Tuesday is starting to smell
I can fix it in a minute.
Synopsis
They fall inside a week: a seven storey building where each floor is a day. They land on the Tuesday, which has been under refurbishment since 2003.
Plot
The rule of the floor, shown whole: on the Tuesday nothing ever finishes. Sentences stop halfway, coffee does not go cold, pregnancies are in their fourteenth month. That is why it smells: what does not finish, ferments. And how to undo it is shown long before it matters: finishing anything at all lets you out of the building. Malios has been saying he can fix it in a minute since episode one, and here the minute genuinely never passes, so for the first time he is right, and it goes straight to his head.
Tag
After the credits, a secondary character from this episode, later and somewhere else.
The Wednesday, taller and newer than Nicanor was, opens a cardboard box just carried up to him in a clean bright corridor: inside there is loose paper, dust, fourteen stopped wristwatches and one long unbroken cigarette ash lying on top of it all. He stands looking at it.
Trivia and continuity
The price is paid by Nicanor, the landlord, a kind man made of office hours who rents minutes by the week and has been halfway through himself for twenty years. Finishing him finishes him.
Malios
Kenya
The cat
Nicanor