The Small Hours

An all-night diner for bodies that keep other hours. It is open, and nobody is going to ask why you are up.

Open whatever time it is where you are.

This is the last lit thing on the road. You see it a long way off: one long low building with a band of window all down its side, bright as a lamp, and the light from it lying out across the car park in pale rectangles. Out here you are standing in the dark looking in. Everybody in there is in the light, and nobody in there is looking out at you. The door is the one on the right, and it is not locked.

The clock over the counter has no hands

Nobody in here is late and nobody is early. A great many of us are awake when the town is not — because a body takes its sleep when it can get it rather than when a day has room for it, because the rhythm it runs on is not the one a work week was drawn around, because it is the only quiet time there is, or because it simply is. Our Crip Time entry has the best sentence about this that anybody has written, and it is Alison Kafer’s:

Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.
Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, as our Crip Time entry quotes it

That is what the diner is. It does not ask you to arrive at a sensible hour; it has no sensible hour. It has a counter, some booths, a kettle that is always hot and a clock that does not tell anybody anything. The same entry quotes Ellen Samuels saying something shorter, which is written on the wall under the clock:

Crip time is time travel.
Ellen Samuels, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, as our Crip Time entry quotes it

Nobody asks why you are up

Not the person behind the counter, not the menu, not the sign. Being awake at this hour is not a symptom anybody here is going to take an interest in. Our Sleep entry quotes Devon Price on how ordinary it is:

The sleep-wake cycles of Autistic adults also differ, on average, from the circadian rhythms of neurotypicals, and many of us experience sleep disorders.
Devon Price, Unmasking Autism, as our Sleep entry quotes it

And there is no sleep advice in this building. Not a tip, not a routine, not a leaflet by the till. The same entry quotes a study in which Autistic teenagers described what actually helped them sleep, and what they described was the opposite of the advice they were usually handed. Georgia Pavlopoulou, who wrote it up, put it in one line:

sleep facilitating factors are in a direct contrast to the sleep hygiene recommendations
Georgia Pavlopoulou, A Good Night’s Sleep: Learning About Sleep From Autistic Adolescents’ Personal Accounts, as our Sleep entry quotes it

So the diner keeps its opinions to itself and keeps the kettle on.

The menu

Written on the board behind the counter. There are no prices, because this is a website and a price would be the one thing on it that was certainly made up.

Breakfast, whenever it is for you
Eggs any way and toast cut however you like it, at any hour. It is breakfast because it is the first thing you have eaten since you woke up, and that is the only clock the kitchen goes by.
The same as last time
Say it and it arrives exactly as it did before, down to where things sit on the plate. Nobody suggests you try something new. A safe food is a perfectly good reason to come back. Our Safe Food entry.
A booth to yourself
For as long as you like. Nobody is waiting for the table, and nobody will stand near it looking as if they are.
Something warm in a heavy mug
Refilled without asking, or never refilled at all, whichever you said when you sat down. Either is remembered until you leave and not a minute after.
Crayons and a paper placemat
On every table, for the reason quoted under the menu. Colouring at a small table while somebody keeps you company is a thing the small hours have been for since long before this diner.
The quiet end of the counter
Furthest from the kitchen and the door. The stools down there do not spin; the ones at the other end do, for the people who asked for that instead.
Nothing at all
You can sit here without ordering anything. Nobody brings the bill over to make a point.

