Speaker 1: Hollo, I mokan stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: I've counted every day since numbers began to matter to me,
Speaker 2: a habit borne not from neurosis, but from an affection
Speaker 2: for small, reliable things. A retired accountant may seem predictable,
Speaker 2: but I take pride in it, even now, in my
Speaker 2: late seventies. As I sit at my kitchen table in
Speaker 2: my cottage, above sent broads firth, steam curling from my mug,
Speaker 2: the window open to salt, air and gulls. I keep journals,
Speaker 2: not fancy, leather bound tomes, sturdy a five notebooks, one
Speaker 2: for every year since I set foot in this village.
Speaker 2: Each page a neat account of the prior day's doings, weather, errands,
Speaker 2: the flavor of jam on toast. The pages ground me
Speaker 2: a countess into memories, small betrayals. Thursday morning began much
Speaker 2: as always June suncheon caught the rim of my specters
Speaker 2: as I spooned porridge, my hands steady for a man
Speaker 2: my age. I fetched the latest book from its pile,
Speaker 2: a blue note book, corners already softened and opened to
Speaker 2: yesterday's page. Only there wasn't one Tuesday, June twelfth. My handwriting,
Speaker 2: meticulous as ever, records a walk to the headland, a
Speaker 2: sighting of oyster catchers, the minor victory of winning cribbage
Speaker 2: at the pub. Then Thursday, June fourteenth, the empty lines
Speaker 2: staring reproachfully. I turned the page with finger tips trained
Speaker 2: by decades of working with bills and receipts, thinking I'd
Speaker 2: skipped ahead. No, June thirteenth should have been right there,
Speaker 2: and wasn't. At first, the mistake seemed so ordinary that
Speaker 2: I barely paused. Perhaps a page stuck. I pinched the
Speaker 2: binding and fanned the sheets. No missing leaves, no signs
Speaker 2: of a torn stub. My custom is unwavering, never an
Speaker 2: empty day, not even during flu, not for bereavements. My
Speaker 2: journals bore silent witness to the sheer normalcy of time.
Speaker 2: I paged back through the weeks to be certain, reassuring
Speaker 2: myself with the unbroken chain from May into June. Mild
Speaker 2: annoyance licked at my certainty. Perhaps I simply forgot nodded
Speaker 2: off with the pen uncapped beside my elbow. Yet there
Speaker 2: was nothing a blank day, not even a misstated note
Speaker 2: in the margin or a cryptic to be filled, as
Speaker 2: I sometimes leave when distracted. Refusing to indulge the creeping
Speaker 2: sense of unreality, I slid open the drawer and checked
Speaker 2: the in box, the basket where I tossed receipts and
Speaker 2: notes before filing them each Friday. A slip from Tom's
Speaker 2: village shop, time stamped fourteen June, lay atop the pile.
Speaker 2: I frowned at the arithmetic. I last shopped yesterday, and
Speaker 2: yet by the calendar, it should have been Wednesday. The
Speaker 2: receipt's date was Thursday. My purse held no earlier slip.
Speaker 2: I checked my phone. The last email was sent June twelfth.
Speaker 2: The next June fourteenth. Old habits wore against confususion. I
Speaker 2: took a breath, glanced out at the seas placid gray,
Speaker 2: and shrugged inwardly. Had I slept an extra day, blanked
Speaker 2: too many crosswords late into the evening, Still a blank
Speaker 2: day in my life, precisely the sort of thing that
Speaker 2: would have once kept me up recalculating, I didn't worry,
Speaker 2: Not yet, Fascination pricked beneath the surface of habit. If
Speaker 2: a routine so ironclad could fail, surely there must be
Speaker 2: a reason, and if not well. Numbers only mean something
Speaker 2: because they can surprise us. I left the page blank,
Speaker 2: as custom demanded, but I left the pen uncapped beside it,
Speaker 2: waiting for some detail to return. The sea was serene,
Speaker 2: the light untroubled. Curiosity not anxiety, followed me down the
Speaker 2: narrow path that morning, as if the village revealed some small,
Speaker 2: peculiar smile. Let me introduce myself properly. My name is
Speaker 2: Lionel Keel, retired twice widowed, too fussy for London, too
Speaker 2: sentimental for most other places. Saint Broad's Firth sits on
Speaker 2: the Cornish coast, carved from stone and salt winds, the
Speaker 2: sort of place where people say morning but never hello,
Speaker 2: and where if you lose your hat you'll find it
Speaker 2: nailed to the pub's beam that evening for a pint's ransom.
Speaker 2: I moved here twenty years ago, trading ledgers for horizon lines.
Speaker 2: My cottage is the second on Church Lane, whitewashed, two
Speaker 2: low stories garden tumbling toward the sea wall. I have
Speaker 2: a kitchen filled with useful clutter, a table for cross words,
Speaker 2: and shelves waited with the detritus of a steady life.
Speaker 2: Perfectly sorted screws, summer hats, and the journals stacked chronologically.
Speaker 2: My routines are almost ecclesiastical. Now breakfast at seven thirty,
Speaker 2: a walk on the cliff path, rain or shine, lunch,
Speaker 2: cheese and tomato most often, then correspondence or puzzles, a
Speaker 2: cup of tea taken in the afternoon sun by the
Speaker 2: garden wall. Most evenings, I join the regulars at the
Speaker 2: first end, a pub more venerable than cheerful, and populated
Speaker 2: like most village institutions, by people equal parts stubborn and kindly.
Speaker 2: The village's social nervous system runs through a handful of characters.
Speaker 2: There's Sheila, the postmistress, sharp as pepper, who holds every petty,
Speaker 2: secret and errant package in memory. Alick is the fisherman,
Speaker 2: face rudded by sun and wind, always on the water
Speaker 2: at dawn, always able to tell you yesterday's catch by
Speaker 2: weight and species. Tom owner of the only shop, insists
Speaker 2: on hand written ledgers, despising electronic tills. Margaret, reliable custodian
Speaker 2: of the library, keeps stories in both modern stacks and
Speaker 2: stacks of ancient files, and possesses an amateur's lust for history.
Speaker 2: Then there's doctor Whitby, semi retired dapper as old bank
Speaker 2: clerks collecting trivial curiosities, the odd edged coin, the broken church,
Speaker 2: weather vane, legends recounted over a pint. Saint Broad's birth
Speaker 2: prides itself on its records, where the data is compiled
Speaker 2: daily by habit rather than necessity. The Firth Times appears
Speaker 2: each Thursday on blue paper, usually padded with anecdotes, plump
Speaker 2: cod and warnings about sea fog. The parish church records
Speaker 2: every birth, marriage and death in a ledger that predates
Speaker 2: the railway tradition. Here is less belief, more elaborate punctuation.
Speaker 2: We are not superstitious. If you ask about rituals, you'll
Speaker 2: hear odd tales, ghostly ships, ill luck at Lammas, the
Speaker 2: day one must never open a black umbrella inside. But
Speaker 2: all told over pints, more for the pleasure of difference
Speaker 2: than conviction, which is why on that mild Thursday, the
Speaker 2: matter of the missing Wednesday felt like an itch, not
Speaker 2: a wound. My first port of call, as with so
Speaker 2: many village puzzles, was Sheila's bakery counter just after opening.
