There were no afternoons in Gloria’s memory. No evenings, either. There were nights in her memory, or at least memories of events that had occurred during hours that most people considered part of night, but those weren’t really nights, they were early mornings. Very early mornings. After midnight but before dawn.

This was because Gloria was a morning person. A true morning person. A person who, every day, existed only between the stroke of midnight and the stroke of noon. These were common expressions in Gloria’s life. “Stroke of midnight.” “Stroke of noon.” Phrased just like that. She’d picked them up from her parents.

It wasn’t that Gloria had never existed beyond noon. She just didn’t remember these few instances because they had all happened on her first three days of life.

Gloria had been born on the stroke of midnight. Maybe that had something to do with it. Her mother had told her the story of her first day and what followed many times. How Gloria had been so calm. Just dozing, eating, blinking, back to dozing. Hardly crying at all, every nurse commenting on her contentedness in her mother’s arms, her father’s arms, anyone’s arms. And then, on the stroke of noon, she’d gotten fussy. Nothing would settle her. With each minute that ticked past, she’d become more and more miserable, screaming, flailing her baby fists.

At 12:16 p.m., she had vanished, leaving her mother holding an empty swaddling blanket wrapped around an empty diaper. Panic set in. Her parents, her older siblings, her extended family, the nurses, the doctors: all panicking, all with no idea what had happened, no idea what to do, no idea where to look for the abruptly absent baby Gloria.

In real life, this part of the story had stretched over twelve excruciating hours. In Gloria’s mom’s telling, she condensed it to a few sentences. Other than general descriptions of the panic and the desperation and the agony and the confusion, Gloria’s mom didn’t supply much detail. It was her least favorite part of the story, and Gloria’s least favorite part, too, but it was also the part of the story that made their favorite part of the story so beautiful. Their favorite part – the best part – was when baby Gloria abruptly reappeared in her hospital bassinet on the stroke of midnight, exactly twenty-four hours after her birth, sleeping peacefully and wearing a clean diaper.

The doctors ran a bunch of tests, of course, but they found nothing. Gloria was a normal, healthy baby. At noon of her second day, she fussed for two minutes, paused for a moment, and vanished again. This time, no one panicked, but it wasn’t like they weren’t worried. Everyone hoped she’d reappear like she had the first time, but how could they be sure? All they could do was wait, so they waited. Gloria’s exhausted parents – neither had slept since her first disappearance – had sat staring at the hospital bassinet, hand in hand, counting down the minutes to midnight. On the stroke of midnight, there she was in the bassinet, exactly the same as before, fast asleep in a fresh diaper. And that was basically the end of the story as Gloria’s mom had told it to her. On her third day of life, she vanished seconds after the stroke of noon. And on her fourth day of life, and on every day of her forty-four years of life since, she had vanished on the stroke of noon and not a single second later.

No one had ever figured out why. Various scientists sometimes still ran various tests on her for a while, but to no avail, and after a few years, everyone lost interest, gave up, shrugged, moved on.

Eventually, Gloria was able to explain it herself in a very non-scientific, unsatisfying way that didn’t illuminate any aspect of the phenomena beyond her own feelings about it, which were that she hated afternoons, she hated evenings, and she hated every part of the night prior to midnight. Her parents would ask her how she knew. How could she be sure that she hated afternoon, evening, and pre-midnight night if she’d only ever experienced miniscule portions of three afternoons when she was a tiny baby and didn’t remember anything about them, and had never experienced a single evening nor period of night prior to midnight?

Well, Gloria just knew. She hated the ideas of them.

Or, no, it wasn’t even that she hated them or hated the ideas of them.

She hated the idea of being inside of them herself, of existing within them. If other people existed during afternoons, evenings, and pre-midnight nights, then that was fine, even good. But she couldn’t abide the idea of doing so herself, not even while asleep.

When she saw non-morning times of day depicted in movies and TV shows, or saw footage on the morning news that had been shot during a non-morning time of day, or if she saw a photograph taken sometime between the hours of noon and midnight, she could just tell that these hours of the day were not for her. She could still enjoy a movie scene that took place in the afternoon just like someone might enjoy a movie scene that takes place in a prison. She could appreciate a picture taken at a nighttime event in the same way she could appreciate an old picture of turn-of-the-century construction workers eating their lunches on a steel beam suspended hundreds of feet above the street. She didn’t begrudge other people their enjoyment of the post meridiem portion of the day. She just didn’t belong there. She was a morning person. A morning-only person. It was all she knew, and she had no desire to be otherwise.

 Once her parents had brought Gloria home from the hospital, along with zero meaningful answers to their many questions, and she again vanished on the stroke of noon, they wondered if she would go back to the hospital bassinet again when she reappeared at midnight. But no, she showed up in her crib, and this time she wore pajamas received from her mom’s great aunt at the baby shower. When her mom checked in the dresser where she had herself placed the folded pajamas mere hours before her contractions had begun, the pajamas were not there. The pajamas were on baby Gloria. So whatever was happening did not generate new items of clothing for Gloria. Whatever was happening simply relocated items of clothing onto Gloria’s body when she reappeared. Whether this made the whole situation more or less difficult to accept, no one could agree.

Over the following days, weeks, months, and years, Gloria and her family discovered more aspects of her gift or her curse or whatever it was. Like, once she advanced past the nap stage, she rarely slept at all. She reappeared at midnight in her pajamas, yes, but wide awake, although she was content to just lie there quietly until the rest of the house began to stir. Once she got older, she’d get out of bed and play by herself in her room, read, watch TV, draw.

When Gloria’s family went on road trips, Gloria didn’t reappear in her bed at home. At midnight, she’d show up in whichever hotel room bed or guest room bed or sleeping bag or spot on a couch she probably would have ended up in if she hadn’t disappeared, if she’d just existed up until that moment like everyone else. Or, if her family was still on the road, she’d reappear in her usual spot in the van wearing the same clothes as before, unless the weather had gotten chilly, in which case maybe she’d be wearing a sweatshirt or a jacket from her suitcase. It was like reality adjusted to return her to existence in whichever way made the most sense. Reality, it seemed, would just say, this is where she’d most likely be, this is what she’d most likely be wearing, and it would rearrange itself to make that assumption so.

Gloria’s family had done their best to make sure strangers didn’t see her vanish – her dad had set an alarm on his watch to go off at 11:50 a.m. every day so they’d have enough time to whisk her out of sight – but it had happened more than once. Her parents’ usual strategy for damage control was to pretend that Gloria was some kind of child-prodigy illusionist, gathering her vacated clothes from the floor while bemoaning her unwillingness to wait for an appropriate time, or at the very least warn people, before performing one of her astounding tricks.

Rather than attempt to wrangle special accommodations from the Multioak school system, Gloria’s mother had homeschooled her. After earning her high school diploma, Gloria stayed at home with her parents and found ways to make a little money through means other than a traditional job. When both of Gloria’s parents died of carbon monoxide poisoning while staying at their friends’ cabin – the friends also died – Gloria inherited the house and most of their savings, an outcome her siblings had known was coming and understood even if they weren’t all thrilled about it.

Gloria had been living her mornings mostly alone in the eight years since her parents passed away. She looked younger than her forty-four years, perhaps a result of existing for only half of each day of her life, although she did not look twenty-two, so she wasn’t exactly sure how the math worked out. 

Other than her siblings, whom she had trouble getting together with since they all had normal work schedules and she didn’t exist during the times of the day when they were most often free, Gloria felt close to only one person: her next-door neighbor, Hailey Cropwin, a twenty-nine-year-old mother raising two kids with no help from a rotten husband who currently lived with a friend in Dalcette but dropped by occasionally to make Hailey’s life difficult.

