One May afternoon, just as something white began drifting along the weeping -cherry-lined river, Spice had just finished wiring a new receiver.
The machines lined up on his workshop’s workbench hummed with a faint , mirage -like heat. Spice wiped his brow and breathed in the May breeze flowing through the open window. It smelled different from usual — a little sweet.
“…What, fluff, at this time of year?”
The instant he murmured it, white flecks began tapping the windowpane . As they increased, one grain, two grains, Spice felt the temperature of the terminal he’d just connected drop, ever so slightly. A voice drifted over from upstream. Keromi was singing. And more than usual, her voice stretched long, high, sustained —
This is bad, Spice thought.
Within three minutes, the whole riverside was covered in white fluff — a blizzard as if the seasons had gotten confused, in May. The weather-measurement terminal by the entrance quietly stopped, and next the assistant module on the workbench went dark without a word. The workshop’s light bulb alone held out the longest, but eventually it too flickered out, as if breathing its last.
“…You’ve done it now, Keromi.”
In the darkened workshop, Spice stood still for a while. A charcoal-like silence filled the space where the machines had been, and only the sound of the river reached him faintly. As he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness after the bulb went out, Spice closed his eyes and simply listened to the river.
The voice came a little while later.
“Spice— are the machines okay—?”
Keromi’s voice flew straight in through the open window. Spice stood up and narrowed his eyes behind his thick glasses.
“Not okay. Everything’s asleep. The log cut off partway too.”
“…Sorry. But—”
Keromi stopped mid-sentence. Soft, overcast light illuminated the white fluff piled on the road in front of the workshop. From among the fluff, a small insect crossed silently to the other side.
“…But, it’s pretty, isn’t it?”
Spice didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled an old hand-crank lantern from the back of the workshop and lit it with a match. He knew the bulb wouldn’t come back until morning.
The next morning, every machine woke up. When Spice checked the final record on the measuring instrument, one line remained — a value that had wildly exceeded the normal operating range, right before the shutdown. What it had been trying to detect, the log cut off there, and would never be known. Keromi sang again that day too. Just a little shorter than usual.
Margin note: The workshop’s light bulb alone had kept its glow forty seconds longer than any other device. What happened in those forty seconds, Spice left no record of.
【Core of the Tale】
- Phenomenon used: May Snow (the Fluff Rebellion) — when Keromi sings too much, an out-of-season blizzard of cotton fluff piles up and puts all the electronic devices in Spice’s workshop to sleep
- The story’s hidden theme: something else only shows its face in the gap where the machines fall silent
This is an English translation of “白い吹雪と、眠った工房”, part of Tales of Amencho Town (蛙鳴町奇譚).