The Night Movers

by Josh Pachter

About the Author: Josh Pachter is the 2020 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society's Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the winner of the Derringer Award for Best Flash Story of 2019 (for "The Two-Body Problem," which was first published in Mystery Weekly). He also edits collections of short crime fiction and translates both fiction and nonfiction from Dutch to English.

Excerpt

The ad in the classified section of the Times-Dispatch was only three lines long, but it caught his eye:

Looking for a clean break and a fresh start?

Contact a.jouhatsu@protonmail.com

Discretion guaranteed

Curious, he flipped open his laptop and did a Google search on “A. Jouhatsu,” and learned that it wasn’t a who but a what.

Jouhatsu, he discovered, was a Japanese word, literally translated as “evaporation.” The article went on to explain that the jouhatsu of the Land of the Rising Sun are people who, for reasons of their own, have chosen to disappear from their lives of quiet desperation and take up anonymous residence far from the homes and jobs and families and friends they have abandoned, and that there are secretive organizations, known as “night movers,” whose mission is to help the jouhatsu make the transition into invisibility.

For reasons of his own, a clean break and a fresh start was exactly what he was looking for, so he opened an email blank and began to compose a message.

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