Speaker 2: The bakery is a sanctuary of order, rows of loaves
Speaker 2: in neat ranks, newspaper folded correctly, quasars cooling on racks.
Speaker 2: Sheila greeted me with a nod, the local equivalent of embrace, morning, Lionel.
Speaker 2: You're usual, yes, and bit of a silly question. I
Speaker 2: seem to have forgotten to write my journal for yesterday,
Speaker 2: entirely blank. Never done that, not in living memory. Can't
Speaker 2: even call it a senior moment. Did you feel yesterday
Speaker 2: was strange? She spread a layer of jam on a
Speaker 2: half cut scone, Attention undivided. Honestly, feels like the weeks
Speaker 2: just rushed by? Wasn't it just Tuesday? Tom, fetching rolls
Speaker 2: for the counter, snorted, You're not the only one, mate, I,
Speaker 2: honest to God, can't remember what I was doing yesterday either.
Speaker 2: Feels like we blinked. Maybe the weather makes the days blend,
Speaker 2: I offered, only partly convinced, Sheila wiped her hands and
Speaker 2: reached for her phone and act as routine as buttering bread.
Speaker 2: She scrolled through her calendar. See look, messages jump from
Speaker 2: the twelfth to the fourteenth. Had a parcel due, but
Speaker 2: that only arrived to day Royal mail. Eh Tom rummaged
Speaker 2: under the counter, emerging with his battered log book. He
Speaker 2: flipped to the relevant week, held it with the pride
Speaker 2: of a man whose ledgers never lie. Tuesday twelve bread
Speaker 2: order from Penzance, right on time. Then Thursday order again
Speaker 2: with the new flower. There's nothing here for Wednesday. Like
Speaker 2: I missed a day. A customer overheard, pausing mid bite.
Speaker 2: Come to think of it, I meant to pay the
Speaker 2: window cleaner, but I can't recall doing it. Wasn't it
Speaker 2: raining Wednesday? Sheila shook her head. No, that was Monday?
Speaker 2: Or was it? We began to laugh, a low tide
Speaker 2: of amusement spreading outward. No fright, just the gentle surprise
Speaker 2: of shared peculiarity. I pressed further, Sheila, your deliveries do
Speaker 2: they reflect the same? No gaps? No Wednesday. She scrolled
Speaker 2: her emails. Nothing, no notes, even the couriers tracking skips
Speaker 2: to to day's date. Computer error. Maybe Tom shrugged, world's
Speaker 2: gone mad. We'll blame Brexit. Next it grew contagious. Half
Speaker 2: the shop joined in, searching phones and shopping lists. Not
Speaker 2: one could name a thing done the previous day. No
Speaker 2: one was troubled. If anything, the strangeness seemed to animate
Speaker 2: the familiar walls. Everyone slightly brighter eyed, as if glimpsing
Speaker 2: a ripple in still water outside. Gulls called unnoticed. I
Speaker 2: wrapped my loaf in wax paper, mind whirring. If it
Speaker 2: was a joke, it was shared by all. If a mistake,
Speaker 2: it was unreasonably uniform. The receipt in my pocket felt heavier. Thursday,
Speaker 2: June fourteenth, printed in ink, a certainty unmoored from experience.
Speaker 2: By now, curiosity had become directional, not vague. The blank
Speaker 2: day nagged me with its quiet assertion of never happened.
Speaker 2: I resolved, as all good accountants do, to check the numbers.
Speaker 2: Alick was easy to find, his boat bobbed by the
Speaker 2: tide wall, weathered hull, glinting sun. When I found him,
Speaker 2: he was checking nets for repairs, hands gummy with tar. Alick,
Speaker 2: I called, how was your Wednesday? He spat into the sea,
Speaker 2: couldn't say, feels like I just put these nets out?
Speaker 2: Any chance you keep logs? Of course, like to know
Speaker 2: if I'm losing nets or gaining bills. He scrambled into
Speaker 2: the wheelhouse and fetched a spiral notebook and a creased
Speaker 2: digital print out. You want Tuesday's catch six kilos mackerel,
Speaker 2: two crab, fair breeze, Thursday, same but heavier fog Wednesday.
Speaker 2: He turned the page, frowned and showed me Tuesday's log,
Speaker 2: then Thursday dates stamped and signed, but no sheet for Wednesday.
Speaker 2: On the GPS print out date, a mirrored Tuesday's course,
Speaker 2: duplicated cat whether even repairs glitch maybe must have been
Speaker 2: on the water. Can't recall a thing, he said, unconcerned,
Speaker 2: bit odd, that not frightened. Alex seen worse than odd.
Speaker 2: But his tape looped Wednesday out of existence. Sinking with mine,
Speaker 2: I made a plan test each thread. At home, I
Speaker 2: opened Internet banking, no transactions for Wednesday. I checked Firth Times.
Speaker 2: Margaret's library had the latest issues. So I walked up
Speaker 2: the hill. Margaret Gray curls pinned up, sat with an
Speaker 2: armload of history books. Her reading glasses weighed down her nose. Actually,
Speaker 2: she said, you're the third to ask. I thought our
Speaker 2: printer missed a delivery. Issue jumps from Tuesday to Thursday.
Speaker 2: I don't remember collecting papers for Wednesday at all. Perhaps
Speaker 2: it was a holiday. I forgot. Have you checked the archives?
Speaker 2: She led me to the back, where copies lined shelves
Speaker 2: in blue folders, date spined and dusty June twelfth, then
Speaker 2: June fourteenth, every year as far as she could see.
Speaker 2: I pressed on my phone sleep tracker showed no rest
Speaker 2: for June thirteenth, as if I shut my eyes on
Speaker 2: one date and woke to the next. My smart home logs,
Speaker 2: usually reliable for gilt tripping me about late night lights,
Speaker 2: made the same leap kitchen lights off at ten zero
Speaker 2: one p m twelve June. Next switch on six forty
Speaker 2: five a m. Fourteen June. No entries for thirteenth. The
Speaker 2: met office app offered another twist. Saint Brouard's Firth's local
Speaker 2: station provided real time data normally, but for June thirteenth,
Speaker 2: every value was listed as the same as for maintenance
Speaker 2: down times, yet there d be no outage message. I
Speaker 2: began to canvas neighbors, only slightly self conscious about this
Speaker 2: unusual investigation. Margaret's reading log, which never misses a day,
Speaker 2: showed a jump. She said, I can't even fake a man.
Speaker 2: I was meant to be reading Emma that week. I
Speaker 2: finished it in what my diary says was one day.
Speaker 2: Never read Austin so fast. On my way out, I
Speaker 2: met doctor whitby heading to his surgery. A battered gladstone
Speaker 2: bag swinging Lionel off to solve the case of the
Speaker 2: lost Wednesday, among other ailments. I replied, would you humor
Speaker 2: me check your appointment logs? He invited me into the
Speaker 2: cramped waiting room, already smelling of antiseptic. The computer displayed
Speaker 2: Tuesdays and Thursday's schedules, no appointments, calls, or even automated
Speaker 2: reminders for Wednesday. That's not a thing that happens. I
Speaker 2: have the world's most irritating system, not designed to skip days.
