March 5th

by Edd

Can you help me? I mean, I suppose you would if you could, you look like the sort who’d help if they could. But, I don’t know, is there anything you can do?

Who’s talking? Me, March 5th. Ridiculous, right? You’ve heard of people being trapped as werewolves, as giant cockroaches, even as Certified Public Accountants, but that’s all fiction.

That was a joke there, that last about CPAs. For all I know you are one. But listen, this isn’t a joke, it isn’t a dream, it’s not some writer’s crazy plot. It’s me, stuck here being a day. One minute I’m grading papers in my tiny little office, then the clock at the church starts ringing twelve, and the next thing I know I’m being stretched and squashed in directions I didn’t even know I had. I’ve lost my past, I don’t know what’s going to happen after 11:59 tonight, but I have a bad feeling it’s going to mean some kind of end for me.

It makes me wonder. Are there three hundred sixty four others like me? And an extra one for leap day? That doesn’t sound right. Or are there millions of us, stretching back in time? One missing person a day, that doesn’t sound like too many. And what about before people evolved? Did some primate become a day before days were measured? Or some three-toed sloth? Or a dinosaur before that, and an ammonite even before that? A few million years from now will it be a super-evolved dragonfly?

Tomorrow, will it be you? See, if there’s something you can do to help, it might help you out as well. So stop reading for once and see what you can do to help me out of here.