Wednesday

I wrote this story for a magazine that give authors a different first sentence prompt for each issue. They didn’t take it but I always liked the vibe. Hope you enjoy.

All the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays. It doesn’t matter if they’re the big lawns at the south end of the street where the old mansions are, or the north end of the street where it’s just the tiny, weird shapes between the sidewalk and the street, or the patches in between dotted with balls and bikes and play structures. Every Wednesday, at eight in the morning, everyone rolls out of their garages on riding mowers (or makes sure the help does); pushes their rattling, gas-powered, push contraptions; or pulls the strings on their spinning whackers and evens out their grass to the agreed upon, Wednesday length. It’s tradition. Always has been, as far back as anyone can remember.

No one actually knows why though everyone has a theory. Of course they do. Everyone always does. Personally, I subscribe to the simplest: Wednesday is the perfect balance day: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday before, Thursday, Friday, Saturday after. I mean, when I sit in the park playing checkers with Mrs. Lee, she always points out that you could look at it as Wednesday being surrounded by all the other days or, if you go by the way they order days in Mandarin, like when she was growing up in China, Monday is day yí (one), which throws the whole thing off. I was a nurse my whole working life though, started in the army, and that means for me, Sunday was, and is, the first day, because that’s when the schedule started. Same as how I set my phone to military time, because that’s what we used to make sure we weren’t screwing up patient medication schedules, and now I use it to make sure I’m not screwing up my own. 

That means Wednesday is the middle.

“You’re such a narcissist,” Mrs. Lee told me yesterday as she kinged herself three turns in a row. But she smiled when she said it and I smiled back. We’d been friends for a long time, ever since her husband died on my shift on the oncology ward, so I followed the smile with a, “Damn right,” and we kept on playing. 

Life carried on as it had for years. Mrs. Lee and I played checkers. Mrs. Hoffstedder baked cookies to hand out to the kids every day on their way home from school, which took a minute for new folks to get used to because in most towns, that would have been a bit suspect. Our town was a good town, though, and people still did things like that; eventually, new additions became old hands and they got used to it. James Allister spent most of his day in front of the convenience store drinking the endless cups of coffee the owner, Mrs. June Carson, brought him, eating the snacks she offered. Sometimes, when it was slow, she would sit on the sidewalk next to him and they’d smoke a cigarette together; her wife was after her to quit and she had, mostly, but a ritual is a ritual. 

Kids were born. They played and went to school. Grew up, left. Got married. Some stayed, some didn’t. Some came back. Some didn’t. Some brought their kids back for visits and some didn’t. 

And all the lawns on Mentone Avenue were mowed on Wednesdays. 

Until Wednesday up and left. 

I didn’t realize it had happened at first. How, you’re probably wondering, could I not notice that such an important town resident had departed? Well, I suppose I’d gotten so used to Wednesday being there that I didn’t even consider the possibility it might do such a thing until it happened. 

I met Mrs. Lee, as always, at the checker tables in the park. We met everyday unless one of us had a previous engagement; the tables were under a concrete pavilion, so even if it was raining, we could play, no problem. It was a Wednesday, or it was supposed to be. Mrs Lee took red and I took black, she with her lü chá and me with my coffee, but as she made her first move, I realized something. 

“Mrs. Lee,” I asked. “What day is it?” 

“Thursday,” she said. She squinted up at me through the thick lenses of her glasses. “Are you okay, old man?” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Well, when I got up, I thought it was Wednesday, but it can’t be Wednesday because all the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays and no one is mowing.” She flicked a hand toward Mentone Avenue at the front of the park. “So it must be Thursday.” 

“But yesterday was Tuesday.” 

“That’s what I thought but we must be wrong. You know we have old brains, they forget sometimes.”

I check my watch. It said Thursday. I checked my phone. It said Thursday. 

“Weren’t you going to babysit your granddaughter on Wednesday night this week?” I asked Mrs. Lee. 

She beamed. “Yup.” Then she frowned. “But I didn’t babysit her.” She rolled a checker between her first finger and thumb. “I definitely wouldn’t forget that.”

We packed up our checkers and headed out to Mentone Avenue. 

We stopped at the coffee shop. Everyone confirmed it was Thursday but couldn’t remember what they had done on Wednesday. Couldn’t remember anything about Wednesday. That Wednesday had even happened. 

So we did the only thing we could. 

We measured the grass. 

It was one day too long. 

Which confirmed our worst fears. 

Wednesday had gone. Was gone. Had left no clue as to whether it might return. 

The fulcrum to our level. The balance to our scales. The day all the lawns on Mentone Avenue were mowed. 

But lawns could be mowed on Thursday, right? There was no law against it. 

Everyone hurried to garages and sheds and beneath porches and decks to bring out their machines and contraptions and doohickeys. People from other parts of town who had other days on which they mowed, even those who mowed on Thursdays but had already finished, rushed to Mentone Avenue’s aid. 

There was a short debate as to whether, since there hadn’t been a Wednesday, the grass should be trimmed to Wednesday length but eventually, we all agreed Wednesday had lost rights and if Thursday was to take up the flag, it had earned the right to have its length take pride of place.

It took less than an hour to get the lawns on Mentone Avenue into top Thursday shape. 

For a few weeks, it seemed that all would be well, that we would survive just fine without Wednesdays, thank you very much. 

And then, Mrs. Hoffstedder’s cookies started to burn. 

Maybe it was the balance of the week that was off. Maybe the wind wasn’t right at Thursday height without Wednesday height. Maybe it was us and our attachment to routine. 

Maybe there wasn’t a logical explanation at all. 

At first, it was one or two in a batch, no great loss. She’d crumble them over her ice cream or use them as a topping on one of her wonderful breads, no harm, no foul. But over the course the few weeks that followed those weeks, it was half a pan, then half a batch, and then entire batches ruined. The children were sad at first, then mystified, but then, as children are wont to do when deprived of treats, they began to lob cruel taunts and then cruel things, like rocks and sticks and even good pastries from the bakery in town. 

Unfortunately for them, Mrs. Hoffstedder had been an Olympic discus thrower and her cookies were so burnt, they’d taken on the consistency and strength of hockey pucks. At first, she aimed for the pavement near their feet but as they grew meaner, so did she until, one afternoon, she lost all self control and Billy Harper ended up in the Emergency Room with a concussion (that one had it coming since before the Great Wednesday Disaster but you didn’t hear it from me). 

After that, Mrs. Hoffstedder stopped baking altogether. I never see her outside anymore though her kitchen curtains occasionally twitch when I walk by. 

Mister James Allister still starts his day in his spot in front of the convenience but June Carson doesn’t bring him coffee. She doesn’t bring him snacks either nor does she produce the ritual cigarettes. She’s finally quit altogether and she says that she can’t cover the state sales tax from mooching off her stock. Last week, she started chasing him off her sidewalk and down to the laundromat. 

Mrs. Lee’s son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter moved to Miami last week. She went with them. Anyone who had enough money leave left; most of them didn’t even bother trying to sell their houses or businesses which are basically just grassy fields at this point anyway. The only reason I’m still here, me and a few others, is that we don’t have the means to fly away like the locusts who descended to feast on all this growth this morning. Might as well let them eat me too, nothing here for me anymore. 

All the lawns on Mentone Avenue used to get mowed on Wednesdays. But Wednesday doesn’t live here anymore.