Speaker 2: But here we are, clean gap, no error. On the
Speaker 2: village WhatsApp group, the conversation was livelier, but just as inconclusive.
Speaker 2: Someone started a meme congrats on making it to Thursday,
Speaker 2: since Wednesday's off. A local student rift about Groundhog Day,
Speaker 2: but without the endless loop, just a vanished square on
Speaker 2: the calendar. Jokingly, several said lucky we didn't schedule the
Speaker 2: wedding for then. At the Firth's end that evening, the
Speaker 2: topic was impossible to avoid. By the second pint, every
Speaker 2: regular agreed not a one could say for sure what
Speaker 2: happened on June thirteenth. No one could recall a birthday,
Speaker 2: an appointment, even a small disaster. Alec prophesied with a wink,
Speaker 2: if that day's gone, maybe we're owed one back at Christmas.
Speaker 2: Jollity failed eventually because there was nothing to be done.
Speaker 2: Some argued it was a system's bug, one more thing
Speaker 2: to blame on technology. Others said it's the weather always
Speaker 2: confuses the mind. Margaret wondered if the whole thing was
Speaker 2: just group inertia. What was most striking was that even
Speaker 2: the teenagers, who had no reason to care for puzzles
Speaker 2: older than Snapchat, admitted, almost shyly, that they could neither
Speaker 2: create nor bo morrow, a memory for the missing day,
Speaker 2: as if, when prompted, the entire village leaned together and
Speaker 2: saw only a smooth, inexplicable gap. I thought it merely
Speaker 2: an odd, clerical quirk, a journal entry missed in the
Speaker 2: shuffle of old age and routine. Now it felt larger,
Speaker 2: as if the fabric of ordinary life had loosened along
Speaker 2: a hidden seam and refused to tell me whether the
Speaker 2: thread was truly gone or merely out of sight. By
Speaker 2: the next morning, my blank page was no longer an
Speaker 2: amateur error, but a portal yet a mind, trained by
Speaker 2: decades of audits, does not stop at shard befuddlement. Every
Speaker 2: anomaly invites a test. If no one could remember Wednesday,
Speaker 2: what about things that cannot forget? Plants, animals, the relentless
Speaker 2: physical world. I keep sunflowers every year, a little ritual
Speaker 2: transplanted from my late wife's garden. This summer's plant stood
Speaker 2: hip high by the garden wall. Each day's progress documented
Speaker 2: in photographs, which I send to my granddaughter. I scrolled
Speaker 2: back through my phone, matching dates. Tuesday's image, petals just
Speaker 2: beginning to unfurl, stems still leaning. Thursday flower wide, golden
Speaker 2: crown pushed farther open, a good two days difference. The
Speaker 2: time lapse widget agreed no photo for Wednesday, but the
Speaker 2: change between frames too great to be explained by a
Speaker 2: single day. Seeking comparison, I trundled up the lane to
Speaker 2: missus Francis, renowned for her sharp tongue and sharper rose garden.
Speaker 2: She was kneeling by her peace shoots as I entered,
Speaker 2: brushing earth from her hands. Francis, do you mind if
Speaker 2: I ask how did your garden fare yesterday? She stood back, creaking,
Speaker 2: Why you'll laugh? I came out this morning and found
Speaker 2: the peas nearly doubled. Could have sworn it was only
Speaker 2: a day since I watered last. Security cam shows nothing,
Speaker 2: just still images. Then fast forward. I'd have bled aimed
Speaker 2: the fairies years ago. She showed me the camera's footage,
Speaker 2: a smooth reel except for June thirteenth, where the date
Speaker 2: simply skipped plants leaping in size. She tutted with theatrical indignation,
Speaker 2: Roses don't do time travel, Lionel, not in this soil.
Speaker 2: Back on the key, I found Alec gutting his morning's
Speaker 2: catch under a tarpaulin. He smirked as I approached, checking
Speaker 2: for time anomalies in the fish, Are you? He teased,
Speaker 2: In fact, yes, can I see the scales? We examined
Speaker 2: the skip jack and cod, checking for signs of aging scales,
Speaker 2: color texture. They all bore a day's extra growth, more
Speaker 2: than he'd expect. Maybe the whole village slept in, Aleck said,
Speaker 2: not Unkindly. The Council's CCTV records, normally continuous, were revealed
Speaker 2: by Tom's teenage son to have a quirk. From midnight
Speaker 2: June twelfth to twelve zero one a m June five, fourteenth,
Speaker 2: The files skipped the naming convention, simply leapt forward a
Speaker 2: continuous system as automated as breathing at the weather station.
Speaker 2: The rainfall, gage, and wind sensors, both mechanical and electronic records,
Speaker 2: suffered the same blackout as the Met Office's website. By now,
Speaker 2: my mind, by turns skeptical and delighted, reached the obvious
Speaker 2: and pass if memories falter and records can glitch. What
Speaker 2: of the sunflower, the plants, the wind, the fish. What
Speaker 2: about systems that are supposed to run without interruption by design?
Speaker 2: Why would they too show a lacuna. Physical law does
Speaker 2: not care for local tradition. Plants do not consult calendars,
Speaker 2: rain does not take a holiday. And yet even the
Speaker 2: humble growth of a peace shoot, the time lap's image,
Speaker 2: the data logger all agreed with human faults. The only
Speaker 2: explanation that made sense, and it did not make much,
Speaker 2: was a total village wide loss, a skipping not just
Speaker 2: of mind, but a physical record, an absence too total
Speaker 2: for ordinary explanations. Clerical error would leave a trace, a note,
Speaker 2: a glitch, even an error code. Here there was only silence.
Speaker 2: Even the grass seemed to have grown by two days worth,
Speaker 2: as if time had slipped by, unnoticed and unprotested. I
Speaker 2: spent the afternoon back at the pub, absentee, minded, my
Speaker 2: pint barely touched the others. Curious but pragmatic, soon moved
Speaker 2: on to football and family gossip, returning to the world's
Speaker 2: familiar pleasures. But a knot had formed at the center
Speaker 2: of my curiosity, drawing in even the smallest detail. That evening,
Speaker 2: I stood on my garden path, the air, sweet with
Speaker 2: the scent of sun warmed earth, and for the first
Speaker 2: time since my accountant's heart learned to calculate risk, I
Speaker 2: felt a sense not of worry, but of invitation. If
Speaker 2: the village's clocks and calendars, plants and people all colluded
Speaker 2: in erasing a day, then there was a pas and
Speaker 2: here strange as any that numbers could show. Was it
Speaker 2: an accident, an inherited tradition, some trick of psychology so
Speaker 2: powerful it infected machines and biology alike. Or something stranger,
Speaker 2: an affliction, a trick, a miracle no one feared. The
Speaker 2: next morning, I resolved to approach not just as an auditor,
Speaker 2: but as a student of the impossible. I summoned a
Speaker 2: meeting at the Firth's End, inviting Margaret Alick, Sheila Tom,
Speaker 2: doctor Whitby and any who would come, promising only a
Speaker 2: discussion of the lost day. Pub gatherings here are less assembly,
Speaker 2: more overlapping conversations, cups of tea pressed against lips, boots
Speaker 2: thumping on old boards. By noon, a half dozen curious
Speaker 2: sorts had squeezed around the largest table, three generations, teachers, tradesmen, farmers,
Speaker 2: a visitor from Yorkshire bunking in the b and B
Speaker 2: eyes bright with outsiders anticipation to avoid accusations, theft I
Speaker 2: bought the first round. I began with the question all
Speaker 2: had been sidling toward how much can we rely on
Speaker 2: our sense of time if it can simply be erased,
Speaker 2: not just from memory, but from every kind of record.
