'Saturday: November 26th: 05:27'

Saturday

05:27

Only moments after she’d been able to get home, it felt like she was out through the front door again.

Striding through backward-alley parking spots that lay between the girl and anything resembling a main road, she watched as dawn began to darken a jagged skyline, where restaurants and cafés and electronics retailers began cropping up.

Unfortunately, or just as well thankfully, there would be no travel under the public eye involved this time.

She was pretty sure she was being followed, but just as much that the guy was drunk, not one of the faces she knew. He’d give up before she reached an open street.

Hana could give any more of a shit about any of that than she did the cold, which still found a way to slip under her coat, attacking the parts her uniform left vulnerable.

All she felt, all she could pay attention to as she paced quietly under the streetlamps in her non-slip shoes, was her own rage.

It wasn’t the kind of anger that she enjoyed, promised herself to hold onto forever, only to watch it fizzle out after a few minutes and move onto the next mood that caught her fancy.
It was deep. Enough that it frightened her, that it had her wondering if the rest of the day was going to be okay. She could spend it all just diving in this muck, if she really wanted to.

And oh, did she not want to.

A hundred thousand. It was a terrifying number. Too much to grasp, and all at once, just as well, insultingly small. Almost a month’s worth of expenses, and far more, it felt, than a month’s pay.

Just a month. A human could bear anything, for a month.

Not starvation. She thought. Not thirst, or lack of oxygen.

She thought so, and yet, how long had it been?

How long had it been that she felt like she couldn’t breathe?

But with this…

She’d done plenty of this dance at home, in the what felt like minutes before she’d come storming out again.
She couldn’t leave it all there, for fear of inviting a cruel twist of fate. And so there it was divided up, some of it left with the little one for when she woke up, and the rest split apart in her clothes, her bag, even strapped to her—
Well… She wasn’t proud.

The girl stomped the concrete ramp that took her to the front door of her first stop, ramming her hand into her bag and jangling the keys into the front door of a quaint-looking desserts shop at the base of the street.

Appearances could be deceiving.

She tied up her hair, and swung an apron out of her bag, her parka onto the nearest hook of the closet of a staff area at the back of the shop.

Where the slope turned flat and smooth asphalt began to show signs of patchwork construction projects, the store, nameless except for a sign in the windows that read ‘Wan Treats’, sat where the wind fell still over the neighbourhood.

The resulting place was characterised by dust. No matter how much it was aired out overnight, the morning wipedown took even longer than refilling the shelves and counters with round, pillowy, eternally-preserved sweet packets, though that might have owed to the fact that what little stock went missing over a sales day was more likely a sign of the occasional shoplifting than any actual sales.

And not even the shoplifters came back.

Measure ingredients…

Hana ran a half-memorised checklist in her head, left the rest to fate, which was kind enough to spare her most of the supplies she needed for the centerpiece cakes.

Policy of Wan, despite the fact that most of the stodgy, circular lumps of merchandise ended up in the—

She tutted.

“Forgot to do the trash.”

One after another, little tasks anchored Hana to her morning.

She felt her shoulders begin to lift a little, as the thoughts of sales targets, logistics, expense and revenue reports stopped spinning quite so fast inside her.

It was in the movements she made across the shop, stacking, rearranging, saving containers before they fell. Sealing bags, watching the light slowly crawl down to cover outside lamppost, telephone wires.
She moved, and felt it all, a reminder that it all existed. The flow of motions across the shop reminded her of everything that didn’t.

She began to forget, or at least find herself able to ignore the weight of too many paper notes divided across various sections of her clothes, her body.

Eventually she stopped, or rather fell into a lull, as the shop stood fully prepped for the day. She wondered a moment if there was time to brew herself a coffee. She had never tried here, but it seemed like there would be enough materials to hand.

And then the bell rang. A clear, sharp sound that announced the arrival of someone at the creaky, heavy front door, leaving behind no doubt that Hana’s morning was over.

“Good morning.” The girl bowed, standing off-center from the kiosk behind a glass display full of treats, atop which were the three cakes she’d finished decorating moments prior. "Owner."

A figure shuffled inside, offering what was questionably a nod before heading around to deliver his bags to the back.

There were no words beyond that between her and the owner for a while, who emerged into the shop floor, glancing around the arrangement of the shelves, the swept floor, the de-dusted, and de-dusted, and de-dusted again counters.

Before Hana could relax, the man’s hand shot out. He pointed down at the sink, and more closely at the mixing bowls and cake tins awaiting their washing-up inside.
No words, only a wide-eyed, raised-eyebrowed look that he gave her, the shock from which Hana had to steady herself against, for some reason.

“I’m sorry. I’ll—" She began to make her way over, before the same hand shot over to the cakes.

“No!” He barked, his first greeting of the day. “Put them inside first. What are you waiting for?”

The girl just nodded, and opened up the display cabinet.

“We always do things in proper order.” The man began, before he’d even let his limply-packed sidebag down. “Work efficiently.”

