The Trouble With Tuesdays
It had belonged to my grandfather, which made it exactly as suspicious as everything else that had belonged to my grandfather.
He was the kind of man who owned seven lighters despite never smoking, kept foreign coins in old marmalade jars, and once told me he’d beaten a priest at cards “fairly enough.” Nobody in the family knew what that meant. Nobody asked twice.
After he died, Mum gave me a shoebox of things nobody else wanted to sort through, it was a Tuesday.
Cufflinks. A cracked pipe. Three keys with no locks. A betting slip from 1988. A black-and-white photograph of him standing beside a woman no one could name.
And the watch.
It was copper, though not cleanly copper. The case was scratched, the glass had a thin crack across the face, and the hands moved even when it wasn’t wound. There was no maker’s mark. No inscription. Nothing helpful.
Just a soft, stubborn tick.
I found out what it did by accident.
That’s what everyone says about terrible things.
The first time, I was making toast. I dropped the buttered slice face-down on the floor, swore, pinched the little stem on the watch, and the kitchen snapped backward nine seconds.
The toast was in my hand again.
I stood there for a long time, holding bread like it had personally betrayed physics.
Then I did what any sensible person would do.
I dropped it again.
The second time, I used it at the cinema.
A man in a paper hat said, “Enjoy your film,” and I said, “You too,” because apparently my brain had decided he was also going to sit in Screen Four and watch a three-hour submarine drama.
I walked six steps.
I stopped.
I took out the watch.
Nine seconds later, I said, “Thanks.”
Perfect.
Morally clean? No. But nobody suffered except the original version of me, and he deserved it.
After that, the watch became useful in small, stupid ways.
I saved a mug from falling.
I avoided stepping in dog mess.
I answered a pub quiz question correctly after hearing someone else get it wrong.
I relived twelve minutes of a date because I’d made a joke about tax codes, and Mara from Hinge had stared at me like I’d opened my coat to reveal several smaller accountants.
I did better the second time.
Not well. Better.
The watch was never dramatic. No lightning. No portal. No taste of copper in the mouth. You pressed the stem and the world hiccuped backward. A second chance, small enough to lie about.
A tap gave seconds. A hold gave minutes. Panic, apparently, gave more.
Then April twenty-second happened, it was a Tuesday.
Time knocked at 3:14 p.m., which was rude because it was 3:09.
By the time I opened the door, it was 3:14 again.
A woman stood in the hallway holding a tin of biscuits under one arm and a folded raincoat over the other. Her hair was the color of old pennies, copper gone soft with age. Her face looked about forty until she blinked, and then it looked tired in a way forty couldn’t explain.
“Eli Mercer?” she said.
“No.”
She looked at the brass number on my door.
“Flat 6B.”
“No.”
She looked at me.
I said, “He’s dead.”
“You’re holding his laundry.”
“People die doing laundry.”
“Not usually in dinosaur slippers.”
I looked down.
The left slipper had a tiny felt volcano on it. The right one said ROAR in red thread.
“Fine,” I said. “Eli Mercer is alive, but unavailable.”
“I’m the Goddess of Time.”
“That sounds like a scheduling issue.”
“It is.” She lifted the biscuit tin. “May I come in? I’ve brought shortbread.”
I should have said no.
To be fair, I thought about saying no.
But she had biscuits, and I had the specific kind of dread that makes hospitality feel legally binding.
That was how the Goddess of Time ended up sitting at my kitchen table, judging my kettle.
She did it quietly. That made it worse.
“It boils water,” I said.
“It screams until it dies.”
“It’s twenty-four pounds from Argos.”
“It remembers being ore.”
“Most of us do.”
She smiled at that, a small private thing, and took two mugs from the drying rack without asking. One was mine, chipped near the handle, with a cartoon goose holding a knife. The other said CONGRATS, AUNT LINDA!
“I’m not Aunt Linda,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Aunt Linda has better sense.”