Speaker 2: Margaret had brought the parish registers, centuries old and heavy,
Speaker 2: along with folders of typed pages from the Firth Times archives. Look,
Speaker 2: she said, flipping pages with care. It's not just this week.
Speaker 2: I checked back. Every year June thirteenth is either missing
Speaker 2: or replaced by a note no record. Alec Grinning produced
Speaker 2: his latest GPS logs and an old hand written fishing
Speaker 2: tally from his grandfather's youth. Neither show anything for the thirteenth.
Speaker 2: My father used to say, if a day could be lost,
Speaker 2: it'd be that one. Tom, rolling his eyes, placed the
Speaker 2: week's counter log for the group. I'd never skip a day.
Speaker 2: Tightest ship in Cornwall, this shop, But for the past
Speaker 2: fifth eighteen years, not a sail, not a delivery, not
Speaker 2: a squiggle for June thirteenth, Doctor Whitby offered, the patient
Speaker 2: lists are flawless, but empty for that day every year,
Speaker 2: Never an appointment, no calls, nothing entered by hand or computer,
Speaker 2: not just last week, every year since I came back
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty nine. The holiday maker piped up his diary,
Speaker 2: kept long time for walking holidays, also skipped the date,
Speaker 2: a blank line graduating straight from June twelfth to fourteenth,
Speaker 2: even as his phone snapped photos at both ends. Thought
Speaker 2: I d made a soppy error, he muttered. Sheila, who
Speaker 2: had quietly called her cousin in Plymouth, relayed an answer.
Speaker 2: Those outside the village had normal weeks, but even a
Speaker 2: delivery driver passing through recorded June thirteenth as a no
Speaker 2: movement day on their dash camp. Margaret quietly said it's
Speaker 2: not just the records. My grandmother always called it leap Day,
Speaker 2: but wasn't that for February? She'd say, when there's nothing
Speaker 2: to do, the day never arrives. We agreed, by nobody's heroics,
Speaker 2: but by strange consensus that this omission crossed more boundaries
Speaker 2: than any could easily explain, human, mechanical, digital, biological. All
Speaker 2: records stopped for June thirteenth and started again unflustered. No
Speaker 2: one could supply a credible story for even a single
Speaker 2: event on that date, nor evidence for it passing as
Speaker 2: anything but silent, unnumbered time. The explanations provided at first
Speaker 2: were pragmatic. Some suggested mass forgetfulness, group hysteria, some unknown
Speaker 2: but dull systemic bug. Others posited a local tradition habits
Speaker 2: so old it infected device and memory alike. The youngest attendees,
Speaker 2: less vested in routine, made less noise, but admitted in
Speaker 2: the end they too could recall nothing. A teacher, young
Speaker 2: and skeptical, asked, what if we're imposing this, like if
Speaker 2: everyone believes there's no Wednesday, then the brain may be
Speaker 2: even machines tuned to the pattern, self fulfilling prophecy doctor
Speaker 2: Whitby counted, but what of the plants, the weather station,
Speaker 2: the things that don't know Wednesday from a bucket? Nobody
Speaker 2: had a satisfactory answer. Margaret gazed down at her hands,
Speaker 2: then at me. It's always been so we forgot to
Speaker 2: notice that we forgot now what. The mood was not
Speaker 2: fear but wonder, disquiet, woven with the gossamer lightness of
Speaker 2: something discovered rather than suffered, as if for the first
Speaker 2: time in many years, the village had a collective secret,
Speaker 2: difficult to dismiss as mere mischief or memory's trick. For me,
Speaker 2: there was no comfort in the ordinary explanations, nor any
Speaker 2: satisfaction in panic. My curiosity, long dulled by routine, sharpened
Speaker 2: itself on this impossible contradiction. The gap was not absence
Speaker 2: but invitation, a puzzle that grew, not shrank, as more
Speaker 2: evidence arrived. As the others drifted into conversation about the weather, football,
Speaker 2: and futures, I sat quietly with Margaret and Alec. I think,
Speaker 2: I said, this is not merely a clerical phenomenon, nor
Speaker 2: only psychological. If it touches the days and the daisies,
Speaker 2: If plants, devices, sky, and weather all leap in synchrony.
Speaker 2: Then we must look deeper. There may be cause, or
Speaker 2: accident or something else. Entirely. We'll need the old records,
Speaker 2: not just last year old ones. The village archives, Margaret nodded,
Speaker 2: energized the rare document's room back of the library. It'll
Speaker 2: be dusty, but it might give us leads. When do
Speaker 2: you want to begin as soon as possible? I replied,
Speaker 2: before another Wednesday slips past. Alick winked, if it's too much,
Speaker 2: perhaps the world's giving us one less day to worry about.
Speaker 2: But I was not inclined to work hurry, not yet.
Speaker 2: I was impossibly as excited as I was at my
Speaker 2: first Audit presented not with error, but with a chance
Speaker 2: to bring mystery into the open. We arranged to meet
Speaker 2: at the library the following morning. That night, my sleep
Speaker 2: was touched by an elusive feeling, half relief, half anticipation.
Speaker 2: The village had agreed, at least in spirit, that its
Speaker 2: days might not always be what they seem. If time
Speaker 2: itself could unravel and every one could pass through, perhaps
Speaker 2: it was not simply a floor, but a feature, a
Speaker 2: secret kept even from itself, an absence so total it
Speaker 2: left the mind thirsty for its edges. Outside, the midnight
Speaker 2: air carried sea and stone, enfolding the village in the
Speaker 2: old unneeded certainties. But on my bedside table the journal
Speaker 2: lay open, pen uncapped, waiting not for missing memories, but
Speaker 2: for the next question. Margaret led the way the next morning,
Speaker 2: unlocking the library with the precise, slow authority of someone
Speaker 2: to whom entropy felt like an affront. I met her
Speaker 2: on the front steps with a fresh box of shortbread
Speaker 2: from Tom's reparative tribute for whatever dust and mold we'd dislodge.
Speaker 2: The sky was low and pewter, a fog bank lurking
Speaker 2: half way down the lane, so early that only the
Speaker 2: baker and the gulls were certain it was morning. Inside,
Speaker 2: the public rooms were quietly echoing, gray light caught on
Speaker 2: battered spines. We left the normal bustle, children's reading, our posters,
Speaker 2: some alone displays for the Warren, passed the staff desks,
Speaker 2: through storerooms dense with bric a brac and obsolete printers.
