kite. Blue and red. A gift from my dad. It had forgotten about it over the years.

He recalled how, on that windy hill-top, my dad would lift the kite and his sets of rough hands, with white knuckles, squinting against the wind and spring sun.

Such a silly matter--as a chance scrap thrown in a moment. But it was what I had anticipated--memories fly away. At any rate things buried are found again.

But the kite never did.

Neither did my dad.

I never saw it again and when I was nearly nine one spring it simply flew off into the air.

Who would even know that?

The cell phone became completely dead, and I dropped the phone receiver.

It became garish as well and resembled a rope tail.

Then I saw it again.

Something, completely familiar, was found inside the shattered glass of that vending machine.

She had a kite, tattered, faded, protruding between rows of snacks.

Haruto stumbled back.

His brain was a mess.

He appeared to be under observation by the entire city.

Or maybe it remembered him?

He turned around and felt the need to breathe with air.

But the door was gone.

Its position was replaced by a massive length and thoroughly decanting mirror.

Full length, all but too pure, as though it had substituted the whole front wall.

He approached it slowly.

His mirror image was hollow and worn-out and it was leaner.

The shop at his back was too long, like an underground well with aisles the same.

And behind his reflection, something moved.

He spun, but saw nothing.

He turned back. There was someone standing behind him, on the other side of the mirror, it might be a man or a mannequin to myself, a man with a huge frozen smile. It was uncanny.

In each hand he was holding a bottle of water.

There was one brand that flashed with “Graduation Day.”

The other read “Last Goodbye.”

The man simply stood and waited.

Then he opened his mouth and his smile and his.

“What memory are you going to drink today?”

The reflection of Haruto remained motionless, though he shuddered back. The man’s voice didn’t follow. The smile did not change at all. But now the bottles were on the shelf next to him.

“No.” Haruto muttered. “No, I’m not trading anything.”

The mirror distorted. He didn’t but His reflection blinked.

He ran.

Past the counter.

Past the shelves.

He nearly went forward to feel the world rocking like the heat on the asphalt.

He struck against the rear wall and pushed the emergency exit wide open

Blinding light.

He staggered out—and stepped into silence.

Not an alley. Not the street. Only white fog: immeasurable, airy as clouds, cold as glass.

He turned.

The convenience store had disappeared.