8:31 AM
When I turned around and pressed the lock button on my keychain, I saw someone I shouldn’t have. They were sitting in the passenger seat of my car. It was right before work when I was in the parking lot. Clock-in time was thirty minutes ago, so I was in a hurry. I jogged back, briefcase hitting my legs, and yanked open the door.
No one was there.
9:04 AM
I had to excuse myself from work. I lumped together lateness with feeling sick. It was all connected, I implied to my supervising manager. My supervising manager, with his trademark olive shirt and peppermint tie, gave me that frown-smile of his. “We’ll see you again soon,” he replied cryptically. My eyes focused on the solitary wrinkle on the chest near the collarbone. Maybe it was the collarbone. I’d never quite figured that out yet. The collarbone is strange, isn’t it?
9:35 AM
I nearly got in a wreck on the way to the hospital. One step ahead of Karma, one step behind Today. Sooner or later, I’d trip.
“You’re still here?” I whispered to the slumbering, beeping mass. I ran my fingers through her hair. It was oily, smelled like blood. She did not stir. I whimpered like a lost schoolboy. Then I went back out and checked the patient name next to the door. If I got back into my car and drove away then and there, I should find the same name on a tombstone. Tomorrow, she would be dead. But I’m writing this today, which is tomorrow, and today, as I’m putting this down this very minute, she has been in her grave for several years now.
I pulled out my cell to read the news to her, the news that was ahead of her by several years.
11:32 AM
The beeping intensified. She was no longer stable. Nurses rolled her out in a hurry. I remained behind reading headlines to the empty room.
12:30 PM
On my way out, there was no use asking the hospital staff what day it was. The correct date was everywhere, mocking me. Plastered on the TV like makeup on a corpse, wound into clocks like a body in a smashed car. High-speed collisions could do strange things. The collarbone was strange. It was poking out, I saw hers poking out when she was next to me, when the lower half of her body was wound up. I wanted to see, although I’d be much too cowardly. Like I was too selfish and cowardly to take her place. But I hadn’t wanted to forget.
1:11 PM
I was in my apartment, awaiting a visitation like I was the patient. When I’d sold the house, it wasn’t to extinguish my memories of what we’d started. On the contrary, I’d needed the money to hire a priest. Not the kind that exorcises demons. Not that kind at all.
Dishes were piled up so high they blocked out the window. Along with moldering food, it smelled like mothballs and incense, like the inside of a church.
The lights went out.
The walls of my apartment creaked, as though they were compressing or expanding. I watched, trembling on the futon, as a shadow snapped away from the others.
It approached from a potted plant that was suddenly rotted to black tatters. It was a fake plant that should not decay like that, as though it had been brought to life, like Pinocchio become a real boy, just to murder it.
The outline of that figure hurt my eyes like a bright, harsh beam, but like radiation barely on the visible spectrum. The sound of its voice ripped me a new eardrum, though it was little more than a whisper.
“The same deal as before stands,” it said. “You can take her place. You can take her place and all this will end.”
“But I might forget her. Don’t want to.”
It clicked a tongue or something inside, the way a schoolmaster would do to a naughty pupil. “She rots in hell. Forever. You killed her, and as if that wasn’t enough—”
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “It was an accident. It should’ve been me.”
A frown-smile showed, and needly curved teeth showed. “Just say the word.” There was nothing cryptic about that. “You know where to find me.” It vanished like a puff of smoke.
3:33 PM
I woke up on the futon to things scrabbling across the apartment. They were on the walls. They were scraping across the floor towards the couch. I saw large, wet white eyes absent pupil or iris. Eyes watching me. Hungry, laughing eyes. Rotted pieces of flesh fell where they crawled. Plops of muscle, strands of innards. I heard something come up onto the futon. Breathing raggedly, I glanced down towards my feet. Its skeleton was exposed, and it was so far gone you could never tell what it had been (it was always that way by the time they got close). It suddenly giggled and cried at the same time.
5:11 PM
I went to a bar to drink myself into a stupor. I picked a fight to get hurt. Maybe it was to feel less guilty, less selfish, although I knew deep down it had nothing to with her, only to do with myself.
I’d had enough to drink that night we’d gotten into the accident. In fact, it had been an argument that had led me to that bar.
And then had come the phone call. No one else available. Her water had broken. The baby, little Sylvie, was early. She’d asked me if I was drinking again, and I’d lied through my teeth, teeth that felt like needles in my mouth.
Yesterday, there was no call and no fight. Someone set me down gently next to the curb. I heard them hailing a cab.
“Wait,” I slurred groggily. “I never told you . . . my address.”
11:11 PM
I was in bed. Someone had taken off my shoes and socks, like she used to do for me while weathering my worst years before I’d gotten sober. She’d done too much for me, put up with too much.
Just say the word. The whisper was deafening. Just . . . say it.
At first, all of that didn’t happen yesterday. But when I woke up today, it had.
It’s this way day after day, with one yesterday taking the place of another, until I forget the yesterday that should’ve been.
They say that memory is malleable. I heard the words in a song once, a song that I ironically can never remember the name of, that memory is not as sure as destiny. But it’s not that I’m remembering yesterday incorrectly. It’s not that this recurring yesterday I’ve put down here is not real. It’s that this Yesterday is more a space than a time. It is a room.