Speaker 2: Margaret's keechin jingled found the one ancient skeleton key and
Speaker 2: rested open the door to the rare document's room. The
Speaker 2: air was cooler and heavy, with the cellulose hush of
Speaker 2: forgotten paper. Careful of the step, she warned, not looking back,
Speaker 2: and don't trip over the barometer some former Vicker's pride
Speaker 2: and joy. The archive was a pair of battered desks,
Speaker 2: a battered kettle defunct, and three bookcases crammed with uncataloged
Speaker 2: ledges and private donations. Yellow sticky notes swarmed over folders
Speaker 2: marked in faint pencil weather tides, meryll proclamations, misk folklore.
Speaker 2: The farthest shelf held the meteorological logs, decades of spiral
Speaker 2: bound note books, covers foxed and warped with mildew, but
Speaker 2: pages neat. Margaret selected the one labeled nineteen fifty six
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine. It opened with the solemn neatness of
Speaker 2: a professional obsession. Weather noted, daily tides, rain, wind. The
Speaker 2: first page announced in immaculate copper plate June bled across
Speaker 2: two pages nineteen fifty eight, June twelfth, light showers wind
Speaker 2: e n E sixty two degrees f, then abruptly June fourteenth,
Speaker 2: with a line no data. The pattern recurred nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy one, nineteen seventy six, always a blank between
Speaker 2: the twelfth and fourteenth. Sometimes a scribble in the margin,
Speaker 2: no entry, equipment idle or simply a dash, no suggestion
Speaker 2: of repair, no reason for the recorder to lie or forget.
Speaker 2: Clipped in the back was a single note, unsigned, likely
Speaker 2: from the compiler, always a day lost. Recorder cannot recall
Speaker 2: why Margaret turned to a box labeled manuscript Hoggan Ledger
Speaker 2: late seventeen hundreds, a find only locals might value. Its
Speaker 2: binding laced with polished twine, its covers warped. She eased
Speaker 2: it open diaries, not day by day, but nearly so.
Speaker 2: Life as measured in seed plantings and churchings, small village
Speaker 2: scandals rendered in iron. Gall ink I traced the summer
Speaker 2: entries by finger. June twelfth, attended market, bought peppercorn and pins.
Speaker 2: Saw Gregory's cow troubled. Next line, June fourteenth, rain walked
Speaker 2: a porth. The intervening days simply absent or in one
Speaker 2: year a cryptic annotation between no notes leapt the word
Speaker 2: struck me leapt, as if the day had been vaulted
Speaker 2: over the ordinary. No hint of concern in the tone.
Speaker 2: A practical omission, not a lost soul. Margaret pointed to
Speaker 2: a passage from the seventeen eighties by custom, the thirteenth
Speaker 2: not marked being Timing's mischief. The ink brown and faded,
Speaker 2: barely legible. She stood knees creaking, and stretched for a
Speaker 2: high folder marked Parish Customs and Observations comp. Eighteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: The writing was messier, compiled from oral recitation more than
Speaker 2: any clean record, notes about village fairs, feast days, suggestions
Speaker 2: about old calendar reforms. On a brittle half page leap day.
Speaker 2: Most years, nothing is set to happen. None born, none wed,
Speaker 2: none buried. We were silent. Margaret cradled the volume as
Speaker 2: if it were a sleeping child. It's always been this way,
Speaker 2: she murmured. I just never looked for the pattern. Why
Speaker 2: would I. We left the records for a moment and trod,
Speaker 2: at my request the short path to the Perrish Cemetery,
Speaker 2: Dew soaked our shoes, suns slanted above the lichened stones.
Speaker 2: Margaret brought the burial record. I traced dates with a
Speaker 2: gloved finger, rows of granite, names crumbling or brightly regilt
Speaker 2: Davy's trethuy Clark, dates ranged in looping numerals, Families entangled
Speaker 2: in times, remembering June twelve June fourteenth, again and again
Speaker 2: a skip, Not one headstone, not a single entry among
Speaker 2: two centuries named June thirteenth as a date of death
Speaker 2: or birth. Not even a died between in all those
Speaker 2: careful chiselings, I had expected, perhaps a rarity, but not
Speaker 2: a perfect void. Even the war years blitz an epidemic
Speaker 2: left that day untouched. I wonder if anyone's noticed before,
Speaker 2: I asked, Margaret shook her head biting a nail. We've
Speaker 2: all seen it, I suppose, just never thought it odd,
Speaker 2: easier to blame chance. We returned to the library the
Speaker 2: space insular as a conch shell in the local folk
Speaker 2: tale almanac, part's scrap book, part annotated diary. Margaret unearthed
Speaker 2: two more clues in a crabbed nineteenth century hand Tea's
Speaker 2: bad luck to begin a roof on leap day, nothing
Speaker 2: will stand, and from a few years later, best to
Speaker 2: rest between the days. I asked if we could speak
Speaker 2: to the oldest villager, Missus Tregaran, now ninety eight, whom
Speaker 2: Margaret visited with groceries each Tuesday. Margaret arranged a visit.
Speaker 2: Missus Tregaran's cottage was another time pocket, thick walls, low beams,
Speaker 2: and oil stove that ticked gently. Her hearing aid whistled.
Speaker 2: As we entered, she fixed us with a watery, indestructible gaze,
Speaker 2: her hands knotted tea towels in her lap. Margaret explained
Speaker 2: our errand lost a day? Have you? She asked, a
Speaker 2: smile twitching across lips, shiny with sugar. Don't worry, TWA's
Speaker 2: the same in my mother's day. We never marked the
Speaker 2: thirteenth too much bother That's all meant. Nothing happened, so
Speaker 2: we put it out of mind. Did she say why?
Speaker 2: I prompted, Oh, old stories, nothing ever set in stone.
Speaker 2: Some said it was bad luck. Some said the sea
Speaker 2: demanded it. One day to leap, one to lose. She shrugged,
Speaker 2: like Carnival or bomb fair night, not written, just understood.
Speaker 2: Did you ever try to remember anything for the thirteenth,
Speaker 2: Margaret asked gently, naw, you'd be the only one. We
Speaker 2: always say it's for the best. A day saved is
Speaker 2: a day never lost. We left her laughter, following us
Speaker 2: to the street. On the walk back, I felt the
Speaker 2: first pang of humility. Every system I prized, routines, records, clocks,
Speaker 2: all proved paper screen thin when brushed with this calm
Speaker 2: collective neglect. Yet the regularity was too complete for happenstance.
Speaker 2: Margaret mused aloud as we walked. Maybe it's an old adjustment,
Speaker 2: something to do with the calendar change. Weren't there years
Speaker 2: when days went missing? I nodded the Great calendar Reform
Speaker 2: Julian to Gregorian, seventeen fifty two, Parliament dropped eleven days nationwide.
Speaker 2: Some people rioted, blustering for the return of their days.
