The Day Without a Story

by Rudi Dornemann

It was the day without a story. At least, if we were reading the dials and blinking lights correctly.

The fictiometer sat in the middle of Professor Woodfern’s desk, whirring and clanking.

“According to this,” he said, nose grazing the pages of the operation’s manual as he read, “we’re in a state of storylessness. It has no beginning and no end.” He looked up, and got that voice he had when he dictated articles on critical theory, “An atemporal state of irremediable middleness. A paramodern and yet curiously prelapsarian condition attended by the utter suspension of causality.”

“Meaning?” I said. The machine was beginning to overheat, so I hoisted the nearest window open a couple inches.

“Events happen, and other events follow, but nothing causes anything else. It’s all isolated, as if the laws of profluence had been suspended.” There was a quiver in his voice as he looked out the window, where the shadow of the clock tower didn’t fall on the roses.

An airplane droned overhead.

My scalp tingled.

In the next office, someone sang a tune without words, only to be interrupted by their own laughter.

I picked up the operation’s manual, and clonked the side of the fictiometer with it the way you’d bang the side of a malfunctioning TV.

The readings didn’t change.

“So it’s true,” I said.

And then, other things happened.