Salem Grey woke up with a strange feeling in his chest—a dull pressure, like something was out of place, but he couldn't quite say what. The room looked the same. His bed, unmade as usual. The same cracked phone charger hanging from the wall. The clock blinking lazily on his nightstand.
But something was… off.
He grabbed his phone and blinked at the date.
Thursday.
The breath caught in his throat.
"Wait—" he sat up too fast, dizziness spinning through him. His head throbbed as the thought clicked into place. "What happened to Wednesday?"
For the second time in less than a week, Salem had lost an entire day.
---
He sat frozen for a moment, letting the realization settle like dust around him.
This wasn't just a one-time fluke. This wasn't oversleeping or forgetting something small.
This was real. And it was getting worse.
---
The first person he called was Max—again.
"Tell me it's just me," Salem said without bothering with hello.
"It's not," Max replied, his voice hollow. "I'm looking at the date right now. It's Thursday. But I swear yesterday was Tuesday."
Salem exhaled sharply. "You remember anything? Anything at all from Wednesday?"
A long pause on the other end.
"Bits and pieces," Max said finally. "I—I remember eating cereal. I think. I was wearing… different clothes. But that's it. Nothing else."
Salem swallowed hard. "Same."
---
The two of them met up at Brew HaHa an hour later, though neither of them had much of an appetite.
The coffee shop felt weirdly quiet, like the background hum of the world had turned down a notch. A few customers sat with vacant eyes, scrolling their phones or staring into space. The barista—someone Salem didn't recognize—kept glancing at the clock on the wall, visibly unnerved.
Max sat across from Salem, drumming his fingers on the table.
"This is actually happening, right?" Max said. "We're not just going nuts?"
Salem gave a tired laugh. "If we are, at least we're both crazy in the same way."
He stirred his coffee absentmindedly, thoughts racing. "It's like… someone's cutting out pieces of time and pasting the leftovers back together. But badly."
"Like a toddler with scissors," Max added. "Great. Love that for us."
---
They spent the next hour comparing details: what they remembered, what they didn't. Both of them had the same blank spots. The same strange flashes.
At one point, Salem scribbled words on a napkin, barely realizing what he was writing:
> "What happens to the days we skip?"
The question hung there between them, heavy and unanswered.
---
That night, Salem couldn't sleep.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw images that didn't belong to him—flashes of streets he didn't recognize, voices speaking languages he didn't understand, a bright blue sky that seemed wrong somehow.
And in the middle of it all:
A feeling.
A single, undeniable feeling that somewhere in the spaces between the days, something was watching.
---
When he woke the next morning—no longer sure what day it even was—Salem knew one thing for certain:
If he didn't figure this out soon, he wasn't just going to lose days.
He was going to lose himself.
---
End of Chapter 2