Speaker 2: But why just here, she wondered. Let's ask some one
Speaker 2: with an eye for customs, I replied. Doctor Whitby welcomed
Speaker 2: us later that afternoon, serving tea in China so thin
Speaker 2: I could see my shadow in it. His study held
Speaker 2: more curiosities, and abacus missing a bead, a drawer of
Speaker 2: odd coins, newspapers yellowed thin as old apple's skin. When
Speaker 2: we recounted our findings, he listened with brisk, good humor,
Speaker 2: then reached into his desk and brought forth a folder
Speaker 2: of typed notes and clippings. His amateur historian's pride, he
Speaker 2: riffled through them, extracting a piece of yellowed foolscap clipped
Speaker 2: to parish minutes from seventeen sixty two. In respect of
Speaker 2: old confusions in the reckoning, it is customed that hereafter,
Speaker 2: between the twelfth and fourteenth days of June, the community
Speaker 2: shall rest, and no business or counting be done on
Speaker 2: that day in perpetuity. The handwriting was narrow, sober, A
Speaker 2: vicar's signature trailed off dry ink, dragging below in a
Speaker 2: used bookseller's ink. Curiously, this was not universal. Most villages
Speaker 2: kept the standard. Count Whitby scratched his chin, smiling. Seems
Speaker 2: we invented a local leap day, but fixed it on June,
Speaker 2: not September. He shrugged. Who can say why? Maybe to
Speaker 2: keep taxes or saints days aligned may be superstition. Britain's
Speaker 2: calendars were chaos. Why would people keep it year after year?
Speaker 2: I asked. It must have outlived any reason. Tradition does that.
Speaker 2: He observed. After a while, any habit becomes a rule,
Speaker 2: especially the ones nobody else follows. Wouldn't that just explain
Speaker 2: the documents the habit? Margaret interjected, what about the plants
Speaker 2: and the clocks, all those automatic systems. Doctor Whitby opened
Speaker 2: his arms. There you have me. I could tell you
Speaker 2: stories about village time slips till supper. But I am
Speaker 2: a doctor, not a physicist. Still, maybe some boundaries are
Speaker 2: stickier than we know. A thrill ran up my spine.
Speaker 2: We had an answer for the human realm, a quirk
Speaker 2: of reckoning, lost in the tides of reform and preserved
Speaker 2: past all need. But our physical phenomena, the sunflowers jump
Speaker 2: the digital gaps resisted such easy shelving over tea. We
Speaker 2: mapped a hypothesis. The original villagers, perhaps to simplify harvests,
Speaker 2: taxes or feasts, chose to skip a day outright every year,
Speaker 2: not just once, as Parliament had dictated, and the calender
Speaker 2: stuck a habit of a mission ossified into daily reality,
Speaker 2: so much so that the community never noticed, and nobody
Speaker 2: queried empty ledgers or unwatered plots. With time, no one
Speaker 2: bothered to question, and the day's absence became absolute. But
Speaker 2: how did this explain the more impossible memories? Compliance, plants,
Speaker 2: eager growth, clocks, reluctance to tick that evening, I wondered
Speaker 2: aloud in the WhatsApp group. What if we set up
Speaker 2: a device cameras automated diaries explicitly to record through the
Speaker 2: lost day. Would whatever mechanism prevents memory or habit from
Speaker 2: marking June thirteenth also defy machines? Margaret responded within minutes,
Speaker 2: I'll loan the library's time lapse camera. Let's document it
Speaker 2: next year. Plants clocks anything we can. Maybe science will
Speaker 2: catch what habit has missed. Doctor Whitby chimed in, if
Speaker 2: nothing else, you'll prove the universe can outstubborn a cornishman.
Speaker 2: The village's humor, its gentle ability to turn curiosity into
Speaker 2: lightness steadied me. But privately, I emailed a plant biologist
Speaker 2: at the university matching my sunflower growth records, and asked,
Speaker 2: is there any plausible way for a plant to simulate
Speaker 2: two days growth in one? Purely from confusion in the
Speaker 2: gardener's head. The response several days later was straightforward, I
Speaker 2: can't explain the gap. Growth looks normal except for that
Speaker 2: one apparent leap. Whether light, water are all within expected
Speaker 2: parameters unless you have an extremely aggressive fertilizer or a
Speaker 2: time machine, I have no biologically satisfying answer. The researcher
Speaker 2: offered to test the question in situ next June, sending
Speaker 2: two sets of seedlings, one inside the village one out.
Speaker 2: Spurred by this, I talked to Alec about his GPS logs.
Speaker 2: He noticed that only in the bounds of Saint Brouard's
Speaker 2: Firth did his day tracking apps skip forward. Outside time
Speaker 2: was measured in honest hours, every day counted. A mirrored
Speaker 2: answer came via delivery drivers their parcel logs, while in
Speaker 2: the village skipped the thirteenth. On near by roads, no
Speaker 2: such anomaly. The effect's boundary was not the coast, but
Speaker 2: the limits of sense. Once you entered Saint Broad's Firth,
Speaker 2: you played by its rules, whether you believed them or not. Margaret,
Speaker 2: digging further into folklore, found mention oblique in codified prose
Speaker 2: of a lost village festival, the fast between days. The
Speaker 2: description was sparse, A silence kept on that day, no games,
Speaker 2: no prayers, no working of land. I pressed her for context.
Speaker 2: It might have started as a holy day, she speculated,
Speaker 2: or a practical one, and enforced rest the old order
Speaker 2: made into faith. I sent a second e mail to
Speaker 2: the biologist. What would you say if I told you
Speaker 2: only devices, diaries, or plants inside the village boundary fail
Speaker 2: to note one day each June, and the skip has
Speaker 2: lasted for centuries. He replied, I'd say it sounded like
Speaker 2: a social excit experiment gone wild, or a localized magnetic anomaly,
Speaker 2: but neither would cause plants to conform to such a pattern.
Speaker 2: Let me know if you test again next year, I'll
Speaker 2: send a team. The deeper we looked, the more the
Speaker 2: phenomenon blurred lines. Traditions shaped record, but record shaped tradition,
Speaker 2: and both had somehow inscribed themselves into physical circumstance. It
Speaker 2: was a feedback loop, impossible to find the start. A
Speaker 2: skepticism was beginning to gnaw, a suspicion that none of
Speaker 2: our explanations quite sufficed. At Margaret's suggestion, we gathered with
Speaker 2: doctor Whitby to review church and council records in the
Speaker 2: hope that more definite origins might show. We poured over
Speaker 2: old charts and ledgers, squinting at centuries old ink, mapping
Speaker 2: the moment of divergence. Invariably, the pattern pointed to the
Speaker 2: eighteenth century Reforms, when Britain abruptly lost days on authorities command.
