Nestled TARITOTO between rolling hills and a winding river, the small town of Fairgrove had one unusual rule: there were no Tuesdays. They didn’t just dislike Tuesdays they refused to acknowledge them at all. Their week jumped straight from Monday to Wednesday, and life went on as if nothing was missing.
Nobody could quite remember when the ban started. Some said it was after a particularly bad storm that struck on a Tuesday decades ago. Others claimed it began because the town’s founder, Mildred Fairgrove, had a personal vendetta against the day after Monday. Whatever the reason, it had become a proud tradition.
Shops closed every “Tuesday,” but since it didn’t officially exist, they simply treated it as a long night between two days. People went to sleep on Monday evening and woke up on Wednesday morning. Outsiders found it strange, but the townspeople loved the extra mystery in their lives.
There were, of course, some problems. The post office constantly struggled to deliver packages on time. Delivery drivers would arrive on what they thought was Tuesday, only to find the town eerily quiet, the streets empty, and a hand-painted sign at the entrance reading: “Today is NOT Tuesday.”
The school calendar was equally confusing. Students never had classes on Tuesdays, but exams were rescheduled so often that nobody could keep track. One teacher, Mrs. Larkin, claimed that skipping a day improved productivity. “We get more done when we don’t waste energy on bad days,” she insisted. Her students didn’t mind—they loved having an extra day off, even if it was unspoken.
Tourists found the phenomenon fascinating. Some tried staying overnight to see what happened between Monday and Wednesday. The truth was disappointingly simple: life paused. Lights dimmed, clocks stopped ticking, and time itself seemed to hold its breath. Then, without warning, Wednesday morning sunlight would flood the town, and everyone would act like nothing had happened.
Local businesses even turned the missing day into a marketing gimmick. The bakery sold “Anti-Tuesday Pastries” on Wednesdays, promising they were baked in “time beyond time.” The hardware store advertised tools that could “fix anything except Tuesdays.”
Not everyone was happy with the tradition. A small group, calling themselves The Daykeepers, argued that skipping Tuesdays was messing with reality. They believed that by ignoring one-seventh of the week, the town was slowly drifting out of sync with the rest of the world. “One day,” warned their leader, Edgar Knox, “we’ll wake up and find we’ve skipped right past Friday.”
But most townspeople brushed off such concerns. Life without Tuesdays was peaceful. They didn’t have Monday blues—because Monday was immediately followed by the midweek relief of Wednesday.
To this day, Fairgrove remains a place where Tuesday simply doesn’t happen. And maybe that’s the real charm: a reminder that rules, even those of time itself, can be bent if enough people agree to pretend.