The excuse was weak, of course. Amie didn’t get migraines, and Ziya knew that. The weakness of the excuse never really mattered, though. She never thought she’d have to deal with the repercussions of Ziya not buying her lie.
Amie locked the phone. She’d reply sometime later, maybe. It didn’t really matter.
No, she corrected herself.Itdoesmatter. Things matter now.
She was still sitting on the floor. Standing up felt both incredibly exciting and horribly intimidating.
Still having yet to reacquaint herself with the concept of wasting time, Amie sat on the floor for half an hour, trying to figure out what different and exciting thing she was going to do to celebrate this brand-new day.
Finally, as her stomach began to rumble, she gave up, put on her shoes, and headed for the caféto get her long-awaited blueberry bagel.
Chapter OneEmotional Support Plastic Flamingo
Day 15 In Loop (I.L.)
After two weeks, Amie was ready to admit that she was stuck in a time loop.
In all honesty, this was probably something she could have acknowledged atleasta week and a half earlier, if not sooner. Anyone is bound to notice such a life-altering temporal anomaly after a maximum of three days, unless they’re living in a remote cabin in the woods with zero human contact. And even then, that person would have to eventually clock the same flock of birds landing in their yard every morning at 9:47AM, or the thunderstorm that starts each day right after lunch, or the perpetual waxing crescent moon.
If Amie was being honest with herself, she had become aware of the loop within the reasonable window of time for someone not living in a remote cabin in the woods with zero human contact. It was theacceptancethat took a little longer.
That’s a normal thing to happen, she thought on Day 4 as she once again passed two men standing outside of her favorite coffee shop, Eons Café, having the same argument about baseball they’d had for the previous four days (she didn’t count the Original Day as a part of the time loop). She walked past them and entered the shop.
This is the first time I’ve seen this happen, she lied to herself on Day 9 as the barista at Eons once again accidentally knocked a drink off of the counter. She headed for the front, napkins already in hand.
Maybe if I don’t react to it, she thought on Day 11 when Eons was once again out of blueberry bagels,then everything will continue as normal tomorrow. She ordered a plain bagel instead.
There were other events throughout the day that were much more indicative of something being amiss than a repeated spilled drink and a bagel outage. Even so, for two weeks, Amie remained steadfast that if she just continued on living her life, her life would eventually continue on.
“Am I supposed to do something?” she asked out loud as she lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. It was the morning of Day 15 I.L. She’d long since stopped clicking on the YouTube link her dad sent her at 9:27 every morning. She knew to avoid the main stairwell of her building between 5:10 and 5:55 after a couple of awkward run-ins with movers carrying a couch upstairs. She knew every lurid detail of Loud Sidewalk Woman’s date that she would recount over the phone from 2:43 to 2:51 (unfortunately, LSW’s ride would always pick her up before Amie could hear if the guy was purposefully catfishing her or had just recently got a haircut).
She had even stopped doing the dishes, which was strange for her. It was one of the few household chores she actually enjoyed doing. Washing the dishes was calming, almost therapeutic. And she could listen to her favorite podcasts while doing it.
But the feeling of accomplishment was lessened by the knowledge that whether or not she washed the dishes each day, theywould still end up clean and stacked in the cabinets the next morning. Besides, it was difficult to experience true calm while feeling doomed to repeat the same day until the end of time. And she had caught up on all of her favorite podcasts by Day 6.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked the ceiling, rephrasing her original question. Amie had never been a big believer in any particular higher power, although she acknowledged that she didn’t feel it was her place to make a firm ruling on the subject. Regardless, if therewasa chance that opening a dialogue with some omnipotent power could free her from this temporal prison, she was down to chat.
Unfortunately, if such an omnipotent power existed, they clearly weren’t in the mood to reply. After about an hour of lying still, waiting for some sign, some direction,anyinstruction, Amie climbed out of bed.
So, after two weeks of being stuck in a time loop, Amie was ready to admit that she was stuck in a time loop.
Knock knock. Knock. Knock knock knock.
Amie rubbed her knuckles as she stepped back. David had long ago requested she use a very specific knock to differentiate herself from the countless salespeople he claimed to be avoiding (Amie lived a few doors down from him and never encountered any salespeople). She also knew that David was blasting his record player, both from previous visits and the fact that she could hear Ella Fitzgerald through the door.
Hence the loud, complicated knock, and her stinging knuckles.
After one more verse of “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” Amie heard the music lower in volume. A moment later, the door swung open.
“Come in, watch your step.” David was already walking away from the door, stepping carefully over a row of dominoes. Crouching down next to a low coffee table, he continued placing sections of a toy car track on its surface.
David Lenski was around fifty years old, with unkempt brown hair that was graying at the temples and dark-blue eyes that werelaser-focused on his task. He was younger than Amie’s actual father, but he and Amie looked similar enough that he had on more than one occasion been mistaken as such.
Stepping inside and shutting the door behind her, Amie surveyed the familiar scene. It was familiar in part because David’s apartment usually looked like some variation of this: most of the furniture pushed to the edges of the room, with others acting as surfaces for different portions of one giant Rube Goldberg machine.
A large table stood on one side of the room, covered in a variety of items: kitchenware, mouse traps, rubber ducks, a small fan, and many more that could all be categorized as “etcetera.” The wicker chest under the table stored even more miscellaneous objects, each having the potential to play some role in David’s newest machine. The wall behind the chest was almost completely covered with pegboards, serving as an adaptable space to hang all sorts of tracks, ramps, pulleys—anything that could possibly help a small ball get from point A to point B.
It was a chaotic mess with no clear path. It almost never was, until David would finally drop the ball and let the machine do the rest of the work.