Speaker 2: A brittle transcription in a package from the Vicar's files
Speaker 2: caught my eye. Let it be remembered that for the
Speaker 2: peace of reckoning, and to avoid confusion, we will not
Speaker 2: mark the thirteenth of June, but let all ages hold
Speaker 2: to the skipping. This custom, I read, was for the
Speaker 2: settlement of ledgers, tides, feasts, and holy obligations, lest calendar
Speaker 2: error breed mischief for the village. The leap had been
Speaker 2: chosen and then fossilized, the act so successful that it
Speaker 2: overruled even births and burials, business and rain gages. For
Speaker 2: notes on village fares, I found this. The festival is
Speaker 2: the day after the leap. The leap is not to
Speaker 2: be counted for fear of the old harm. Margaret translated
Speaker 2: in plain terms. When they dropped the calendar days, everyone scrambled,
Speaker 2: Feasts fell wrong, taxes fell due too soon. Maybe the
Speaker 2: villagers here, being stubborn or simply practical, chose a little
Speaker 2: skip to keep everything aligned, and it stuck. There was
Speaker 2: something plausible about it, a story of ordinary people outwitting
Speaker 2: an edict with a bit of calender knitting. But as
Speaker 2: satisfying as the paperwork was, it left the oddest elements
Speaker 2: the clockwork soaked, plant warmed side of the mystery undone
Speaker 2: calender's paper over inconvenience, but they don't make the grass
Speaker 2: grow faster or the sky forget a gale. I set
Speaker 2: to thinking about the act of forgetting, not a flaw,
Speaker 2: but a protective action. If the tradition was so ingrained
Speaker 2: that even nature, in the swirl of local expectation forgot,
Speaker 2: what did that say for the malleability of time of
Speaker 2: reality when structured by shared belief Out of ideas, I
Speaker 2: proposed a test. Let's see if we can outwit this gap.
Speaker 2: I told Margaret, doctor Whitby Alec the entire impromptu investigation committee.
Speaker 2: At our next pub gathering. We'll set every automatic device
Speaker 2: we can clocks, timers, cameras, voice recorders, starting the night
Speaker 2: of June twelfth and running through to the fourteenth. Perhaps
Speaker 2: something will force the day to reveal itself. Every One
Speaker 2: brightened at the challenge. Tom offered a shop alarm, Margaret
Speaker 2: produced the library's aging nikon for time lapse. Sheila contributed
Speaker 2: her ancient digital kitchen timer. Too finicky to fool with.
Speaker 2: Excitement gathering for the experiment, I quietly reached out to
Speaker 2: Margaret's nephew, Reese from London, who was planning to visit
Speaker 2: that June. I told him only that we wished him
Speaker 2: to keep a meticulous daily diary, and to avoid at
Speaker 2: first any of the rumors or explanations swirling in the village.
Speaker 2: He agreed, perhaps humorously, to be a control group of one.
Speaker 2: The big day came at sunset on June twelfth. We
Speaker 2: set up the gear. Clocks ticked, timers beeped, cameras faced
Speaker 2: the garden, voice memos initiated. I wrote an entry noting
Speaker 2: the test recording the time of night and the length
Speaker 2: of sunset shadow. On June fourteenth. The first thing I
Speaker 2: did was fetch the devices, heart skipping a little with
Speaker 2: that old thrill of unknown results. The timers had ticked
Speaker 2: straight from midnight on the twelfth to a minute past
Speaker 2: midnight on the fourteenth, No error messages, no lost data,
Speaker 2: just an uninterrupted march, skipping precisely where every other record did.
Speaker 2: The time lapse camera set to take a fote every
Speaker 2: hour showed June twelfth dusk, then an abrupt jump to
Speaker 2: June fourteenth, with a sunflower suddenly two inches taller, morning
Speaker 2: light leaking in around petals unable to name their interval.
Speaker 2: My voice recorder was more unsettling. It played my June
Speaker 2: twelfth bedtime message alarm set ready for tomorrow's experiment, and
Speaker 2: the next file jumped to the morning of the fourteenth.
Speaker 2: I distinctly remembered the intention, and yet upon playing back,
Speaker 2: there was no trace of error, sense of omission, or
Speaker 2: the least disturbance in continuity, only the certainty that a
Speaker 2: day had been effaced, and my mind, willingly or not,
Speaker 2: had played its part. When Rhese mailed me his diary
Speaker 2: a week later, he included a word perfect account of
Speaker 2: June twelfth, his drive from the city, arrival supper at
Speaker 2: the first's end. The next entry in his untidy scrawl
Speaker 2: was headed June fourteenth, and he observed only that yesterday
Speaker 2: had blended away a blank odd in feeling, but nothing alarming.
Speaker 2: I suppose I was simply absorbed, or the sea air
Speaker 2: did me in. I called him, pressing for some flicker
Speaker 2: of the missing day. He insisted, mildly amused that he
Speaker 2: could not, for the life of him, tell me why
Speaker 2: his notebook had skipped Wednesday, nor recall a single event,
Speaker 2: meal or conversation. His digital photos, shot at intervals likewise
Speaker 2: jumped from Tuesday to Thursday, missing any record even of
Speaker 2: idle beach walking or pasty shop cues. None of us
Speaker 2: were frightened, perplexed, delighted, stubbornly curious. Tom mulling over his
Speaker 2: shop's alarm log wondered, what if, for all our clever gadgets,
Speaker 2: we simply impose a blank through force of custom? Alec counted,
Speaker 2: But how would that make the plants grow faster then?
Speaker 2: Or get the machines to skip too? Doctor Whitby, standing
Speaker 2: by the bar, surveyed the lot of us with an
Speaker 2: expression belied by decades of treating stubbed toes and the
Speaker 2: odd case of chicken pox Lionel. He mused, perhaps we
Speaker 2: have fallen into the deepest English tradition, making ourselves so
Speaker 2: dull in habit the universe itself obliges just to please us.
Speaker 2: I held my tongue, feeling both humility and a lurching
Speaker 2: sense of the world's flexibility. How an entire community seeking
Speaker 2: harmony had managed to snip a day out of time's
Speaker 2: own ledger training whether and machines to comply? I thought? Further,
Speaker 2: Was it truly just belief as children making up a
Speaker 2: game so long and so well that even the garden
Speaker 2: joined in? Or was there something under the soil in
Speaker 2: the stone or the sea's breath, a property native to
Speaker 2: this place. Some resonance subtle as a church bell at
Speaker 2: tide's highest point, bending time so gently that only an
Speaker 2: outsider or a record keeper in his dotage might notice.
Speaker 2: To settle the question of the phenomenon's boundary, Margaret and
Speaker 2: I arranged a new plant test with the university. Two
Speaker 2: trays of seedlings sent, one planted in the village's community greenhouse,
Speaker 2: one outside in Truro City plot. Both sets were tended, scrupulously, watered,
Speaker 2: and fertilized by the same schedule. Results come July bore
Speaker 2: out the pattern. Inside the village, the seedlings leapt in
Speaker 2: growth across the skipped day. Outside, identical plants grew at
Speaker 2: the normal pace. A summary email from the lab we
Speaker 2: observe a consistent growth differential only within the coordinates you gave. Soil, light,
Speaker 2: and watering appear identical. No biological cause determined. The scientist's
Speaker 2: final note read, if this is a joke, it's a
Speaker 2: sophisticated one. Can you explain your methodology? I could not
Speaker 2: records with the met office. When I finally made contact
Speaker 2: with a sympathetic administrator, affirmed the gap for decades, the
Speaker 2: village's station had always missed its thirteenth of June data dump,
Speaker 2: contrary to national schedules and censors running three hundred sixty
Speaker 2: five days. Other towns weren't affected. Once a regional tech
Speaker 2: had been called for what he'd assumed was a bug
Speaker 2: in the logger, he'd replaced the hardware with no change.