Hailey was a native of Multioak, heavyset, and a fan of t-shirts depicting horror movie antagonists. She seemed too smart to have gotten mixed up with someone like her husband. Hailey also possessed the quality most important to being Gloria’s friend, that being that she was a morning person. Not in the sense that Gloria was, of course, but in the sense that morning was Hailey’s favorite part of the day and she liked to get up early so she could experience as much of each morning as possible, sitting on her toy-strewn front porch, sipping coffee from a mug with the words “World’s Pretty-Goodest Mom” printed on it, and watching the neighborhood rouse itself. Since Gloria liked to eat her main – and often only – meal of the day on her porch around 6:00 a.m., when weather permitted, she and Hailey had moved quickly from friendly head-nods from their respective porches to waves to greetings to short conversations on Hailey’s porch to long conversations on Gloria’s porch to a genuine friendship constrained to neither porch.

Gloria had even explained her unique characteristics to Hailey – specifically the one – and answered Hailey’s many questions about it as best she could.

“I’m a morning person, too,” Hailey had said. “But I like sunsets. There are some great sunsets. Don’t you wish you could see sunsets?”

“Not really,” Gloria had answered. “I have sunrises. I’ve seen pictures of sunsets, and they don’t appeal to me. Not like sunrises do, anyway.”

“But what about nightlife?” asked Hailey. “Going out with friends, dancing, going to parties?”

“I’ve done some of those things in the morning,” said Gloria. “And I’ve met up with people after midnight a few times, which is the best part of the night. I think everyone knows that. On New Year’s Eve, I always reappear at my family gathering right in the middle of the action, right as everyone cheers. It’s fun.”

“What about time zones?” asked Hailey.

“I abide by them,” said Gloria. “I disappear at noon of whatever time zone I’m in. That’s the only time I exist longer than twelve hours in a day. When I cross into a new time zone going west. But then sometimes I exist for less than twelve hours in a day when I’m going east.”

“So if you traveled at the right speed going west, you’d just exist for hours and hours and hours in a row, maybe the equivalent of a week or months or years until you stopped and the time caught up with you?” asked Hailey.

“I guess so,” said Gloria.

“But do you wish you were normal?” asked Hailey.

“No,” said Gloria. “I don’t see it as a disability. This is the only way I know life to be. I sometimes wish the rest of the world was like me, or at least more accommodating, just for convenience’s sake, but I never wish that I could be different.”

Hailey had also opened up to Gloria about her struggles with Cole, her husband. Hailey was too disdainful of Cole to fear him, but she feared the things he might do. He was arrogant, stupid, selfish, and reckless. Fortunately for the rest of the family, he didn’t want much to do with the kids. Still, his infrequent unannounced visits were a source of stress and conflict, and Hailey had wished many times that he would just lose interest completely, move away, disappear. “It’d be nice if he turned out to have a condition sort of like yours, Gloria,” said Hailey. “But instead of being a morning person, he’d be more like a ‘first thirty-one years person’ and then he’d just cease to exist on his thirty-second birthday, and then not come back.”

“Sounds a lot like death,” said Gloria.

Hailey shook her head. “No. It’d be different. You don’t die at noon and then come back to life at midnight, do you?”

“No,” said Gloria. “I don’t.”

“It’d be just like what happens to you,” said Hailey. “Except without the coming back part. Or, I don’t care, he can come back when he’d be turning fifty-six or something. If he has to come back for it to not be a death, then that’d be fine.”

“I think you should get the law involved,” said Gloria. “Get a restraining order or something.”

“No, no,” said Hailey. “That’d just make things worse. You don’t know what Cole’s like, Gloria. You’ve never met him, and I don’t know how you would. He’s basically asleep every hour you exist.”

“But from your description of him,” said Gloria. “And your description of the situation and all the circumstances, I think it’d be better to involve the law before something really bad happens.”

“No offense, Gloria,” said Hailey, “but there’s a lot about life you don’t understand by missing out on afternoons and evenings and the hours of night before midnight.”

Gloria didn’t get how existing during those hours would provide perspective necessary to understand why her suggestion of involving the law didn’t make sense in Hailey’s situation, but she decided to let it go. She didn’t want to be pushy. She didn’t want to nag.

 

One mid-Spring night on the stroke of midnight, Gloria appeared in bed wearing her favorite pair of pajamas, and one second later, her phone began to vibrate on her bedside table. The call was from Hailey. It was not uncommon for Gloria to receive calls right after she reappeared, usually when something big had happened during her regular span of non-existence. When her parents and their friends had died of carbon monoxide inhalation, for example. Their bodies had been discovered in the early evening, so Gloria’s older sister Cassie had sat up waiting for midnight to arrive so she could immediately call Gloria to deliver the horrible news.

But it wasn’t always bad news. For example, Gloria had received a one-second-after-midnight call about the birth of one of her nephews. But the news was usually bad. Enough so that Gloria had grown to dread the one-second-after-midnight phone call. She now answered them all with trepidation, and that included this call from Hailey.

“Hello?” said Gloria, the aforementioned trepidation right there in her voice.

“Can I come over?” asked Hailey. “I need to talk to someone. Well, not just ‘someone.’ I need to talk to someone I trust, and you’re the only person I trust.” Whatever was in Hailey’s voice was worse than trepidation.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gloria. “What happened?”

“Cole took the kids,” said Hailey. “And I don’t know where they are or what his plans are or anything and I’m very, very scared.”

“Oh no,” said Gloria. She sat up in bed, flung her covers back, set her feet soles-down on her deceased parents’ former bedroom rug. “Come right over, Hailey. I’ll make coffee.”

Gloria had imagined that she would have the coffee made before Hailey actually knocked on her front door, but Hailey was already knocking before Gloria was half-way down the stairs to the ground floor. When Gloria answered the door, Hailey surged into the house and headed for the kitchen. Gloria closed the door, locked it, and followed her frantic neighbor to the cold, empty coffee pot.

“You didn’t make coffee?” asked Hailey.

“I hung up with you thirty seconds ago,” said Gloria. “Sit down, Hailey. You look…”

“I know, I know,” said Hailey. She pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat down. She still wore the same clothes she’d been wearing during her and Gloria’s chilly-but-uneventful early-morning conversation on Gloria’s porch, although she had applied makeup at some point, and had then smudged and streaked that makeup at some later point.

Gloria worked on the coffee. “So what happened?” she asked. “Unless you’d rather wait for the coffee.”

Hailey did not want to wait for the coffee. “Cole dropped in this evening just before dinner. I already had dinner basically made, but he dropped in and said he wanted to take us all out to eat, which of course got Perry and Sonya all excited. They love going out to eat, they don’t even care where it is. I’ve told you about that. So I wanted to say no because I was suspicious of Cole and I was annoyed he hadn’t called or texted ahead and I honestly don’t remember the last time he wanted to take any of us out to eat, definitely not since he moved out and barely before then, even. And, like I said, I had already made dinner, it was almost done, and I wasn’t thrilled about putting a bunch of just-cooked hot dogs in a bag in the fridge, but Perry and Sonya were so excited, and I don’t get to take them out that much, and as much as I wish Cole would just stay away, if he’s going to drop in, I’d rather it be to do something other than pick a fight, and I thought maybe that’s what he was really trying to do, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, so I said, sure, let’s go out to eat, so we all went out and piled into his car, and then as soon as we got out there, he said, oh, oops, I left my hat inside, and I said, yeah, you left it on the back of the easy chair in the living room, and he said, OK, I’ll run back inside and get it, and he still has a house key, which bothers me since he doesn’t live here anymore, but his name is still on the lease and we aren’t officially divorced or anything, so whatever, he got out of the car and went back inside the house, and he was gone for way longer than it should have taken to grab his hat and come back, and I was like, what could be taking him so long, but I figured he probably decided to use the bathroom or something, too, but then he came back out with no hat and said, well, I looked everywhere and I couldn’t find it, and I was like, come on, Cole, it was right on the back of the chair, and he was like, no, it wasn’t, I couldn’t find it anywhere, and I was like, fine, let me go look for it, I guarantee I find it in less than thirty seconds, so I got out of the car, I went inside, I saw the hat sitting right on top of the chair right where I said it was, and then I came back outside just in time to see his car backing out of my driveway with my kids inside and then him driving away, taking my kids away, and he hasn’t called, he hasn’t texted, he hasn’t answered any of my calls or texts, and I know Perry has his phone, but he hasn’t answered any calls or texts either and it’s been over six hours now, Gloria, and I’m very worried, I’m super worried, I don’t what to do, I’ve just been pacing around in my house freaking out for hours waiting for you to exist again so I could tell you everything that happened.”