About the crayons. Our Sleep entry opens with Sarah Kurchak remembering the nights she did not sleep as a child, and what her parents did about it:

they’d sit me at the small table they’d put next to their bed and hand me some crayons so that I could blissfully colour while they watched over me in semi-consciousness.
Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder, as our Sleep entry quotes it

Up All Night

Josephmooon · lyrics by Ronan Boren, a Stimpunk

There is one record in the jukebox that everybody in here puts on sooner or later, because it is about them. “Up All Night” is a song about Autistic insomnia, from Josephmooon’s first album, and its words are Ronan Boren’s. When we wrote about that album in 2021, we said this about it:

Insomnia is a research priority for autistic communities. At Stimpunks, we keep the hour-of-the-wolf.
Our post, The Neurodivergent Experience in Josephmooon’s “So Far So Good”

Track 4 of So Far So Good · runs 2:41

Ronan Boren: all lyrics
Bill Paige: vocals, guitar
Ronnie Nice: guitars, keyboards, bass, drums, programming
Ian Nice: piano, keyboards, backing vocals

The words

I’m staying up all night
All night all night that’s not right
Staying up all night
That’s what I’ve been doing

Up all night all night all night
Try to stay out of sight in the daytime
I do it a lot

I have been up all night all night all night
That’s not right alright that what I like to do
Well I sleep when it’s day and stay up all night

You can go with or without me
It’s up to you
I’ve been up all night
Up all night all night all night
I sleep when it’s day like I said when its light
Not a lot of the time
Most of the time

I have been up all night all night all night
And that’s alright alright that’s what I like to do
Well I sleep when it’s day and stay up all night
Until it feels alright

Stay out of sight
That’s how I write
Staying up all night
That’s what I do
How about you
Lyrics by Ronan Boren. Printed in full with permission: Stimpunks helped produce the song and has permission to distribute it and its lyrics. They are not under this site’s licence and stay the lyricist’s and the band’s.

The whole album is on the jukebox below and on its own page on the band’s site.

The jukebox

Both of Josephmooon’s albums, every track, played from the band’s own site. Nothing loads until you press something, every button says how long the song runs before you press it, and only one song plays at a time: starting another pauses the one before. The album buttons play straight through from the top; they say how many songs and how long first, because a press that starts several things has to say so before it does.

So Far So Good

Josephmooon · released 1 October 2021 · on the band’s own site

1Floats Boat
2One Word
3Long Ago
4Up All Night
5Out Of Tune
6Captolea
7Busybodies
8High In The Sky
9Cost Time
10Reusable Money
11Check For
12So Far So Good

Hand in Heaven

Josephmooon · on the band’s own site

1Good Morning
2Her Smile
3Only One Life
4Just Do It
5Me and My Homies
6Banjo on My Knee
7Can’t Be Beat
8You’re Not in Charge
9Hand in Heaven
10Last Words
11Something Good

The rules of the house

It does not close. There are no last orders and no time you are expected to leave by. The sign does not read your clock, either: a diner for people up at odd hours is the last place that should be keeping an eye on the time.
Nobody asks why you are up, and nobody gives you advice about it.
The tubes do not flicker and do not hum. A fluorescent light that buzzes and stutters is the sound of half the waiting rooms we have ever sat in, and it is gone from this one.
You can sit without ordering, stay as long as you like, sit in a booth on your own or at the counter next to somebody you have never met and not say a word.
Nothing is counted and nothing is kept. Not what time you came in, not how often, not how long you stayed. Nobody here is keeping a record of how many nights you were awake.

Whose this all is

Every quotation here names who wrote it and is linked to the page of ours that quotes it. Each was read word for word off that page, and every author was checked against a library record rather than remembered — which is how the crayons passage got its right author: our Sleep entry links the book without naming who wrote it, and the name this room was nearly given from memory belonged to somebody else. The full list is in the liner notes.

The diner is invented. Crip time is not, and neither is being up at an hour a town has decided is for sleeping.

Job marker — a crayon dropped by the door

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: What the clock is missing

Before the code: The clock over the counter at The Small Hours is missing something. What?

Hint 1

It is in the heading of the first window.

Hint 2

A clock needs these to tell anybody anything.

Last hint

Most clocks have two of them, one long and one short.

Give me the answer

The answer is Its hands. Its hands. The clock over the counter has none, because nobody in there is late and nobody is early — the room's picture of crip time, which Alison Kafer puts as bending the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds rather than the other way round.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: CRIPTIME

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →