Cicadas, Ice, And The Long Return

It is not a noise you hear so much as a temperature you can listen to. It begins in the dark before dawn and rises with the sun, and by the time the shop's morning delivery arrives it is the only thing in the world, and then in October it stops and the silence is somehow worse.

They come in ones. A salaryman still in his shirt. A woman in a hotel yukata. A boy of nineteen buying four bags and offering no explanation. Nobody speaks beyond the necessary. The door chimes, the cold air escapes, and the night resumes.

The platforms are heavy with bags and grandchildren. Whole families move north and west to houses with photographs on the shelf. And the shop stays open, as it always does, for the shift workers and the ones with nowhere to return to, and the fluorescent hum is a kind of company.