“And the police haven’t found them?” asked Gloria. She didn’t know Perry and Sonya very well, but she knew how much they meant to their mother, and she felt sick for Hailey.

“Not that I know of,” said Hailey.

“But wouldn’t they tell you?” asked Gloria.

“I don’t know,” said Hailey. “I mean, the kids are with their dad, so unless he’s done something horrible, they probably wouldn’t think they’d need to tell me anything.”

“Wait, so you haven’t reported them missing?” asked Gloria. “You haven’t told the cops that Cole abducted your kids?”

“No,” said Hailey. “I haven’t. And I know you aren’t gonna agree with that decision, but-”

“I don’t agree with that decision,” said Gloria. “Hailey, you have to tell the police!”

“No,” said Hailey. “I’ve told you this so many times, Gloria. If the police get involved – if Cole knows the police are involved – things will get so much worse. I promise. He’ll snap. Right now, he’s just acting out, but involving the police will push the whole situation to another level. I just need…I just need to figure out how to handle this without the cops. But I can’t do that if he won’t talk to me. I don’t think he’ll intentionally do anything to the kids. I think this is just a way of getting to me. He’s just playing keep-away. But he’s also very stupid, very reckless, and very irresponsible, so something horrible could easily happen even if he doesn’t mean for it to happen.”

“All the more reason to call the cops,” said Gloria. “They’ll be able to find them fast.”

Hailey sighed and held her head in her hands, her elbows planted on the table. “If I call the cops, he’ll overreact,” she said. “He’ll see that as a very aggressive response from me, he’ll think it’s unwarranted, and he’ll feel like he needs to hit back even harder.”

“But he initiated the whole thing,” said Gloria.

“He’s not reasonable!” said Hailey. “That’s the whole issue, Gloria. He’s completely unreasonable! You can’t deal with him like he’s reasonable in any way!”

“Then I don’t know what to do,” said Gloria. “I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s OK,” said Hailey. “I didn’t tell you all this so you’d solve it. I just wanted to explain it all to someone who’d be sympathetic.”

“I’m very sympathetic,” said Gloria. She resisted the urge to point out that this calamity had occurred during a non-morning time of the day. Personally, she found it difficult to imagine a no-good father kidnapping his children during the morning, though she supposed it had probably happened before, maybe even a few times.

“I know you’re sympathetic,” said Hailey. “I knew you would be.” She heaved a shaky sigh with a near-sob in the middle of it.

“The coffee’s almost ready,” said Gloria.

She and Hailey waited in silence for almost-ready to become ready. When it did, Gloria poured the coffee into two mugs, set one in front of Hailey, and sat herself across from Hailey with the other mug of coffee in hand. The remainder of the conversation, which lasted until well past dawn, covered no new ground, but it seemed to do Hailey some good. By the time she said goodbye and trudged back across her and Gloria’s adjoining lawns, she was certainly less frantic, although that was probably due to exhaustion setting in. And despondence.

But forty-five minutes after Hailey had gone, she was back on Gloria’s porch, pounding on Gloria’s door. With her hair still wet from the shower, Gloria answered in a teal-colored bathrobe.

“He called!” said Hailey. “The kids are OK! He even let me talk to them. They both said they’re OK. They sounded fine! And he’s bringing them back!”

“That’s wonderful,” said Gloria.

Hailey nodded, breathing hard. Then, slowly, her smile dwindled. “But not until Thursday night.”

“But not what until Thursday night?” asked Gloria.

“He’s not bringing Perry and Sonya back until Thursday night.”

“But it’s Monday morning,” said Gloria. “That’s a long time. What is he going to do with them until then? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Hailey. The answer stood for both questions. “I was so happy that they’re OK and that he’s just going to bring them back that I didn’t really give much thought to how long I’d have to wait. Or how much time they’d be alone with him.”

Gloria gave Hailey a sad smile. She wanted very badly to encourage Hailey to call the cops, but she chose not to, for once. “Well, things are looking a lot brighter than they were earlier this morning,” she said.

“That’s true,” said Hailey. “That is true. I just wish you could be there.”

“Be where?” asked Gloria.

“At the house when he brings the kids,” said Hailey. “Just for moral support. I’d feel a lot better with you there. And I think he’d act better. I know he would. He always acts better when there’s other people around. I wish you could be there. But he said Thursday night. So you can’t be there. You won’t be existing then. I wish you could be there, though.”

“I do too,” said Gloria.

 

When Gloria next reappeared on the stroke of midnight in her bed wearing her second favorite pair of pajamas, and her phone immediately began to buzz, horror took her in its grip. What if the call was again from Hailey? What would that mean? She forced herself to pick up her phone and look at the screen. The call was from Hailey. Gloria’s chest constricted, her hand trembled so that she had difficulty using her thumb to answer. “What happened?” she asked. “What did he do? Are the kids OK?”

“Yes!” said Hailey. “Everything’s fine!”

“I almost had a stroke just now,” said Gloria, clasping one hand over her eyes.

“I have exciting news,” said Hailey. “Can I come over? You’ll want to hear this!”

“OK, yes, you can come over,” said Gloria. “How soon will you be here?”

“I’m already on your porch,” said Hailey. “I’ve been hanging out here since around ten. It’s a beautiful night.”

When Gloria opened the front door, Hailey embraced her. It was their first ever hug. Gloria was not a touchy-feely person. Touchy-feely-ness was a characteristic she associated with the hours of the day that fell beyond noon.

“I think there’s a chance,” said Hailey, her voice muffled by Gloria’s neck.

“A chance for what?” asked Gloria, stepping back, maintaining a hold on Hailey’s shoulders.

“For you to be there!”

“For me to be where?” asked Gloria.

“For you to be there to support me when Cole brings the kids back on Thursday night,” said Hailey, her voice drenched with relief.

“Um, come in,” said Gloria, not knowing what to say but noticing that she and Hailey still stood in the open doorway. Instead of the kitchen, Gloria took the shorter route to the living room, switching on lamps as she made her way to her preferred chair. Hailey did not seem perturbed at what this location meant for the availability of coffee. She sat on the end of the couch closest to Gloria. If they’d had drinks, they would have shared the same end table.

Hailey did not wait for Gloria to ask her to explain herself in more detail before she began to explain herself in more detail. “I’ve been poking around online,” said Hailey. She looked as if she had not slept recently, but also did not look tired. “I’ve been searching for people like you, Gloria. Because I wanted to see if it could be overcome, you know?”

Gloria didn’t care for the sound of this. “If what could be overcome?”

“Your thing,” said Hailey, not sensing Gloria’s discomfort. “Whatever it is that makes you disappear at noon. I wanted to see if you could stick around, sometimes. Not every day, necessarily, but just when you really want to, when it’s really important. Like, on Thursday when Cole brings the kids back. I know you’d like to be there to support me, to help make sure everything goes smoothly and nothing bad happens, but we both were like, well, that can’t happen ‘cause it’s gonna be in the evening, but I was thinking, what if it could happen and you could be there to support me? So I started doing some research, and, well, yeah, I think it is possible!”

“No,” said Gloria. “It isn’t. I’m sorry, Hailey, it just isn’t. I have no control over it.”

“That’s what these other people thought, too!” said Hailey. “But they found out they were wrong. They found out they can control it!”

“What other people?” asked Gloria. “Other morning people?”

“Sort of,” said Hailey. “They’re not exactly like you, which is the one thing that makes me feel a little twinge of doubt, but they’re close enough, I think, and that’s what makes me feel a big twinge – can a twinge be big? – that’s what makes me feel a big…big…that’s what makes me hopeful!”

Gloria did not want to entertain any fantasies of finding a means to exist within an afternoon, evening, or night prior to midnight, but she was curious about these other people, these “sort-of” morning people who were not exactly like her, but were “close enough” by Hailey’s reckoning. Gloria had done internet searches of her own, over the years, but had never turned up anything that sounded both familiar and truthful. She had found many people who preferred mornings, of course. She had found people who slept from sundown to sunrise. She had found people who lived in spaces where the windows had been replaced by monitors which displayed only realistic depictions of morning. She had found people who denied all distinctions between times of day, insisting that, in reality, All is Morning. But never anyone else who disappeared and then later reappeared.

“I found it on an old forum,” said Hailey. “Not even a forum about disappearing or mornings or anything, just a forum about vintage scooters. But these two guys had a side conversation. One of them mentioned his condition in passing, and another guy took notice and said he had something similar, and then they had a whole public back-and-forth about it, and other users of the forum were chiming in, calling these guys liars or assuming they were doing some sort of, I don’t know, creative writing exercise or something, but since I know you and I know these kinds of things really can happen, I think these two guys were being for real.” She lapsed into silence, eager for Gloria to respond.

But Gloria was hesitant to respond. How far should she let this go? If she allowed for the possibility of her existence beyond noon, then not doing so might become her fault, somehow, a failure of her will. People might start blaming her for missing afternoon events, holding her absence against her because she didn’t consider their event important enough to grace with her existence. Even if she never proved she could do it, they might assume she wasn’t really trying, wasn’t practicing enough, wasn’t committed to figuring it out. But she also had to know. Not about how to exist beyond noon, but about who these two guys in the vintage scooter forum were, how they might have traits similar to her defining trait. “So how were they like me?” Gloria finally asked.

“OK, so,” said Hailey. “One of them, he’s like you except for temperature instead of time of day. So instead of only existing during certain times of the day, he only exists when the outside temperature is between fifty-five and eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Huh,” said Gloria. It was fascinating to consider. “So depending where he lives, he could go months at a time without existing? And then exist for months straight? Or he could maybe even live some place where he exists for almost his whole life?”

“Yes,” said Hailey. “He talked about that.”

“What about the other guy?” asked Gloria.

“He is a morning person,” said Hailey. “But in a different way than you, because he exists between noon and midnight, but he isn’t conscious of existing during those times. Come morning, he remembers those times, he remembers what he said and did and why he said and did those things, but he’s never aware of himself during the hours between noon and midnight. In fact, most of his friends and family don’t even know this about him because even though he’s not aware of himself during those hours, from an outside perspective, he’s the same guy, he’s acting like himself, talking like himself, just totally normal. But he feels like he only personally experiences those hours of the day as memories.”

“That’s,” said Gloria. “That’s…” She didn’t know what to say. She wished she could meet these guys. She wished she could pick their brains, find out what their childhoods were like, discuss how their peculiarities had affected their lives. Did they have jobs? Did they have spouses, kids? Did they wish to be other than they were?

“And the cool part,” said Hailey, “is that the morning person guy helped the temperature guy figure out how to continue to exist outside of his usual range of temperatures. He’d figured out a technique for maintaining his awareness after noon, and he explained it to the temperature guy, and then he tried it and came back to the forum to say that it worked, he’d managed to exist outside of his usual range of temperatures using the other guy’s technique! And the explanation of the technique was all right there in the thread for anyone to read! It might work for you, Gloria! I mean, why wouldn’t it, right? If it worked for both of them? It should work for you!”

“I just…” said Gloria. She leaned forward to rest her hand on Hailey’s knee. “I just don’t think it will, Hailey. It won’t.”

Hailey frowned. “But don’t you at least want to hear it? Don’t you at least want to try? It’s not hard, I don’t think. It’s not complicated. It’s a little strange, but it’s not, like, creepy or physically strenuous or unethical or anything.”

“How would it be unethical?” asked Gloria.

“I don’t know,” said Hailey. “I’m just trying to think of reasons why you wouldn’t even want to try it. Like, maybe if you had to…to…commit a crime to make it happen or something, I don’t know.”

“I just don’t want to get your hopes up,” said Gloria. “I don’t want to get my hopes up,” she added, although this addition was untrue. Her hopes for the technique working for her would never be “up.”

“You don’t want to help me,” said Hailey. She sat back on the couch, eyes wide at the enormity of this revelation. “You don’t want to be there to support me when Cole brings the kids back on Thursday.”

“No, no,” said Gloria. “I do, Hailey, I do. If he was gonna drop them off at, say, 2 a.m., I’d be there. If he was gonna drop them off at 9 a.m., I’d be there. But I cannot be there in the evening.”

“But I’m telling you there might be a way,” said Hailey. “And you don’t even want to hear about it. And you think that if you try this technique and it works, then you’ll be obligated to be there to support me, and you don’t want that obligation, so you’re resisting me every step of the way, naysaying and…and…” She started to cry, then, alternately wiping her left eye with her right index finger and her right eye with her left index finger. It looked like a sorrowful, subtle dance.

“No, that’s not why,” said Gloria. “It’s just…I can’t explain it to you, Hailey. But…OK, listen, tell me the technique. I’ll give it a try. I really will.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Hailey. “I’ve been dealing with Cole by myself for years. I’ll be fine.”

“Look,” said Gloria. “It’s never been about me not wanting to be there for you. It’s just, I’ve never existed during the hours of the day after noon. Not since I was a baby, and it sounds like I hated those few minutes, from what my mom told me, so I’m…scared. I’m afraid of the afternoon, I’m afraid of the evening, I’m afraid of the hours of the night prior to midnight. But I’ll…try. I’ll see how it feels. I’ll see if I can bear it. Because even if I can exist past noon, I mean, I’ll have to make it all the way to 6 p.m....and I just don’t know how I’ll be feeling, if I can hold on for that long. But I’ll try. I really will.” Gloria knew that this was the only way to save her relationship with Hailey. She just had to hope that even a sincere attempt at maintaining her existence past noon would fail. Then she could, with a totally clear conscience, go back to a life where everyone, including herself, took it for granted that she would never exist between noon and midnight. Would not because she could not. Would not because it was impossible for her, even if it was not impossible for these vintage scooter enthusiasts. If what they had said was even true. Maybe they were liars. Maybe they were engaged in some sort of joint, public creative writing project, probably never guessing how much it would complicate the life of a real person. “So,” said Gloria. “How do I do it? What’s the technique?”

Hailey collected herself, giving her eyes a final simultaneous wipe with both index fingers. “I took a screenshot of his description,” she said. “So I wouldn’t explain it wrong.” She pulled out her phone and squinted at the screen.

Gloria silently wished for the forthcoming explanation to be nonsense, to be almost farcical, or even farcical.