Speaker 2: As I reviewed this evidence, it dawned on me that
Speaker 2: not only was the thirteenth ignored by the villagers, their
Speaker 2: habit of omission quietly elegantly enforced a bubble where recognition,
Speaker 2: record and even the encouragement of biological times simply did
Speaker 2: not hold. I recorded a voice memo to myself, the
Speaker 2: experiment is not with technology, but with consensus. What the
Speaker 2: village expects holds even in the workings of the world.
Speaker 2: Margaret ran the experiment with potted plants. She set two trays,
Speaker 2: one just beyond the village's Cairn boundary, one inside her
Speaker 2: garden wall. When she checked them after the thirteenth, though
Speaker 2: only a single night had passed, her tray had grown
Speaker 2: two days worth. The other outside sent Broad's bounds matched
Speaker 2: its slower ordinary pace. Doctor Whitby digging among his historical
Speaker 2: letters found one from the nineteenth century, a villager writing
Speaker 2: to a relative in Devon, apologizing for missing correspondents. Time
Speaker 2: got away from me, as it does here between the days.
Speaker 2: Next I wrote, it was already sent. Swiin s on
Speaker 2: the Devon's side. The recipient annotates odd jump. But what
Speaker 2: can be done. At the final pub gathering, the regulars
Speaker 2: debated what it all meant. Maybe the world needs reminding
Speaker 2: that days aren't always equal, said missus Francis, whose peas
Speaker 2: by now threatened to climb her fence. Alec toasted to
Speaker 2: the lost day. May it never return to cause paperwork.
Speaker 2: Tom in his way wondered if it was corner. The
Speaker 2: student from last week said, only it's a vibe. Maybe
Speaker 2: place matters more than we think. No one was alarmed.
Speaker 2: In fact, the consensus grew to be part of a
Speaker 2: village that laid claim to a missing day once a year.
Speaker 2: Was a charm. It made the place feel rare and
Speaker 2: connected and strange enough to smile about a riddle that
Speaker 2: asked nothing and offered only a gentle fracture in the
Speaker 2: shell of ordinary life. For me, though, it turned into
Speaker 2: something more. The evidence and tests had slowly revealed that
Speaker 2: what began as a pragmatic fix, the smoothing of a calendar,
Speaker 2: the avoidance of awkward festivals, the wish to make sense
Speaker 2: out of Parliament's confusion, had through repetition, become an inheritance.
Speaker 2: The annual leap, so fastidiously kept by list and Ledger,
Speaker 2: had wormed its way into the habits of people, and then,
Speaker 2: impossibly into the rhythms of the village clockwork, root and leaf.
Speaker 2: The very records intended to keep the world certain. It
Speaker 2: was as if time in this bounded place had become
Speaker 2: a custom rather than law. The village did not simply
Speaker 2: forget its day, but excized it smoothly enough that even
Speaker 2: systems designed to be impartial, whether sensors, GPS, logs, plant growth, emails,
Speaker 2: bode to the collective act. Where habit is steadfast enough,
Speaker 2: expectation becomes somehow its own controlling principle. Margaret submitted a
Speaker 2: gentle tongue in cheek article to the Firth Times on
Speaker 2: the tradition of the leap day Saint Broad's peculiar calendar.
Speaker 2: She wrote, it seems our ancestors, in their infinite wisdom
Speaker 2: or stubbornness, decreed that the thirteenth of June should trouble
Speaker 2: us no further, and so we have unwittingly obliged training
Speaker 2: every register, plant, and perhaps even the rain to do. Likewise,
Speaker 2: she ended, we forgot the reason, but not the ritual,
Speaker 2: and sometimes that is enough. The village, I realized, Exus
Speaker 2: most slightly out of step with the rest of Britain.
Speaker 2: For one interval every year, a day is not past,
Speaker 2: but parted with so carefully, so completely, that the absence
Speaker 2: becomes ordinary. The trick is not to fear the mystery,
Speaker 2: nor to burden it with meaning, but simply to notice
Speaker 2: the beauty in what is not there. That was my revelation.
Speaker 2: The answer contained, for all its practical roots, more than explanation.
Speaker 2: The world, it seems, is less hard edged than we imagine.
Speaker 2: Attention and habit and expectation color inside the lines, and sometimes,
Speaker 2: as inceint Broad's Firth, even define the lines themselves. The
Speaker 2: impossible is not the day we miss, but the ease
Speaker 2: with which we let it go, and how gracefully the
Speaker 2: universe complies. I did not need to solve the how.
Speaker 2: It was enough, for once in a life marked by
Speaker 2: counting and accounting, to stand quietly before an absence that
Speaker 2: was shared, attended, and even loved. The ordinary can conceal
Speaker 2: the impossible. Routines so often dismissed as dull, may shelter
Speaker 2: mysteries too subtle or gentle to alarm us. I began
Speaker 2: to wonder in that final week of careful checking, if
Speaker 2: time itself could be shaped by what we agree to
Speaker 2: remember or collectively ignore. Perhaps there are other places, other families,
Speaker 2: other ledgers, with blank spaces, made meaningful only by their emptiness. What,
Speaker 2: after all, is certainty but a comfort we choose, a
Speaker 2: sum always rounded in our favor. There is relief in
Speaker 2: such unanswerable gaps, a humility, and an invitation. When a
Speaker 2: day can be lost so seamlessly and so gently, there
Speaker 2: is wonder in every page left blank, and perhaps wisdom
Speaker 2: in letting the missing be what it is. Saint Broad's
Speaker 2: firth endures. The villagers move in their habitual grooves. I
Speaker 2: join them for my morning walk, smile at familiar faces.
Speaker 2: The journals on my shelf all skip the thirteenth year
Speaker 2: by year. No one minds, no one seeks to change it.
Speaker 2: Now only I, perhaps, apps and those who listen feel
Speaker 2: the shape of the absence and the quiet, impossible magic
Speaker 2: It makes of the mundane. If a day can be
Speaker 2: lost in Saint Broad's Firth, quietly, universally and without concern,
Speaker 2: how many other moments might slip through unnoticed elsewhere. I
Speaker 2: find myself scanning my own old journals for blanks, gaps,
Speaker 2: entries that never troubled me before. The true marvel I
Speaker 2: suspect is not the missing day, but all the ones
Speaker 2: we take for granted. Perhaps if we ever find a
Speaker 2: gap in our memories or diaries, we should look more closely.
Speaker 2: It might mean the world is stranger and richer than
Speaker 2: we imagine. Midday bells chime across the rooftops, marking time
Speaker 2: as faithfully as always, Another ordinary, extraordinary day is passing,
Speaker 2: and none of us, not even the sunflowers in my
Speaker 2: window sill, will ever know exactly what has been skipped.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next this one