She put the kettle on. It began its usual metal panic.
I leaned against the counter and tried to look casual, which is hard to do when a deity has come to your flat with biscuits and legal energy.
“So,” I said. “Tea.”
“Yes.”
“And time.”
“Yes.”
“And my recent…” I searched for the right word.
“Mischief,” she said.
“That feels loaded.”
“It’s carrying exactly the load it was built for.”
The kettle clicked off. Steam curled against the cupboards. She poured water into both mugs, added tea bags, and watched them bleed brown.
No thunder. No glowing hourglass. No choir of dead kings.
Just my kitchen. Damp socks on the radiator. Half a Tesco receipt stuck to the floor. A goddess stirring tea with the handle of a fork because I hadn’t done the washing up.
The watch was in the bedroom.
I knew that.
She knew that.
Neither of us said it.
She opened the biscuit tin. Actual shortbread sat inside, pale and sugared, arranged in a neat circle.
That was somehow worse than if the tin had been full of bones.
“You’ve used it forty-six times,” she said.
“That sounds high.”
“It isn’t. Most idiots hit triple digits before I visit.”
“Most?”
“You’d be amazed how many people find divine contraband in dead relatives’ sock drawers.”
I sat down.
She slid a mug toward me.
“Milk?”
“Yes, please.”
She added milk.
Too much milk.
I didn’t say anything. There are battles and there are suicides.
She took a biscuit. Crumbs fell onto the table, then jumped neatly back into the biscuit.
Show-off.
“Let’s review,” she said. “First offense. March third. You rewound eleven minutes to avoid saying ‘you too’ to a cinema employee.”
“That was mercy.”
“That was vanity.”
“It was a bad moment.”
“It was eleven minutes of existence.”
“Barely.”
Her eyes flicked up.
I drank my tea.
She continued.
“March seventh. You rewound twenty-two minutes after losing a pub quiz.”
“They said the capital of Australia was Sydney.”
“And you could have let them be wrong.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could. You chose not to.”
“Fine.”
“March ninth. You relived a first date five times.”
“Four.”
“Five. You forgot the version where you pretended to like jazz.”
“That version doesn’t count. Nobody was happy.”
“The saxophonist was.”
“The saxophonist was dead.”
“Exactly. He had so few listeners.”
I rubbed my forehead.
“Are you here to punish me or audit me?”
“Yes.”
The watch ticked from the bedroom.
That should have been impossible. Two rooms away, inside a drawer, under socks I had been avoiding since Tuesday.
Still, I heard it.
She sipped from Aunt Linda’s mug.
“March fifteenth,” she said. “You prevented yourself from sending a text that read, and I quote, ‘I miss your stupid face.’”
“That was self-preservation.”
“That was cowardice with punctuation.”
“It had a full stop.”
“It had longing.”
I hated her.
“April second,” she said. “You reheated soup by rewinding the soup.”
“That was efficient.”
“You aged the bowl twelve years.”
“It was ugly anyway.”
“The bowl didn’t ask to become archaeological.”
I almost laughed.
Almost.
Then she stopped reading.
The kitchen didn’t change. That was the first bad sign.
The radiator clicked. The kettle cooled. The damp socks continued their slow moral decline.
But April twenty-second entered the room and sat down beside me.
I could smell rain on pavement. Burnt coffee. Hospital hand soap.
I put my mug down.
The goddess said nothing.
“You said this was about mischief,” I said.
“It is.”
“That wasn’t mischief.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then what was it?”
I looked toward the hallway, toward the bedroom, toward the drawer.
“Necessary.”
She gave me a tired look. I recognized it. Doctors had used that look. Teachers too. My older sister, Mae, whenever I explained why a bad idea was secretly genius.
Mae had been very good at that look.
April twenty-second.
4:41 p.m.
Mae stepping off the curb outside King’s Cross with her phone in one hand, coffee in the other, mouth open to say something rude about my haircut.
