Between Midnights
🔪 Dark Fiction | In a world that resets every day at midnight, there are no consequences. And no future. Without consequences, anything is possible. Without a future, nothing means anything...
BETWEEN MIDNIGHTS
A piece of dark, literary speculative fiction from Dayfall
Copyright © 2020, 2026 Liam Armitage
Book Home | BookFunnel | Substack | Universal Book Link
DESCRIPTION
In a world that resets every day at midnight, there are no consequences.
And no future.
Erin has lived the same rainy day more times than she can count. She’s learned Korean, rebuilt a motorcycle engine, and she could easily pass the theoretical exams for a medical doctorate.
She’s also part of a small, strange society of people who slipped through the loop just like her. People who have made an art of living without permanence.
Without consequences, anything is possible.
Without a future, nothing means anything.
But all that changes when they discover a possible way out.
What follows is a negotiation none of them had anticipated: between their freedom and an old man’s dignity.
Between Midnights is a piece of dark, literary speculative fiction about what we owe each other—and what we become when nothing sticks.
EXCERPT
“We’re here to talk about a murder. One that would keep.”
In a room of mad people, Joe was the least mad. Living his routine carefully, he almost never came out. That’s how I knew this was going to be a serious discussion.
There were nine of us gathered in Egan’s lounge room. His spacious apartment was available on account of his wife having an affair. Seeing her every morning didn’t help, and the last time we met, he’d been really upset about it. Told us in the early days of discovery he’d gotten so mad he’d killed them both a few times. None of them stuck.
He knew better now. Egan wasn’t a newbie anymore. Not like poor Keri, who fell through during a particularly short repetition. She never had the chance to go through that bacchanalian phase most of us had experienced without repercussions.
Joe never did any of that. With every repetition, he simply refined his daily life more, making each day as idyllic as he could. I had stopped trying to work out how long he had lived, but Joe had been tracking the length of the repetitions. He stopped when he realized he was approaching one hundred years old. After that, he didn’t count anymore. He was the first among us.
We had dinner at his house once, on a day that has now never happened, so his family never met me. They were sweet, and he listened to their stories and replied in kind as if he had never heard them before. It was perfect.
I wish I had the fortitude to do that, but it’s hard when you repeat and they don’t.
Me? My name is Erin. I forgot to meet my fiancé for dinner on the last day that stuck. I have even managed to forget his name a few times since I slipped through. That was seventeen real days ago. I haven’t tracked the repetitions, but in that time I’ve watched everything Netflix and Hulu have of any interest to me, and I’m well-read now.
I’m learning Korean, and I could easily pass the theoretical exams for a medical doctorate. Out of curiosity, I have also learned how to rebuild a motorcycle engine.
In my bacchanalian phase, I slept with more than fifty men and thirty women. That was mostly on a single Saturday, the previous week. So long ago, I couldn’t remember most of their faces.
BOOK REVIEWS
Have you read this story? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
BUY/READ IT NOW
On BookFunnel | Universal Book Link
~