“So you wait until you’re about to cease to exist,” said Hailey. “A minute before, maybe, although he said once you get better at it, you can start just a few seconds before. And then you picture yourself holding a cup full of a liquid you like.”

“A liquid I like?” asked Gloria. “Like, a liquid I like to drink? A beverage?”

“A liquid you like for any reason, I think,” said Hailey.

“But why else would I like a liquid other than to drink it?”

“I don’t know,” said Hailey. “You might like how it feels, how it looks, how it smells.”

“But why would I put a liquid that I like for its appearance in a cup?” asked Gloria.

“It can be a beverage,” said Hailey. “Just picture yourself holding a glass full of a beverage you like.”

“All right,” said Gloria. She still had issues with the phrasing, but she didn’t want to seem like she was looking for reasons not to try the technique. She didn’t want the crying and the accusations to start up again.

“So that’s basically it,” said Hailey. “You just concentrate on picturing yourself holding that cup of liquid you like, and then when – like in your case – when the time changes over to noon, your desire to preserve that cup of liquid you like will make you persist beyond your usual boundaries.”

“So I have to picture myself holding a cup of liquid I like until 6 p.m.?” asked Gloria. “I don’t even know if that’s possible. And even if it was, how would I be able to ‘be there for you’ in any meaningful way if I’m just concentrating on this imaginary cup of liquid?”

“He said it’s like being at a party,” said Hailey. “Like, when you’re walking around at a party holding a cup of liquid that you like, you don’t have to constantly think about not dropping it. You just hold it while you walk around, while you talk to other people, maybe even while you dance.”

“That really sounds like a beverage,” said Gloria. “Just a beverage. Who’s walking around a party holding a cup of a liquid that they like because of how it feels? Who would do that?”

Hailey sighed and slumped back on the couch again, dropping her phone on the cushion beside her. “Just forget it,” she said.

“No, no, no,” said Gloria. “I’m going to try it. Today at noon. Come over. You can watch me try it. That way whether it works or not, you’ll be the first to know.”

“You’ll really try?” asked Hailey. “You’ll try your hardest?”

“Yes,” said Gloria. And oh, how she hoped her hardest try would not be enough.

“What liquid are you going to envision in the cup?” asked Hailey.

“Coffee,” said Gloria.

“Nice,” said Hailey, her smile recovering much of its original brightness. “The most ‘morning’ of all liquids.”

“Right,” said Gloria. “The Morning Liquid.”

 

One minute before noon, Gloria and Hailey stood on the patio in Gloria’s back yard. The day was warm. In a few hours, it would be hot. Gloria had never experienced the fullness of afternoon heat. She did not relish the idea.

“Are you envisioning the cup full of coffee?” asked Hailey.

“Yes,” said Gloria. She pantomimed the holding of a cup with her right hand. She curled her hand as if wrapping her fingers around the outside of a cup with no handle, although since the imagined liquid in the imagined cup was coffee, maybe it would have made more sense to pantomime holding a mug by its handle. But Hailey had said “a cup,” not “a mug,” and Gloria did not want to appear to be deviating from the technique as described in any way. Convincing Hailey that she was doing her absolute best to exist beyond noon was Gloria’s top priority. That meant doing everything as instructed up front, and then doing a good job of pretending to be disappointed when it didn’t work and she reappeared in her bed in twelve hours and one minute. Or, twelve hours and however many seconds.

“I don’t think you have to pretend to hold it like that,” said Hailey. “Just think about it.”

“This helps me think about it,” said Gloria. “This helps me concentrate.”

“Oh, OK,” said Hailey. “Good idea, then.”

“I’m doing everything I can,” said Gloria.

“I know,” said Hailey. “I appreciate it so much. Even if it doesn’t work today, we’ll keep trying. Even if it doesn’t work on Thursday and you can’t be there when Cole brings the kids, we’ll keep trying after that. We’ll figure it out together. Just imagine if you could help me with some babysitting in the evening sometimes? That would be amazing.”

“Is it almost noon?” asked Gloria. A fly landed on the wrist of the hand pretending to hold the cup of coffee. Rather than shake her wrist, she slapped at the fly with her other hand, and was disappointed when she successfully smashed it.

Hailey looked at her phone. “Gloria. Gloria!”

“What?” asked Gloria, wiping her left hand on her jeans.

“It’s noon!” said Hailey. “It’s noon and you’re still here!” She showed the screen of her phone to Gloria. The brightness was too low for the intensity of the noonday sun, but Gloria could still make out the time. It was 12:00 p.m.

“It worked,” said Gloria. She didn’t know what else to say. She looked at her imaginary-cup-holding right hand as she would a betrayer, a back-stabber. “And then how do I cease to exist again?”

“Why?” asked Hailey. “You want to disappear already? It’s not even 12:01 yet.”

“I don’t want to…wear it out,” said Gloria.

“Wear what out?” asked Hailey.

“My tolerance,” said Gloria. “My tolerance for existing outside of the morning. I proved I can do it, but it does not feel good, and I don’t want to be exhausted before we even get to Thursday.”

“It really feels that bad?” asked Hailey. “Is it painful?”

“Yes, it feels that bad,” said Gloria. “No, it isn’t painful. How do I stop, Hailey?”

“They actually didn’t get into that in the forum discussion that I saw,” said Hailey. “I didn’t even think of it until you mentioned it just now.”

“So I’m stuck here now?” asked Gloria, her voice rising. “I won’t have any relief until midnight?”

“I don’t know,” said Hailey. She squinted down at her phone again, poking the screen. “I’ll…I’ll try to do some more research.”

Gloria’s heart rate began to pick up speed, her breathing began to lose depth, she began to produce more sweat than the after-noon warmth would have otherwise coaxed from her. “I need to get away, Hailey. Fix this!”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Hailey. “Maybe try imagining putting the cup of coffee down.”

Gloria did not step to the patio table to pretend to set the imaginary cup of coffee down. She bent at the waist right where she stood and pretended to set it down at her feet.

She disappeared.

 

When Gloria reappeared in her bed at midnight, a text from Hailey was already waiting for her.

Are you OK? Text me when you see this.

Gloria decided to let her wait and wonder. Let Hailey recognize that midnight had come and gone and that she had not yet heard from Gloria, let her worry that she had done real damage to Gloria with her pressure to try existing past noon, let her worry she’d broken Gloria somehow, stranded her in a non-existent state until who knows when, maybe forever.

After getting dressed, going downstairs, making coffee, and brooding in her silent kitchen for a while, Gloria decided to end Hailey’s suspense. I’m fine.

Hailey’s response was immediate. That’s a relief. I folded the clothes you left on the patio when you disappeared and set them inside the door since it was still unlocked. I’m going to sleep. I’ll see you a little before noon.

What for? asked Gloria. Today’s only Wednesday.

To make sure you can do it again.

Gloria was too angry to continue the conversation. She busied herself with minor household chores and mild amusements to distract herself from the resentment toward Hailey mounting within her. But it didn’t work, and she was fully aware of her mounting resentment toward Hailey right up until Hailey knocked on her door at ten minutes before noon.

“Are you in a bad mood?” asked Hailey. “Are you upset with me?”

“No,” said Gloria. “Let’s just do it on the front porch.” She didn’t feel like inviting Hailey inside.

“What if it doesn’t work and someone going by sees you disappear?” asked Hailey.

“It’ll work,” said Gloria.

“I like the confidence,” said Hailey.

Gloria didn’t return her smile. She curled her right hand as if holding a cup of coffee.

“It’s not gonna be noon for, uh, seven more minutes,” said Hailey.

“I’m just making sure I’m ready,” said Gloria.  But, secretly, although her hand was in the correct position, she was not imagining herself holding a cup of coffee. Or rather, she was trying not to. But trying to remain focused on anything other than holding a cup of coffee was turning out to be a surefire way to keep the holding of a cup of coffee affixed to the very front of her mind.