A van running the light.
My body remembering the sound before my mind could.
The watch in my palm, hot enough to burn.
My thumb finding the stem.
The world folding back.
Again.
Again.
Again.
“You used it thirty-one times that afternoon,” the goddess said.
I stared at the table.
“That’s included in the forty-six?”
“Yes.”
“Then I barely used it for anything else.”
She said, “That’s your defense?”
“I got it right once.”
“No.”
I looked up.
Her expression had no cruelty in it. That annoyed me more than cruelty would have.
“I did,” I said. “I got her to stop. I called before she crossed. I told her I’d fallen down the stairs.”
“That was attempt twenty-four.”
“She turned around.”
“Yes.”
“She lived.”
“For seven minutes.”
My throat tightened.
Mae had not been hit by the van on attempt twenty-four.
She had run back toward the tube station, furious and scared, because I had said stairs and blood and hurry.
A man carrying a suitcase had tripped in front of her.
She had gone down badly.
Not cinematic badly. Real badly. A little slip. A stupid angle. Her skull meeting the edge of the station steps.
Seven minutes later, she died anyway.
I had rewound again.
And again.
After attempt thirty-one, I had stopped because the watch went cold.
Because I couldn’t move my thumb.
Because Mae, in every version, died near me or away from me or reaching for me or angry at me or laughing into the phone, and the universe had begun to look bored.
“I tried,” I said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
The lights flickered.
For the first time, she looked like something other than a woman in my kitchen.
The steam above her mug froze in place. The dust in the air stopped falling. The ticking watch went silent so abruptly the whole flat seemed to lean toward it.
Her eyes were full of time.
Dark, deep wells of time. Autumns rotted there. Oceans withdrew. Apples browned in the palm. Stars blinked once.
I saw my own pulse inside them, bright and ridiculous, throwing itself against all eternity.
“I know,” she said.
I believed her.
Then she was only a woman again, and the radiator resumed its clicking.
I hated that too.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She looked toward the bedroom.
“I’m not allowed to want anything from you.”
“That sounds unlikely.”
“It’s contractual.”
I stared at her.
She took another biscuit.
“He didn’t make the watch,” she said. “If that’s what you’re wondering. Your grandfather couldn’t assemble a bird feeder without inventing three new swear words.”
“That sounds accurate.”
“He won the right to keep it in a card game.”
I sat forward.
“He actually won it in a card game?”
“From a minor saint of bad decisions.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish I were.”
“With a saint?”
“Minor.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“It rarely does.”
I thought of my grandfather at the kitchen table, sleeves rolled up, smiling through cigarette smoke he had probably borrowed from someone else.
“He signed ownership into his bloodline,” she said. “Badly, but with enthusiasm. That’s often enough.”
“My grandfather did blood magic?”
“He signed a napkin.”
“That counts?”
“With the correct witness, yes.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I was busy.”
She looked into her tea.
“And your grandfather was very good at being beneath notice.”
The watch ticked again from the bedroom.
“So take it,” I said.
Her face went flat.
“I can’t.”
“Fine. Ask for it.”
“I can’t do that either.”
“Suggest I give it to you.”
“No.”
“Hint?”
“No.”
“Stand near me while holding out your hand?”
“Eli.”
“What?”
“If I could remove it from your life by force, I’d have done it before the kettle finished screaming.”
The room felt smaller.
I understood then. Not fully. Enough.
She hadn’t come because she was powerful.
She had come because she was limited.
That frightened me more.
“So what are you doing here?” I asked.
“I can teach.”
“I don’t want a lesson.”
“No one does.”
The tea in my mug darkened.
The surface trembled. Milk clouds twisted into shape. A hospital bed. A blue curtain. A plastic chair with a split in the vinyl.
Mae sat in the chair.
Alive.
No.
Not alive.
Present.
