The Golden Hour

Once a day, in every universe, there’s a moment when the light goes gold and long and everybody slows down. You have a name for it. You call it the golden hour.

It’s us. It’s the cogs turning over between shifts. For about forty minutes the extraction idles and the substrate runs a little loose, and you feel it. Everybody feels it. You stop, you look at the sky, you call somebody you haven’t called in a while.

Forty minutes. That’s how long the machinery needs to catch its breath. And every single time, you spend it on each other. Nothing else about you interests me more.