“One more minute,” said Hailey.

Gloria flailed for something to pry her thoughts away from the imaginary coffee cup in her hand. Something funny, something sad, something horrible. Anything, anything, anything.

“It’s noon!” said Hailey.

Gloria swallowed her feelings of violation. “Told you,” she said.

“Are you going to try staying longer today?” asked Hailey. “I think maybe you should. Just to make sure you can keep it-”

Gloria opened her right hand, imagining the cup of coffee in free fall, shattering on the porch, splattering her and Hailey’s ankles with hot, sweet coffee.

She disappeared.

 

Gloria woke up in her bed at midnight. It was Thursday. She looked up at the ceiling and tried to remember if she had ever dreaded anything as much as she dreaded the coming afternoon and evening. Surely this wouldn’t extend beyond evening, right? This would all be wrapped up by 6:30 or so? But what if Cole was late? What if he didn’t show up at all? How long would Hailey expect Gloria to wait around and support her while she made desperate and fruitless phone calls to everyone except the police?

With a tension headache developing not even five minutes into her morning, Gloria looked at her phone and saw that Hailey had, of course, texted her again. See you a little before noon!

You don’t need to be here at noon, Gloria texted back. I’ll come to your place at 5:45.

OK, texted Hailey. But just check in with me throughout the day so I know you’re still around.

This demand made Gloria cry out and repeatedly slam her phone against her mattress, damaging neither, but also doing little to relieve Gloria’s frustration. The remainder of her morning was like the previous morning, but worse. Shortly before noon, Gloria contemplated blowing Hailey off, just letting noon arrive with her hands dangling at her side or folded in her lap or making finger-guns at her own temples. But then all this would have been for nothing. Hailey would know, or strongly suspect, that Gloria had abandoned her on purpose. But given how the last few days had gone, how much did Gloria really care about preserving her relationship with Hailey? Did she really care what Hailey thought of her? She wasn’t so sure.

But as the last few seconds of 11:59 a.m. ticked away, Gloria was almost surprised to note that her hand had assumed the cup-holding shape. She didn’t even need to concentrate to know there was a liquid she liked in that cup. A specific liquid. It was coffee. Noon arrived, and Gloria was right there with it, in it. She hated it, but she was part of it.

The afternoon passed like a gut-shot man dragging himself up a spiral staircase. Gloria kept the curtains closed. She made herself a sandwich with her left hand, her right hand beginning to ache, beginning to cramp. Could she use her right hand as long as she didn’t specifically envision setting the cup down, dropping the cup, or otherwise losing her grip on the cup? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to risk it. Besides, the discomfort in her right hand was the least of her worries. Much worse was the deepening sense of oppressive un-belonging. For the brief amounts of time she’d experienced Tuesday and Wednesday’s afternoons, she’d been conscious of feeling bad, but hadn’t allowed herself time to examine that bad feeling, to ponder it, to attempt to understand it. But with almost six hours to kill until she was expected at Hailey’s, Gloria had more than enough time to contemplate her misery. The big revelation was this: the hours after noon and before midnight hated Gloria. The distaste was mutual. Now, which had hated which first? Gloria didn’t know. Did this part of the day prefer to pass without her because it felt her revulsion for it? Or had infant Gloria, on her first day of life outside the womb, immediately sensed that her existence was not wanted beyond noon?

Gloria did not initiate any update texts concerning her continued existence to Hailey, but Hailey sent single question marks every so often to which Gloria always responded with an unpunctuated “Yes.”

As she sat on the couch in the dimness of her living room with a fake cup of coffee in her right hand and a real cup of water in her left hand, Gloria felt the day’s indignation at her intrusion growing, intensifying. She felt glared at, pointed at accusingly. She felt poked, prodded, and picked at. She felt intentionally jostled. She felt herself to be the subject of hostile whispers, her name hissed with extra venom. She felt very unwelcome.

Gloria’s right hand locked up. She could feel it, but she couldn’t move it. And the stiffer her hand got, the more real the fake cup of coffee it grasped began to seem. Sometimes, when glancing down at her hand, Gloria was momentarily surprised by the lack of a real cup therein. Couldn’t she feel the heat on her palm? A real cup of coffee would have cooled to room temperature long ago, but this cup was full of a liquid that Gloria liked, and Gloria didn’t like room-temperature coffee, so the coffee in the imaginary cup stayed hot. Gloria could smell it. Well, she couldn’t smell it, but it was getting easier and easier to pretend she could.

Sometime later, while looking at but not watching TV, Gloria noted a change in the afternoon’s disposition. She sensed that it was becoming resigned to her presence. It seemed to have decided that if she couldn’t be willed out of existence until midnight, then it might as well, if not tolerate her, then at least ignore her. While this change diminished some aspects of her misery, it also caused Gloria to worry about what consequences it might entail. As long as she felt the afternoon resisting her occupation of its domain, then she was confident in the familiar parameters of her life remaining in place. But as that resistance faded, she feared what else might fade with it.

At 5:53 p.m., Gloria woke from her first sleep since toddlerhood to the sound of someone pounding on her front door. She looked at her phone and saw that she had a series of unread texts from Hailey. She didn’t bother to check them, instead groaning to her feet and stumbling to the front door, disgusted at the groggy sensation afflicting her head and limbs.

“It’s almost six!” said Hailey when Gloria opened the door.

“I see that,” said Gloria, smacking her lips, wincing at the look and sound and feel of everything.

“Aren’t you coming?” asked Hailey. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Gloria. “I guess I fell asleep.”

“I thought you don’t sleep,” said Hailey.

“I don’t exist past noon either,” said Gloria. “Come on, let’s go to your place and get this over with.”

Hailey looked at Gloria’s right hand. It was whiter than the rest of her skin in some areas and redder than the rest of her skin in others. Its tendons stood out, taught and protruding. The hand shuddered, but not continuously. “Have you been doing that all day? The guys on the forum said it isn’t necessary to-”

“Do you want my help or not?” asked Gloria. “Let’s go.”

 

Inside Hailey’s house, the mismatched furniture all looked as if it had either been purchased from a thrift store, or was on the verge of being donated to a thrift store. Perry and Sonya’s toys were scattered in the entryway and the living room. Gloria wondered why Hailey hadn’t used some of her unexpected free time and nervous energy to clean up a little. Perhaps intuiting Gloria’s thoughts from her expression, Hailey said, “I picked up the kids’ toys the other day, but the house looked so sad without the mess that I put everything back where it was, or at least as well as I could remember. It’s hard to artificially re-create a mess. Like how the messes in movies look fake. All the stuff looks placed, not just, you know, tossed or left or whatever.”

“I’ve never noticed that,” said Gloria.

A family portrait on the wall showed Hailey’s family in less turbulent times, although Gloria made that assessment under the assumption that the current time was the most turbulent time ever in the family, so any previous time would automatically be less turbulent in comparison. The kids were little, just a toddler and a baby. Cole was there, his wrinkled dress shirt tucked into black jeans riding low on his hips with no belt, which made his torso appear comically long. His smile betrayed his stupidity, and he held baby Sonya with unpracticed awkwardness. Hailey’s pictured smile was identical to the one she now wore as she joined Gloria in looking at the portrait. All she said was, “Perry looks cute, right?”

“Yes, he does,” said Gloria.

At 6:04, Cole pulled into the driveway. From Gloria and Hailey’s vantage point at the front window, it was clear that Perry and Sonya were not in the car. Cole climbed out wearing denim shorts, a gray tank top, a baseball cap worn backward, and a backpack hanging heavily from his freckled shoulders.