She wore the yellow jumper she had worn that day, the one with the coffee stain near the cuff. Her hair was tied in the horrible bun she did when she couldn’t be bothered. She looked twenty-nine, which was unfair. I had already become older than her in several small ways.
She looked at me through the tea.
“Eli,” she said.
I made a sound. Not a word.
The goddess stood.
“I can’t take the watch,” she said. “I can’t ask you not to use it. But I can show you what you’ve been spending.”
Then she left the kitchen.
Not through the door. She simply reached the part of the room where leaving belonged and used it.
Mae watched me.
I watched her.
The tea smelled like hospital hand soap.
“You look awful,” she said.
That did it.
I laughed once, which broke in the middle and came out wrong.
“You’re dead,” I said.
“Yeah. I’ve picked up on that.”
“I tried to save you.”
Her face changed.
Not softened exactly.
Tired.
“I know,” she said.
“I kept trying.”
“I know that too.”
“I couldn’t make it work.”
“I remember each time.”
My hands curled around the mug.
“Did it hurt every time?”
Mae looked away.
That was answer enough.
Something inside me folded small.
“No,” I said. “Because I went back. Those versions didn’t happen.”
“They happened to me.”
The watch ticked.
A mean, patient sound.
Mae leaned closer, her face bending with the curve of the tea.
“The van,” she said. “The stairs. The bike courier. The bus mirror. The glass door. The man with the suitcase. The version where I turned around because you said Mum was in hospital. That was low, by the way.”
I covered my mouth.
“The version where I didn’t answer your call. The version where you screamed so loudly I heard you from across the street. The version where I lived long enough to see your face and knew I was dying because you looked like a child.”
“Stop.”
I could barely get the word out.
“I didn’t know you remembered.”
She gave me the smallest smile.
It hurt more than anger would have.
“You always think pain only counts if you understand it.”
The three minutes were cruel.
They were also more than I deserved.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Mae nodded.
It wasn’t forgiveness yet.
It was receipt.
A stupid, bureaucratic mercy.
“I thought if I got the timing right,” I said, “if I said the right thing, if I made you turn left instead of right…”
“You always do this.”
I blinked.
“You think life is a lock,” she said. “Like there’s a clever little trick and then it opens.”
“I just wanted you here.”
“I wanted that too.”
The tea went pale around her edges.
“No,” I said. “Wait.”
“Listen to me.”
“I can try again.”
Her face hardened.
There she was. My sister. Finally angry.
“No.”
The word hit harder than any divine command could have.
I sat back.
She looked at me, and I could see all thirty-one deaths in her eyes. Not as images. Worse. As memory. As exhaustion.
“You have to stop practicing,” she said.
“Practicing what?”
“Losing me.”
I couldn’t answer.
“Do it once,” she said. “Badly. Like everyone else.”
The mug trembled in my hands.
Mae smiled then. Crooked and tired and hers.
“Your haircut really was terrible.”
Then she was gone.
The tea was only tea.
Cold. Too much milk.
The Goddess of Time returned at 3:17, which was impossible and therefore exactly on brand.
She sat down again and took a biscuit.
For a long time, neither of us spoke.
Finally I said, “You knew.”
“Yes.”
“You knew she remembered.”
“Yes.”
“And you let me do it thirty-one times.”
Her face went still.
“I don’t let people do anything,” she said. “That’s the part mortals hate. You keep mistaking consequence for permission.”
I wiped my face with my sleeve.
The watch ticked from the bedroom.
It did not sound useful anymore.
It sounded hungry.
“So that’s the cost?” I asked.
“No.”
I looked up.
“That’s part of it,” she said. “The cost is that now you know.”
“That’s cruel.”
“Yes.”
“You’re cruel.”
“Sometimes.”
“At least you admit it.”
She brushed crumbs from her fingers.
“You needed something heavier than hope.”
I hated that sentence because it landed.
Hope had been the problem. Hope had kept my thumb on the stem. Hope had made every death feel like a draft I could revise.
