“Tuesday is Bingo”
The Activities Director’s name is Karen and she has determined that Tuesday is Bingo and Wednesday is Bingo and Thursday is also Bingo but with slightly different rules that change each week based on what Karen decides that morning while looking at the residents’ faces.
On Monday she prints the cards. On Tuesday she distributes them. On Wednesday a man named Gerald says, “But we already did this,” and Karen says, “That was a different Bingo, Gerald, that was American Bingo,” and Gerald nods because he has learned that Karen has access to forms of Bingo that he did not know existed, and he is, at this point in his life, open to new geometries.
By Friday everyone has forgotten what Tuesday was. Karen has already ordered new cards for next week. The cards arrive in a box. Karen opens the box. She looks at the cards. She looks at the residents. She thinks about what they might want to win, and what a prize might be, and whether prizes make people happier or sadder, and then she puts the cards back in the box because it is already 4:47 PM and she has a dentist appointment, and next week she will figure out what Tuesday is.
The residents are fine with this. They have learned that time is not a line but a Bingo card, and that Karen is the dauber, and that they are the little circles, and that someone will call their number eventually, or they will just sit here and wait, which is also a kind of winning.
“The Fountain Hears Everything”
The water fountain in the east hallway has a dent in it shaped like a fist, and it was made by a man named Howard on a Tuesday in 2019 when Howard learned that his wife had forgotten his name again, and Howard, who had been married for sixty-four years, and who had been prepared for her forgetting, was not prepared for the specific geometry of that forgetting, which was not blank but replaced — his wife had looked at him and seen a man who looked like her brother, and had called him by her brother’s name, and had asked him where her husband was.
Howard punched the water fountain.
The water fountain did not break. It dented. It continued to dispense water. It has been dispensing for four years now through that dent, and the water that comes out sometimes hits the dent first and sprays sideways, and the residents have learned to account for this. They approach it the way you approach a person who has been hurt but is still trying to do their job.
The old maintenance man had stopped noticing the dent years ago, the way people stop seeing a crack in their own wall. Then he started noticing all the ways things were breaking and would keep breaking, and one day he simply did not come back. The new maintenance man arrived on a Tuesday, which was Bingo, and he sees the dent before he even approaches. He photographs it and writes something on his clipboard. “We have to replace this,” he tells Karen. “The dent’s cosmetic, but the water pressure’s compromised. Look — it sprays.”
Karen watches the water hit the dent and scatter sideways. She knows what he is seeing: a problem. She knows what he does not know: that Howard made that dent, that it has been here for four years, that the residents have learned to approach it the way you approach a person who is damaged but still trying to do their job.
“Leave it,” Karen says.
After the maintenance man leaves, Karen fills a cup from the fountain. She positions it under the dent, lets the spray hit it sideways. The water is still cold. Still clear.
She drinks. The water tastes like it always has. Like the stubborn, ordinary refusal to disappear.
“They Voted on What Day It Is”
There is a man named Samuel who keeps meticulous notes on things that have not happened. He writes: Thursday — did not see the blue car. Friday — the mailman did not arrive wearing a hat. Saturday — no one mentioned the war.
One day a woman named Dorothy asks him why he is writing about things that did not happen, and Samuel says, “Because someone should remember,” and Dorothy nods, and the next day she joins him, and now there are seven residents who sit in the lobby every morning and write down what did not occur.
They have become, accidentally, the Parliament of Absences.
Samuel had started by writing down what did not happen; now they decide together what is true.
They vote. They vote on whether Tuesday should be Wednesday. They vote on whether the soup was chicken or the idea of chicken. They vote on whether it is morning (3 yeses, 2 nos, 2 abstentions). They vote on whether Margaret is still Margaret or has become someone else in the night (unanimous: she is still Margaret, but different).
The staff does not know about the Parliament.. The Parliament is secret except that everyone can see it happening, and that is, the Parliament has voted, the definition of secret in a place where everyone is forgetting anyway.
Yesterday they voted on whether to let one of them go home. The vote was 4-3. Samuel asked what home meant. They voted again. This time it was 7-0. Home was the thing they voted on, and the voting made it real.
“The Woman Who Collects Thursdays”
Margaret collects Thursdays. She has been collecting them for three years and no one has asked her to stop. She keeps them in a manila envelope under her mattress, and when she remembers that the envelope is there, she pulls it out and counts them.
Today she counted seventeen Thursdays.
She does not remember what a Thursday is, but she knows it is important, and she knows that she has been saving them, and she knows that the other residents respect this, the way they respect all of the odd things that people do when they are forgetting.
The new nurse — just hired, before she understood what the job would ask of her — asked her what she was doing, and Margaret said, “Collecting Thursdays,” and the nurse said, “Why?” and Margaret had to think about this. The answer had been in the envelope all along, but it was written in a language she used to speak.
She is saving them for something. She is sure of this. She is sure the way you are sure of things you cannot quite remember, which is very sure indeed.
On a Wednesday morning in late October, Margaret did not wake up. The new nurse found her still in bed, the envelope on her nightstand.
The nurse called for help. The nurse called Karen. The nurse, and two others, stood in the room looking at the envelope, looking at the papers inside, looking at Margaret’s careful handwriting spelling out THURSDAY seventeen times.
“What was she doing?” one of them asked.
They did not know. They placed the envelope back under the mattress. They did not know what to do with Thursdays you cannot throw away and cannot understand.
Dana Wall is the winner of Columbia Journal’s 2025 Online Fiction Contest for “Dissolution Studies and Fourth Genres 2026 Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest winner for “The Bullfighter”. Her work appears or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Brevity, River Teeth, Hobart, Okay Donkey, Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, Strange Horizons, Pithead Chapel, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. She has received Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominations. Dana earned her MFA from Goddard College and lives in Manhattan Beach, California.