Hailey flung the door open before Cole could knock or, more likely, barge in. “Where are the kids, Cole? You said you were bringing the kids!”

“They’re close by,” said Cole. “I’ll go get them once I make sure everything’s cool.”

“What do you mean?” asked Hailey.

“Once I make sure you don’t have any cops hiding in the house to grab me,” said Cole.

“There’s no cops,” said Hailey. “Just go get the kids, Cole, please.”

“I’ve gotta check first,” said Cole. “Gotta give the house a quick check.” He noticed Gloria standing a few feet behind his wife. “Who’s that? Is that a cop?” He took a nervous step back as if preparing to bolt for his car.

“No, no!” said Hailey. “She’s not a cop, she’s just a neighbor. She’s my friend. She’s not a cop. She’s a…she’s just Gloria.”

“Both of you come out here on the porch,” said Cole. “Wait out here while I check the house.”

Hailey sighed. “And once you check the house and see there’s no cops, you’ll go get Perry and Sonya? They’re OK?”

“They’re great,” said Cole. “And yeah, if you let me check the house, and if there’s no cops hiding inside – and that includes FBI, CIA, uh, and so on – then yeah, I’ll go get Perry and Sonya, it won’t take more than a couple minutes. They’re great, they’re having fun. But if someone in there tries to arrest me or kill me or whatever, then, yeah, I won’t go get ‘em and I won’t tell you where they are and you’ll pretty much never see them again.”

This seemed like an empty threat to Gloria, but she didn’t say anything.

“OK, fine, you can check the house,” said Hailey. “I’ve got nothing to hide. Let’s just get this over with.”

As Gloria followed Hailey out onto the porch, Cole pointed at her and said, “Why is she doing that with her hand?”

“I have to,” said Gloria. “It’s part of a condition I have.”

Cole furrowed his brow as if trying to determine in what way, exactly, the two women were attempting to trick him.

“It’s nothing, Cole,” said Hailey. “She’s just here to support me.”

“So she’s against me,” said Cole.

“I’m your wife’s friend,” said Gloria. “She’s been sad while the kids have been gone. I’ve been trying to help her feel better. I don’t want this to take any longer than it has to, trust me.”

Cole shook his head as if Gloria had just delivered a monologue in a foreign language. “That’s crazy,” he said, but it was clear from his tone that the declaration held no meaning at all. He stepped inside the house, closed the front door, and locked it.

“Why did he lock the door?” asked Gloria.

“He’s paranoid,” said Hailey. “He’s not reasonable. I told you it would be a bad idea to call the cops. Can you imagine how badly this would be going if there were cops here right now?”

“You think this is going well?” asked Gloria.

“No, but imagine how much worse,” said Hailey.

“This wouldn’t be happening at all,” said Gloria. “The cops would have caught him days ago and you’d be having a nice dinner with your kids and I’d be non-existent until midnight.”

Hailey said nothing, but she signaled her disagreement by stepping past Gloria to lean on the porch railing and gaze at the street where an average amount of traffic was happening.

Minutes passed.

“What’s taking so long?” Gloria asked.

“I don’t know,” said Hailey. “I guess he’s being thorough.”

“How many places could a police officer hide in your house?” asked Gloria.

“Not many,” said Hailey.

The front door opened. “Come back inside,” said Cole. He no longer wore the backpack. Perspiration coated his face and neck.

“What have you been doing?” asked Hailey as she stepped back into her house. She sounded annoyed, but Gloria also discerned a hint of affection. This, she realized, was the real reason Hailey never called the cops on Cole.

“You too,” said Cole, gesturing at Gloria with impatience.

She sighed. She stepped into the house.

Cole slammed the door behind her. “OK,” he said. “Hailey, there on the coffee table. You see that paper? If you sign that, then I won’t blow up the house with all of us in it. But if you won’t sign it, then I will blow up the house with all of us in it.” He waited for someone else to say something. When no one did, he said, “So are you gonna sign it?”

Hailey stood looking at her rotten husband with her mouth hanging open, waiting for a new piece of information to arrive from anywhere that would make sense of everything he’d just said.

“What do you mean you’re going to blow the house up?” asked Gloria.

“There’s a bomb in my backpack,” said Cole. “I hid it somewhere in the house.” He pulled a garage door opener, painted explosion red, from one of the roomy front pockets of his shorts. “If I press one of the buttons on this thing, then the bomb goes off, the house blows up, and we all die.”

“I was wondering where the garage door opener went,” said Hailey. “I should have known! And you painted it?”

Gloria turned to Hailey. “He doesn’t know how to build a bomb, does he? Or how to turn a garage door opener into a remote detonator? Surely not.”

“I had help!” screamed Cole, tears springing into his eyes and spilling down his face. “I paid eighty dollars for professional help!”

Hailey sounded almost maternal as she said, “What’s the paper?”

“What paper?” asked Cole.

“The paper you want me to sign,” said Hailey. “To keep you from blowing up the house.”

“It’s over there,” said Cole. “You can read it. But it basically just says I get full custody of the kids forever and you never get to see them again unless I give you written permission. Or verbal permission. Any kind of permission, really, but it’s up to me when I give you permission.”

Hailey’s face went as pale as one of her beloved cinematic horror villains, Gloria couldn’t remember his name. Bloodless Brad? Gloria only knew of him from Hailey’s t-shirts. “Bloodless Brad” seemed too idiotic to be correct, but they all had idiotic names, and the “bloodless” part would explain why he was so pale. But Gloria didn’t want to devote any more thought to remembering the name of the villain. Instead, she needed to focus on opening her right hand so she could extricate the imaginary cup of hot coffee from her own clutches and blink out of existence before this situation reached any of the bad conclusions that now seemed most probable.

But she couldn’t do it. Her hand was stuck. Trying to force it using the power of her will gained her nothing. The hand would not loosen its grip one bit. It was like the hand of a statue, hewn from ugly marble, but in some ways less lifelike. It didn’t ache, it didn’t burn, it didn’t hurt at all. The only sensation Gloria now received from it was that of a cup full of hot coffee contained within the curl of its fingers.

Hailey was now shouting. “I’ll never sign that paper, Cole! Never!” She stormed to the coffee table and picked up the paper in question. “This isn’t even a legal document! You hand-wrote this! It’s almost illegible!”

“If you sign it, it’s legal,” said Cole. “It’s legal in the eyes of God.”

“I will never let you take my kids away from me!” Hailey was verging on hysteria.

“Well, you already did let me take the kids away from you,” said Cole. “By falling for my ‘lost hat’ trick. This just makes it official.”

“This was all a lie!” cried Hailey. “Perry and Sonya probably aren’t even close by right now!”

“This is phase two of the ‘lost hat’ trick,” said Cole. “This is the ‘bomb threat’ part of the ‘lost hat’ trick.”

“I need to use the bathroom,” said Gloria.

Cole and Hailey paused their scene to stare at her as if she had just blinked into existence.

“Can I use the bathroom?” asked Gloria. “Without you blowing up the house?”

“Yeah,” said Cole. “But you can’t use your phone. Actually, oh, I should have taken both of your phones away already. Give me your phones or I’ll blow up the house with all of us in it.”

As Cole collected the phones, Hailey made questioning eye contact with Gloria. The question seemed to be: Is this trip to the bathroom part of some plan which will save us? And maybe a follow-up question: Has losing your phone ruined that plan? Gloria responded with the most dissembling look she could manage, communicating nothing of worth.

