Wednesday

Wednesday began, as Wednesdays do, at midnight. Oli Marsh woke at seven, ate toast, went to school, came home, did homework that felt like it would never end (it did), ate shepherd's pie, went to bed. Nothing unusual.

Then it was midnight again, and then it was seven again, and then there was toast again, and Oli sat at the kitchen table looking at the same Wednesday morning, the same grey sky, the same drip on the same windowpane, and understood with the calm certainty of someone who reads a lot of books that something had gone wrong with the week.

The phone said Wednesday. The calendar said Wednesday. The bin men, who only came on Wednesdays, came again. Oli's mother made shepherd's pie again, from scratch, with no memory of having made it the night before, which was the most unsettling part, because his mother had an excellent memory and shepherd's pie took forty minutes.

By the fourth Wednesday, Oli had established three facts. First: he was the only one who knew. Everyone else woke fresh, ate their toast, went about their Wednesday as though it were the first and only one, which for them it was. Second: the Wednesdays were identical in all physical particulars (same weather, same pie, same drip) but he retained everything. Third: Thursday was almost there. He could feel it, sometimes, in the late evening: a sort of brightening at the edge of things, a sense that the air was about to change its mind. Then midnight arrived and reset everything and Thursday retreated like a tide going out.

On the eleventh Wednesday, Oli decided to speak to it directly. This felt, in the cold light of 7am toast, like the sort of decision that required explanation, and the explanation he arrived at was: he had tried everything else. He had tried going to bed early. He had tried staying up past midnight. He had tried breaking the pattern: eating cereal instead of toast, taking a different bus, ignoring the drip. The drip did not care about being ignored. Wednesday did not care about cereal.

So at ten minutes to midnight on the eleventh Wednesday, Oli sat at the kitchen table, which was the most Wednesday room in the house, and said, out loud, into the air that was already beginning to brighten at its edges with the promise of Thursday:

"Why won't you end?"

The kitchen was quiet. The drip dripped. The clock moved toward midnight with its usual unhurried authority.

And then Wednesday answered. It spoke the way a feeling does, not in words, exactly, but in something that landed in the chest with the weight of words.

Oli sat with that for the three minutes he had left. He thought about what the first Wednesday had contained that he had moved through without finishing. He thought about the homework he had done but not the answer he had avoided. He thought about the phone he hadn't picked up. He thought about his father, who had called at 4pm on the first Wednesday (it was always the first Wednesday on the phone, because his father didn't know) and whom Oli had let ring out because he didn't know what to say and the not-knowing had felt easier than the saying.

It was 11:58.

Oli went to his room and found his phone and called back. His father answered on the second ring, which meant he'd been waiting, which meant he knew, which was the thing Oli had been not-knowing he knew for eleven Wednesdays.

They talked until midnight. Oli said the thing he hadn't said. His father said the thing he'd been trying to say since the call that hadn't been answered.

Neither of them said anything important in the way that important things are usually said: loudly, with gravity, in well-formed sentences. They said it the way people actually say important things, which is sideways and incompletely and with several pauses that did most of the work.

The clock moved to midnight.

Oli waited.

The kitchen drip stopped. Not because it was fixed. Because drips in the same kitchen on the same day don't drip past midnight when the day has ended, and this Wednesday, finally, quietly, had.

Thursday smelled exactly like pencil shavings and slightly cooler air, which Oli felt he deserved some credit for predicting.

He went to sleep. In the morning there was no shepherd's pie. There was no drip. The bin men did not come because it was Thursday and the bin men came on Wednesdays, which was yesterday, which had been a very long time ago.

His mother made eggs.

At four in the afternoon his father called again, and Oli answered on the first ring, and they talked about nothing in particular, which was a different thing entirely from not talking, and which felt, after eleven Wednesdays, like almost everything.