Chapter 1
Chapter One
Emotional Support Plastic Flamingo
After two weeks, Amie was ready to admit that she was stuck in a time loop.
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 the acceptance that 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, they would 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 there was a 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, any instruction, 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 were laser-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.
The scene was also familiar because—as it may have been mentioned—this was not the first time Amie had lived through this day. But although she had experienced that Monday sixteen times before, she had only visited David thrice in that time.
The two neighbors had met about a year before the time loop began, soon after Amie had moved into the building.
She’d been working at a public relations firm for a few years post-college, living with a parade of roommates as she tried convincing herself that she was enjoying her work.
Then Amie’s employer and landlord came to a joint agreement to blow up her life, simultaneously laying her off and converting her place into a short-term rental.
She was lucky to quickly find the writing job and a new place to live.
Despite the low salary and the high rent, Amie enjoyed the peace and quiet of no longer having roommates. Most of the time.
One day, she’d come upon David struggling to open the front door while holding two cardboard boxes full of wooden blocks.
After a good amount of cajoling, Amie had managed to wrest one of the boxes away from him and haul it up to his apartment.
With the amount of time it took her to convince him to let her into his apartment with the box, she knew he either wasn’t going to murder her, or didn’t want her to see the bodies of the people he had already murdered.
If the former situation was true, great.
If the latter, she figured holding a heavy box of wooden blocks would prove to be useful.
David didn’t murder her, and since then visiting her neighbor had become a regular occasion for Amie.
At first she would show up under the guise of having baked too many cookies or scones or muffins.
Eventually, she just started showing up.
David seemed to enjoy having an audience as he tinkered with his machines, and Amie enjoyed having someone who enjoyed having her around.
She’d also found out that he’d managed to write a few bestselling books and was “semi-retired,” which apparently meant that he spent most of his waking hours building Rube Goldberg machines, or acquiring objects for said machines, or cursing at the machines when they didn’t do what he wanted them to.
As for the books, Amie had long since given up on trying to get him to reveal their titles, or the pen name he wrote them under.
The first of her three September 17 visits to David was on the Original Day, when her only experience with time loops was watching Groundhog Day when she was twelve.
Her second visit was on Day 1 I.L., when she frantically dashed up the stairs, banged on the door, and froze as she heard Ella Fitzgerald’s muffled crooning through the door once again.
She’d stayed for ten minutes, unwilling to say out loud what she thought was happening to her, as if outwardly acknowledging the loop would somehow give it permanence.
Her third visit was on Day 12 I.L. Although she didn’t want to admit it to herself, Amie was steadily acclimating to her situation.
And even though he had no way of knowing, she felt bad for going so long without visiting David.
She felt even worse when she learned that she’d woken him from his afternoon nap, and worse still when he told her to stay, saying, “Once I’m up, I’m up. ”
Despite feeling like an imposition, she ended up staying for over two hours, far longer than her usual visits. And even though she couldn’t bring herself to say the words “time loop” to David that day, she’d left his apartment feeling a little less alone.
And now, on Day 15 I.L., Amie was ready to say the words out loud.
“Is this a judgment-free zone?” she asked, picking up a lawn flamingo that had been lying on the couch and taking its seat.
“No,” David replied bluntly, not looking up from his work.
Amie’s jaw dropped. That was not the response she’d expected. “Why not?”
“Yesterday you judged me for not knowing that ‘SMH’ meant ‘shaking my head.’ ” David connected two track pieces together with a loud snap. “By your own actions, I don’t think this is a ‘judgment-free zone.’ ”
“Oh.” Amie vaguely remembered that. For David, it had been yesterday. For her, a bit longer.