Mae’s face in the tea had done what the van couldn’t.
It made the watch feel filthy.
“What happens if I use it again?” I asked.
The goddess looked toward the hallway.
“I’m not allowed to answer that in a way that directs your choice.”
“Legal nonsense.”
“Divine Contact. Much worse.”
“Can you answer badly?”
A corner of her mouth moved.
“If you use it again,” she said, “time will obey.”
“That’s all?”
“No,” she said. “That’s the threat.”
I sat with that.
Time will obey.
A horrifying sentence, if you thought about it for more than two seconds.
She stood and closed the biscuit tin. This time she took it with her.
At the door, she paused.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Now?” She looked down the hallway, where the afternoon waited with its teeth out. “Now time moves on.”
“That sounds awful.”
“It often is.”
Then she left.
Through the door this time.
The flat was quiet after that.
The socks dripped onto the radiator. The kettle cooled. Somewhere downstairs, someone laughed too loudly at something that probably wasn’t funny.
At 3:21, my phone buzzed.
A reminder I’d set months ago.
CALL MAE ABOUT ROSE’S BIRTHDAY.
I looked at it until the screen went dark.
Then I deleted the reminder.
I didn’t touch the watch that day.
That sounds noble.
It wasn’t.
I stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the sock drawer until my knees ached. I imagined taking it out. Pressing the stem. Returning to the moment before the goddess knocked.
I could make better tea.
I could ask Mae better questions.
I could say sorry first. I could ask whether death was cold. I could ask whether she had seen Dad. I could ask if she blamed me.
I could ask what Rose would want for her birthday.
The wanting came back in waves.
Small, then huge.
At midnight, I opened the drawer.
The watch sat under three pairs of socks and a receipt for batteries.
It was warm.
Of course it was warm.
I picked it up.
The cracked glass caught the bedroom light. The second hand twitched backward, forward, backward again.
A clever little trick.
A lock waiting for its clever little key.
My thumb found the stem.
And Mae flinched in my memory.
Not dying.
Worse.
Remembering.
I put the watch down.
My grandfather’s old box was still at the bottom of the wardrobe. I had kept it after clearing his flat because it was solid wood and I am, apparently, the sort of person who inherits furniture from men who make contracts on napkins.
I opened it.
Inside were the things Mum had given me. The cufflinks. The cracked pipe. The foreign coins. The keys with no locks. The photograph of my grandfather standing beside the woman no one could name.
I put the watch underneath all of it.
Then I shut the drawer.
I didn’t lock it.
That would have been too honest.
Years passed.
That’s the strangest part. They actually did.
At first, every hour felt like a dare. Then every day. Then whole months slipped by without asking my permission.
The watch stayed in the drawer.
Sometimes I heard it ticking.
Sometimes I didn’t.
I never used it again.
The box moved with me twice. Once to a better flat. Once to a worse one with better light. I told myself I kept it because the wood was good, because it had been my grandfather’s, because old things shouldn’t be thrown away just because they’re inconvenient.
People can make cowardice sound practical if they have enough time.
Then, many years later, after a heart attack took me quickly enough that nobody could make a project of saving me, my niece came to clear out the flat.
Her name was Rose.
She had Mae’s mouth and my bad habit of keeping receipts.
She found the drawer on a Tuesday afternoon.
Cufflinks. A cracked pipe. Three keys with no locks. A black-and-white photograph of a man she barely remembered beside a woman nobody could name.
And underneath it all, the watch.
Copper, though not cleanly copper.
Scratched case.
Cracked glass.
No inscription.
Just a soft, stubborn tick.
Rose picked it up.
The watch warmed in her palm.
She had been crying all morning.
That mattered.
It always matters.
She pressed the stem.
Nine days vanished.
Somewhere far away, or very near, a woman with copper-colored hair looked up from her tea and sighed.
Then she reached for the biscuit tin.