The Trouble with Tuesdays
A David Sands Competition story by Alison Jones
An entry in The Sands of Time Writing Competition
The Trouble with Tuesdays by Alison Jones
Raine had long suspected Tuesdays were a conspiracy. It wasn’t paranoia, at least not in the bad sense of the word. She considered it more of a personal philosophy. Mondays were universally disliked, Wednesdays had camel memes, Thursdays were the anticipation of Friday, and Friday itself was a carnival of pub trips and paydays. Saturdays and Sundays were sanctified.
But Tuesday?
Tuesday lingered. Tuesday loitered. Tuesday was suspicious.
Raine had tried to explain this once to her flatmate Leonie as they sat in their kitchen, which was roughly the size of a shoebox designed by someone who hated feet.
“Think about it,” Raine said, waving her fork at Leonie as though it were a sceptre of universal truth. “Tuesday is the day nothing happens. No one talks about it. No songs about Tuesday, no movies about Tuesday. It’s hiding something.”
Leonie, half-asleep over her cereal, muttered something about cornflakes being eternal and went back to staring at the wall.
So when, on a Tuesday morning, a man in a lime-green suit materialised in their kitchen, Raine felt vindicated.
The man was tall, thin, and had a hairstyle that looked as though it had been designed by a committee of frightened pigeons. He carried a briefcase that wheezed every time he moved it, as though carrying the existential exhaustion of countless forms.
“Good morning!” he announced. “Terribly sorry for the intrusion, but you’ve both been time-travelling illegally.”
Leonie blinked. “We’ve both been what?”
“Time travelling illegally,” the man repeated. “Dreadfully sorry, paperwork nightmare, really. I’d rather be at home polishing my gorgonzola collection, but alas, duty calls. The Department is quite firm on these matters.”
Raine set her toast down. “We’ve never time-travelled.”
“Of course you haven’t. Not yet. But you will. Which means you already have. Temporal enforcement, you see. Cause and effect are just dreadfully bureaucratic suggestions.” He smiled in a way that suggested he did this sort of thing far too often.
Leonie groaned. “I knew the milk was off. This is an hallucination.”
“Oh no, it’s very real. Allow me to introduce myself.” The man struck a pose entirely unsuited to a man in a lime suit. “Atticus Lattie, Junior Assistant Deputy Clerk of the Department of Time. But you may call me Attie Lattie. Everyone does, except my mother, who calls me ‘mistake.’”
Raine tilted her head. “And you’re here because…?”
“Because you’re about to steal a time machine.”
The Clock with Low Self-Esteem
Attie Lattie led them out of the flat, down three flights of stairs, across the road, and into the belly of a grandfather clock.
Not just any grandfather clock. This one stood in the lobby of the South Bampton Public Library, wedged between a shelf of self-help books and a taxidermy weasel that had been dressed as Sherlock Holmes for reasons no one had successfully explained.
To enter, one had to insult the clock three times in a row until it grudgingly let you in.
“Pretentious antique!” Raine said.
“Your pendulum is compensating for something,” Leonie added.
“You smell faintly of cabbage,” Attie concluded.
The clock gave a weary sigh, as though it had long ago given up expecting respect, and swung open to reveal a vast, humming chamber.
The Department of Time’s headquarters looked like an unholy fusion of the Ministry of Magic, a mid-tier IKEA, and the inside of a metronome. Clerks in flowing robes zipped past, pushing trolleys piled high with glowing hourglasses, stacks of calendars, and the occasional screaming stopwatch.
At the front desk, a receptionist with six pairs of glasses perched on her nose raised a hand. “Take a number.”
Attie handed them slips of paper. Raine’s said Tuesday. Leonie’s said Pi.
“These aren’t numbers,” Raine said flatly.
“They are if you believe in them,” Attie said.
Why the Department of Time Is Closed on Wednesdays
“Let me get this straight,” Leonie said as they sat in a waiting room that smelled faintly of centuries-old popcorn. “You’re accusing us of a crime we haven’t committed yet?”
“Precisely,” Attie said, flipping through a file that seemed to be written in a combination of crayon and Latin. “At 3:42 p.m. this very Tuesday, you will, in fact, steal a Mark IV Chrono-Hopper from the Department of Time. Which means, of course, you already have.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Raine protested.
“Of course it doesn’t,” Attie agreed. “That’s why we have forms. Now, the Department is closed on Wednesdays, so we’ll have to deal with this quickly.”
“Why is it closed on Wednesdays?” Leonie asked.
“Because Wednesdays are unstable,” Attie whispered. “Terribly volatile. Try to time-travel on a Wednesday and you’ll end up inside a soup can in 1832.”
A Slightly Stolen Time Machine
At exactly 3:42 p.m., Raine tripped over a filing cabinet, Leonie caught her, Attie dropped his briefcase, and somehow the three of them tumbled directly into a Mark IV Chrono-Hopper.
It looked, disappointingly, like a shed.
Not a futuristic pod, not a sleek silver craft, but a shed. A slightly rusty, leaky-roofed garden shed with a faint smell of fertiliser.
The door slammed shut, lights flickered, and with a horrible whoomp, the shed vanished from the Department of Time.
“See?” Attie said from the floor, pinned under his briefcase. “Told you so.”
Raine scrambled upright. “We didn’t mean to steal it!”
“No one ever means to,” Attie said, brushing dust off his lime-green lapels. “It’s very inconvenient.”
Leonie groaned. “Where are we?”
Attie peeked out the shed’s tiny window. “Ah. Ancient Rome. Lovely architecture, terrible plumbing.”