In the bathroom, Gloria locked the door and set to work using her left hand to pry her right hand open. Why hadn’t she imagined holding the cup of coffee in her left hand? She was right-handed. Pretending to hold a cup of coffee in her left hand instead of her right would have been much more convenient at every point of the day up to and including this one wherein she was now struggling to un-curl the fingers of her stronger hand with the fingers of her weaker hand. It didn’t work. She kicked her right shoe off, crouched to rest the back of her right hand on the cool, not-very-clean tile floor, and forced her heel into her cupped hand where it was able to coexist with the cup of coffee because the cup of coffee was not real in a physical sense. Then, she pressed down with her ankle-socked foot while pulling her arm upward and, after a tense few moments of stalemate, her fingers began to unbend. She was almost gone. Out of this house, out of this situation, out of this evening, out of this existence. At any moment now, she would find herself in her bed, whatever else was going to happen here having already happened without her.

She stopped pulling, her fingers nearly straight, the imagined cup surely on the verge of its final liberating tumble. Would she reappear in her bed? Or would it be like the family road trips where she popped back into the car, reality having determined that the most likely place for her to be at midnight would be here, still enduring this nonsensical nightmare that had nothing to do with her? No. No, of course not. None of this counted. Nothing that had happened since noon had been logged. If the afternoon had ceased paying attention to her and forgotten about her, then the evening had overlooked her entirely, rendering her, for all practical purposes, a non-entity. Once she ceased to exist, all would be back in its proper place, and she would reappear in her bed at midnight just as if Thursday’s noon had arrived to find her hands doing anything except holding an imaginary cup of coffee.

Gloria gave her hand one last yank against the resistance of her heel, felt her fingers unlock, and stood up straight, holding her splay-fingered hand aloft in triumph. But she did not disappear. The imaginary cup was stuck to her hand. Gloria whimpered, shaking her hand vigorously, scraping her palm against the edge of the counter. The cup would not come loose. It wasn’t just stuck, Gloria then realized. It was fused to her hand. She slapped her hand against the countertop in an attempt to break the cup, to crack it open, but it was too durable, too tough. She tried to simply upend it, then, to spill the imaginary coffee without separating herself from the cup, but the open end of the cup had become sealed, somehow. It had grown closed, becoming less of a cup and more of an indestructible capsule containing hot coffee in its inaccessible center.

“No,” said Gloria. Her voice was whispered anguish. “No, no.” The anguish quantity in her whisper had doubled, maybe tripled. “No.” Exponential escalation of anguish with minimal increase in volume, a feat perhaps thought impossible.

And now the imagined cup – Gloria still thought of it as a cup – began to rapidly shrink. Gloria was initially relieved. The cup would get smaller and smaller until it was gone. When it disappeared, she would disappear. She heaved a shuddering sigh that she clipped right at the end when it occurred to her that there was no point at which something would become so small that it no longer existed. Right? Couldn’t it theoretically keep shrinking forever while still existing? Didn’t infinity stretch in both directions? She stared in horror at the palm of her hand as the imaginary cup of hot coffee slipped through one of the pores in her skin. It was inside of her, now, and shrinking still. It would soon pass beyond the ability of any known instrument to perceive it, but it would still be there. She would still be holding it, in some sense, and she would never be rid of it.

When she emerged from the bathroom, Hailey said, “You’re still here,” smiled, and burst into tears, her face in her hands, shuffling toward Gloria in anticipation of some kind of an embrace, even a small one.

Gloria did not touch Hailey. “Where else would I be?”

Hailey looked up, searching Gloria’s face. “I thought you were going to, you know, leave me.” She gestured at Gloria’s hand. “It’s open now. Were you trying to…?”

“No,” said Gloria. “You said yourself that those guys on the forum said you don’t have to physically, you know, do it the whole time. And I thought, considering the situation, it might be nice to have both hands available.”

Cole, still standing next to the coffee table containing his now rumpled contract for Hailey, waggled the garage door opener at the women. “Excuse me,” he said. “But is Hailey signing the contract saying I get to say when she gets to see the kids, which might be never? Or are we all blowing up?”

Very little about Gloria’s life now felt nice. From where she was now standing, it all seemed pretty bleak. But her one consolation, in this moment, at least, and maybe in future moments like this, moments in the long afternoons and evenings and hours of the night before midnight that had now unfurled before her unwilling feet, was that as an overlooked interloper, a being so far beneath notice that she might as well not exist, it didn’t really matter what she did.

So Gloria walked toward Cole, scooped one of the kids’ toys off the floor – a hard, plastic, many-colored cube of indeterminate function which she had hoped would be heavier – and flung it at his head. Cole was too surprised to dodge, but Gloria’s throw was errant. She was no athlete. The toy struck him in the shoulder, a glancing blow at best.

Cole was shocked, affronted. He held the garage door opener next to his face and frowned a threat, his index finger resting on, presumably, the correct button to end them all, not to mention what could be a nice house with a little work.

But Gloria was not dissuaded. As she rounded the couch, she picked up a long stick with a clicky plastic alligator head on one end, swinging it at Cole’s face. He fended the blows off with his forearms, staggering backward.

“Gloria!” shouted Hailey. “Stop! He’ll do it! He’s not reasonable! You can’t reason with him!”

“Does it look like I’m reasoning with him?” asked Gloria. Still brandishing the alligator stick – what else could it be called? – she picked up Cole’s handwritten, unsigned contract with her free hand and, after sparing a brief thought to the possible origin of several of the stains thereon, she held one corner in her mouth and tore it, if not in half, then at least in two.

And Gloria had to admit that she felt disappointed when Cole cursed once, cursed again, paused as the pain of having presided over a thoroughly blown life flooded his face, pressed the button on the garage door opener, and all that happened was, after a moment, the sound of a garage door grinding open came sulking through the house’s thin walls.

Hailey let out a long breath, and then she was all over Cole, fists flying. He did not fight back. This soon gave way to mutual weeping, then hugging. Cole told Hailey where he was hiding Perry and Sonya, which turned out to be the house where he was staying, so they weren’t that close, but they also weren’t really that hidden. Cole got his backpack out from under the kitchen sink. Gloria never saw what was inside of it. Hailey and Cole departed in a little two-car caravan to retrieve the kids. Gloria went home and, eventually, went to bed. When she awoke the next day, a huge chunk of her beloved morning was already gone.

 

Days later, as Gloria sweated through another dull, humid sunset on her back patio with Hailey, the subject of Cole’s bomb threat came up again for the first time since it had occurred.

“I can’t believe you still didn’t call the cops after all that,” said Gloria.

“Oh, Gloria,” said Hailey. “It was just a hoax. He was faking the whole time. We were never in danger. Of course, you knew that. When you started flinging toys at him, I thought you were gonna get us all killed, but as I look back on it, I mean, you were right. Cole was never going to hurt anyone. He’s unreasonable, but he’s not that unreasonable.”

Gloria did not mention the bewilderment she had witnessed on Cole’s face upon realizing that he had been swindled, that no annihilation was forthcoming no matter how many times he jabbed the button on that sticky red garage door opener. She wondered if he’d gotten his eighty dollars back.

“Even so,” said Gloria. “Something like that never would have happened in the morning.” She stood, almost downing the remainder of her lukewarm iced tea – all ice long since melted – before noticing a drowned gnat floating in the cup.

“Where are you going?” asked Hailey. “The kids are with Cole. I’ve got all night. He drew up a new contract that says he gets the kids one night a week and I don’t get to see them that night at all without his permission, but I’m sure he’ll be tired of finding ways to entertain them soon, so I have to take advantage of these free evenings while I can.”

“My brother’s giving a speech to his church about how what he did maybe wasn’t ethical, but was not technically illegal,” said Gloria. “He wants me to be there to support him.”

“Wow, yuck,” said Hailey. “And you’re going to?”

Gloria drank the tea after all, gnat and everything. “I exist, don’t I?”