The End of Février
By Dorothee LangShe got the day wrong. It was one of her usual mistakes, getting the day wrong. A Wednes for a Tues. Or a seventeen for a sixteen. Sometimes it took her until late afternoon that she realized it. Which probably meant that it didn’t make much of a difference anyway. Expect for the Mons, which you better should not expect to be Suns. Not that she disliked Mons. They formed the beginning of the week. And she liked beginnings. Liked them definitely more than endings.
But then she also liked names that made sense. And wasn’t it strange that six out of their seven names didn’t make much of it. Like Satur. As if they forget to add an n there, trying to keep the planets out. It was only the last one, the seventh one that came with a clear picture in mind. Sun. Shamelessly leading to wrong expectations every second week, as the day didn’t even try to adjust the actual weather conditions to its meaning. Sun it was, no matter the rain or snow outside, or the moon that had already entered the sky stage.
In France, the moon not only followed the sun, but also followed the Sun. La lune. Lun-di. Maybe that is where Mondays come from, she thought. Moon-days. Moody and moony a day.
But not today. Today was the one called Wednes, which came close to when, not so much in writing, but at least in pronunciation. And in topic. When, that had been the question that had made people name the days, invent the dates, the diaries, the clocks, the calendars. Those things she mostly got almost right.
Today she got the name right. Wednes. And the number. Twenty-eight. But then she had messed it all up with picking the wrong month. September instead of February. She still had no clue where that had come from. January, maybe. But September? Maybe it had been the dawn, the way it met her in the kitchen, just when the water for the tea was ready.
She counted back and forth from solstice. It didn’t work. With solstice being at the end of the December, the month that had the same day and night times like February would be November, not September. Whatever, she thought, and moved to the next page, still not sure if she would leave September on top of this one, or replace it.
In the end, she corrected it. After all it was neither the seventh day today, nor luna day, but just a plain Wednesday. Which maybe was the real reason for picking September - everything is possible on a Wednesday. That at least was what her friend Kaye used to say. She never understood why this wouldn’t be true for all the other days of the weeks, too. But she refrained from discussing this subject, as the theory at least added some thrill to the plainness of this day in the middle of the week.
Not today, though. Today was over, and from all possible everythings not one had happened. And what is the use of a day without any events? And even more so, the use of a diary entry, she thought, finishing the last sentence of the day with a question mark. Which wasn’t exactly appropriate for an ending, but then, you could always see it as a cliffhanger, she decided. For more unanswered questions, visit again tomorrow.
It was only later, when she turned out the light, that she realized that this day hadn’t been about something happening, but about something not happening: She hadn’t thought of Février all day.
And how good I hadn’t noticed this before, she thought, cause it inevitably had made me think of all those things I don’t want to think of, I don’t want to think of, I don’t want to think of.
Mars, Avril, Mai, she whispered to keep her mind from moving. Juin, Juillet, Août, she kept on humming, until she made it through Wednes, until it was Thurs.
Dorothee Lang works as an undercover agent for overdue intermediate transmissions, is a capricorn but loves cats, has web dreams on a weekly basis and believes in noncoincidence and cotangents. Her work has appeared in The Blue Moon Review, Artzar, Eyeshot, Word Riot, Locus Novus and Cafe Irreal, among others. She edits the travel magazine subside.zine, lives in Germany, and for some yet undiscovered reasons only gets published abroad. Most of her work can be reached through her homepage and her web log.