Human at Heart // Boa & Juniel
Time always seemed to have an inconstant pace. Not even long ago, the head waitress was occupied with paperwork, constantly shifting them haphazardly. Numbers never really intrigued her whatsoever, but it was a requirement, an essence in business.
A hand ran through her hair, quickly tossing a big portion on one side. Oh how she wished she could go home sooner than to spend her evening (and possibly night) calculating and recalculating what seemed to be insignificant if there was the slightest error. Her forehead creased at the inconceivable effort of going through every singly data they had gathered from doing the inventory.
No need for advanced mathematics, but it did demand a level of concentration that would prevent the numbers from floating and dancing on the pages. Hallucinations like these were frequent—so much that when Junhee looked up at the clock, she smiled.
The café still had its opening hours at that time, which means that she was the one dealing with its closure almost every night. She did not realize how late it was or how long she had spent in the café all by herself, sitting behind the counter. She ensured the absence of intruders before flipping the sign to ‘closed’ and exiting the place. “Time to go home now…” The words escaped through her thin lips as whispers, a hand dropping to the side once the petite girl pressed the appropriate code for the security alarm.
Absentmindedly, she executed the same routine without fail, but the last step was a troublesome one. It concerned locking the doors. That shouldn’t be a difficult task considering how simple it was to insert the keys in the doorknob. A little twist would be enough to confirm that it was properly locked. The problematic would be that it would sometimes get stuck. Why must you do this to me— Groaning, Junhee started pulling.
Force was almost the solution to this kind of situation. Yet, a tired being does not have all their strength. And a tired being would rather let their irritation deal with it, a decision that’s often regrettable in terms of being time consuming. In the midst of her upsetting circumstances, she stopped. A presence among the passersby offered an unfamiliar chill. A hand still holding her keys, her head turned towards the unknown figure walking towards her.
A woman around her height stood less than a meter away from her… wounded, drenched in ripped clothes, unaffected by her current condition. She should have collapsed by now, caught up by the severity of what went through her body. How was she still stable on her own two feet, with a nearly perfect standing posture, and her expression showing no sign of pain, agony or even fear?
Instead, Junhee was the one expressing what could not be seen by the other.
