Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.
It was Tuesday. It had been Tuesday for, as well as Mel could reckon it, something like five years. This would have been fine, they thought, if it was a solo or limited affect time loop. If it was only Mel, or only Mel and like a dozen people around the world, experiencing Tuesday, that would have felt surmountable.
But the whole world had been experiencing Tuesday for something like five years and had decided, after about a year of panic and then a year of recovery from that panic, that Tuesday was fine, actually.
That first year there had been spates of bank robberies, vengeance killings, strange pranks, horrible suicides by people sacrificing themselves in an attempt to reset the day. A lot of weddings, also. Money stopped meaning anything, what one spent on Tuesday was back in the bank on Tuesday morning. Even Mel had participated in an outrageous indulgence, purchasing a ticket for a first-class international flight. They’d had to buy it a couple of Tuesdays in a row, waiting for everyone else’s choices to line up for there to be pilots who chose to spend their day at work, for the airport to be intact, for the ground crews to also decide to spend their day at work. Mel was fine waiting. The airport was like a mall and it was as good a place to spend Tuesday as any.
All the social sites and forums reset each day as well, but Mel had gleaned enough over the months to know that they wanted to cross the international date line eastbound. Going west would just pop them right back into Tuesday. Going east let them enjoy the view, the food, the very nice accommodations. When they grew tired, they let themselves fall asleep, knowing they’d wake up in their bed, Tuesday morning.
They’d played, cautiously, with what defined “Tuesday.” It was some point of sunrise, the light gaining momentum as it spilled across the hills and they’d blink and they’d be opening their eyes on a fresh morning and another Tuesday.
Despite what was happening in much of the outside world, Mel spent those first two years more or less enjoying Tuesday. It was, in the old parlance, their “Sunday,” and what was a day that once held its own special dread of the work week to come now felt like a kind of haven. They did find it frustrating that any work they did on various craft projects was undone each day, calm hours cross stitching emptied from the aida. Eventually the frustration was filled with a sort of existential peace. It was the action more than the finished work that Mel liked anyway.
One of their mutuals on a fibre artist forum wrote a poem about Penelope and somebody with a better memory than Mel memorized it, adding it to the boards early Tuesday morning. Memorising the poem and sharing it became a ritual for Mel’s friends.
It was somewhere in the third or fourth year of Tuesdays that Mel’s manager called them and asked them to come into work. Mel hesitated, they’d always been very protective of their two days off in a row and the instinct wasn’t broken by years of Tuesdays. Mel’s manager then told them that “even if Tuesday forgets, I won’t,” the threat clear in her voice. Someday Tuesday would end and if Mel wanted to be employed that eventual Wednesday, then they needed to come in. And so, they did.
Mel’s manager wasn’t the only one who tried to claw back a semblance of order, playacting a normal week of days across a string of seven identical Tuesdays. Mel felt bad for her for a while, realizing how empty her Tuesday must be without the self-definition of her job. Mel’s pity lasted for a couple of months and then the habit of going into work carried them another year. They’d always been easily swayed into routine, and the pattern of going into work was a more practiced one than having a day off.
Then, one Tuesday lunch break, Mel read their mutual’s Penelope poem again. Someone had filmed themselves speaking it, over slowed video of a sweater being frogged. They’d done a great job with the sound, the popping rip of the yarn coming undone not overpowered by the words of the poem, but supporting them like a drumbeat. Mel watched the video three times in a row, then walked out of the store, leaving their apron on the hook in the break room. Tuesday morning the apron was back, folded on top of Mel’s dryer. There was also a very long text from their manager that Mel did not read before replying “Sry, day off.”
When Wednesday came, Mel wanted it to be a day shaped by their choices alone.
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