A Gladiator, a Giraffe, and a Very Poorly Timed Joke
The shed had landed smack in the middle of the Colosseum. A gladiatorial fight was in progress.
The Romans looked up, confused, as a rusty shed materialised with a cough of smoke.
“Don’t panic,” Attie whispered. “Just blend in.”
“Blend in?!” Leonie hissed. “We’re in jeans and hoodies!”
“Romans were very forgiving fashion critics,” Attie lied.
A gladiator in full armour approached, glaring. “Quid est hoc?”
Raine froze. “ I-I think he’s asking what this is.”
Attie clapped. “Wonderful! You speak Latin.”
“No, I don’t!”
“Well, you do now. Time machines have translation fields. Very handy at diplomatic dinners.”
The gladiator tapped the shed with his sword. “Looks like an outhouse,” he muttered.
The crowd roared with laughter. Someone released a giraffe, for reasons lost to history. The giraffe immediately stole the gladiator’s helmet and began parading around like a champion.
Amid the chaos, Raine, Leonie, and Attie scrambled back into the shed.
“Where to next?” Raine demanded.
Attie shrugged. “Anywhere but here.”
The shed vanished again.
Napoleon Hates Garden Sheds
The shed reappeared on a battlefield. Cannon fire thundered in the distance. Soldiers marched in neat lines. At the centre of it all, a small but furious man in a big hat pointed at the shed and screamed in French.
“Ah,” Attie said cheerfully. “Napoleonic Wars. He hates sheds, you know. Bad childhood experience.”
“Why do we keep landing in the middle of famous historical events?” Leonie demanded.
“Because you’re protagonists,” Attie explained. “It’s compulsory.”
Napoleon stormed up, shouting furiously. Raine didn’t need a translation field to know he was saying something along the lines of “Get this bloody shed off my battlefield.”
The shed shuddered again and whisked them away before Napoleon could kick it.
The Future Has Terrible Sandwiches
This time, the shed landed in the year 2437.
They emerged into a gleaming city of silver towers, floating cars, and holographic advertisements for something called Quantum Yoghurt™.
Leonie picked up a sandwich from a street vendor. She took one bite and gagged. “This tastes like sadness and shoe polish.”
“Ah, yes,” Attie nodded. “Future cuisine. They managed to cure disease and end war, but sandwiches remain appalling.”
A robot wheeled up. “Citizen identification, please.”
“We don’t have any,” Raine admitted.
The robot blinked. “Then you are… illegal time tourists!”
“RUN!” Attie yelled.
They bolted back into the shed.
The Department of Paradoxes
After several more chaotic jumps—including but not limited to a brief detour through the Cretaceous period where a T. rex tried to use the shed as a scratching post—the group finally landed back in the Department of Time.
But not the same Department.
This one was upside down. Literally. Desks and filing cabinets clung to the ceiling. Hourglasses floated sideways. A clerk with two heads waved.
“Welcome to the Department of Paradoxes,” Attie said grimly. “We’re in trouble now.”
“What kind of trouble?” Raine asked.
“The kind that gets you fined thirty-seven temporal credits and possibly turned into a salad.”
Trial by Bureaucracy
The three of them were hauled before a tribunal of extremely bored-looking officials. Each official had a gavel, a stopwatch, and a packet of crisps.
The lead judge spoke. “You are accused of time theft, paradox propagation, and giraffe misplacement.”
“The giraffe was an accident!” Raine protested.
“Silence. How do you plead?”
Leonie crossed her arms. “Hungry.”
The judge sighed. “Very well. We sentence you to community service: repairing the timeline you’ve broken.”
The Day That Never Was
Their punishment began with fixing the Day That Never Was—a Tuesday in 1753 that somehow got skipped due to a calendar reform error.
“See?” Raine whispered smugly as they reappeared in 1753. “I told you Tuesdays were a conspiracy.”
They spent the day frantically convincing villagers that, yes, today did exist, no, they weren’t hallucinating, and please stop burning the shed as a witch.
By sunset, the day was restored, though everyone in town now believed “Tuesday” was a magical holiday involving excessive cheese consumption.
Infinite Sheds
Eventually, through a series of fixes involving tea with Cleopatra, teaching Shakespeare how to spell his own name, and convincing Albert Einstein not to pursue a career in competitive knitting, Raine and Leonie became something like competent time travellers.
The shed, however, developed a quirk.
It began duplicating itself.
Every time they jumped, another shed was left behind. By the end of the week, there were seventeen identical sheds scattered throughout history. One in Victorian London, one on the Moon, one inside the digestive tract of a whale.
The Department was livid.
“Do you realize how much paperwork seventeen extra sheds generate?!” the judge shrieked.
Closing the Loop
At last, after countless adventures, paradoxes, and far too many sandwiches, Raine, Leonie, and Attie returned to the very moment they had first left their flat.
The shed deposited them gently back into their kitchen, as though nothing had happened.
Raine blinked. “Wait. Did we… fix it?”
Leonie checked her phone. “It’s still Tuesday.”
Attie adjusted his lime-green tie. “Well, technically, yes. The timeline is stable. More or less. Except for the giraffe situation. And the fact Napoleon now has an irrational fear of sheds. But otherwise, yes. Splendid job!”
He picked up his briefcase, which wheezed affectionately. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must file seventeen thousand forms.”
And with that, he vanished.
Raine and Leonie sat in silence.
Finally, Raine said, “I still don’t trust Tuesdays.”
Leonie groaned. “I need a sandwich.”
From the corner of the room, the shed coughed.
The End (or possibly the Beginning, depending on your point of view).
About Alison Jones:
I’m 68 years old, love history and Sci-Fi.
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