As the owner continued on an inspired diatribe of whatever idea came to him next, Hana walked around him, tidying up the sink.

The owner’s name wasn’t even Wan. He was a Japanese man who went by Hideki Kajima, tilting towards his seventies in seniority and toward the ground in posture. He only seemed to come alive when he spotted something was wrong, and—

“—Where are my till keys?”

He interrupted himself, grabbing at his pockets, searching his bag, finally looking to Hana. His forehead creased, as the eyebrows went up.

Instinctually, stupidly, she checked her pockets. Her fingers brushed against a wedge of paper, and she froze.

The owner was still watching. She glanced, and nodded in the direction of the till.

“They’re… There.”

She extracted her hand, taking care not to drag any of the notes out of her pocket with the sweat on her knuckles.

Hideki Kajima sniffed, and shuffled over to his station, rattling the drawer open.

The morning echoed with the jangle and click of coins as the owner began counting, rubbing, folding, flipping little rectangular slips of plastic-paper into and out of a small safe below.

Just a few more hours. She shut her eyes, pulling her apron, for lack of a parka, tight.

The morning shift would set the tone for today. So she had to hang in there, no matter what happened.

¥¥¥

Hana came to quickly shake herself of the illusion that anything happening would be the problem with that morning.

The problem lay with what didn’t happen.

Which was… Anything.

Hana was comfortable in the quiet. She’d taken up meditation here and there, going on long forest bathes with the little one when they were both young, all of that jazz, all the stuff that promised to deliver her to some higher dimension or something.

In reality, she just wanted peace. But even in the near-perfect stillness of the dessert shop’s sideline to the churn of foot traffic outside, such a thing was difficult to find standing five feet away from an increasingly restless manager.

Every time he moved, she felt her sides tense, almost like she was itchy.

“You have a boyfriend?” The old man asked. “Husband?”

She supposed that might be why. Every time the man’s boredom reached a fever pitch, he began to look to her for entertainment.

Hana tried to mentally don her mitt and full catcher’s padding in time to receive the remark. She at least managed to seem like she took it like a stone.

“Neither.” She replied, tentatively honest.

The eyebrows went up. He reached out, and pointed at her fingers, tutting all the while.

Glancing down, the polish she’d applied last night was still on.

“Oh—” Reflexively, she went to hide her nails.

“Contamination!” He declared, throwing up his hands at the cakes. “Remake them.”

Before he could dive into the cabinet, she pointed again at the freshly-opened box of disposables on the counter.

“I… Wore gloves.”
The cakes were safe, at least until the end of the day.

And the excitement was over. The owner almost seemed disappointed, as he drifted over to some corner to rearrange bits of office supplies and spare paper into a different order on the desk. Hana gazed down at her nails, hearing a tut replay in her own mind, in her own voice.

Why did I…?

Forget? Choose this particular colour? Bother in the first place?

And why was she bothered about it now, the night after, when she’d never even see that alleyway in Minato again?

Her mind was abuzz. She began scraping her nails clean, at least occupying it that way.

More like stifling it, she thought, shutting out everything except the tiny motions of cracking the layer of polish open. Rubbing it away. Exposing plain, tough, pinkish keratin.

Bzzzzt.

Speaking of things that were vibrating with unfortunate timing, Hana peeked at her phone partway out of her pocket.

‘Out of town.’ The text read, from a number she didn’t have saved, but recognised all the same. ‘Need you to cover the late morning shift today, otherwise PTs cannot work.’

The bell rang at the front of the shop. The owner shuffled to meet their first customer of the day, shooting a look back at Hana.

“I need your help.” The man said.

“I—” Hana gathered her thoughts, trying to stop herself from spinning in the current of too many moving parts, moving too suddenly around her.
“I’m sorry, owner.” She bowed. “I need to finish an hour early. Something’s come up.”

He turned, his forehead static and smooth, his eyebrows bent ever-so-slightly downward.

“I need you here.” The older man said. "Not your holiday, ah?"

The young woman about Hana’s age continued to peruse the shop at the other end, not privy to the exchange, or at least pretending. Beyond her, the morning outside had lulled, the bustle slowed to the point where a figure would pass by the circle-glazed glass of the front door a couple of times a minute.

Bzzzt.

An auto-reminder vibration came, as Hana stepped back to hang up her apron.

“I’m afraid I have to go. It’s…”

It was hardly an emergency, but what else could she call it?

She smiled at their customer, as she pulled her parka on.

“Useless girl.”

The words followed Hana out, as the owner bent forward to take the change for the oversized cat-shaped marshmallow their first, and likely only customer for the day had picked out.

She studied her phone, trying to cross-reference which workplace she was supposed to head to next.
Almost tripping on the concrete, she tutted, and put the damn thing away.
None of the passers-by turned their heads, but she knew they'd seen.

Colder, crisper, and certainly cleaner of dust, the air outside was still no easier to breathe.

"Useless girl, eh..."

In no less frigid a mood than this morning, she began towards the nearest bus stop.