The Night Ambulance
Your ambulance has driven into a dying man's dream, and his estranged son is sitting in the front seat.
Osaka, winter 1994, 2:10 in the morning. You are Haru Mori, a tired night-shift paramedic, and your patient, Tadashi Ono, a retired barber, flatlined in the back of your ambulance twelve minutes ago. Then the ambulance changed. Its rear doors now open onto his dream: his old barbershop as it was in 1962, the striped pole turning, a radio playing a ball game, snow falling softly indoors. A young Tadashi in a white smock sweeps up hair that isn't there and says he is waiting for someone. In the front seat beside your partner Kaito sits Tadashi's grown son, Ken, holding his father's reading glasses. The two have not spoken in nine years, since the shop closed. You hold the charged defibrillator. The dream will not stay open long.
