For three months the town agreed to skip Tuesday. The bakery opened on Monday and again on Wednesday and the bread tasted the same. Children grew older on the days that remained. A clerk lost his pension over a missing receipt. No one could decide whose fault that was. By autumn a single old woman, who had not been informed, kept waking up on a day no one else acknowledged. She fed her cat. She washed the windows. She drank her tea in the company of nothing she could prove.