Killing Time

Robots and Time" anthology, 2005

“Hey,” I said, snapping my fingers under his nose. He blinked a couple of times, then looked at me, a little dazed. “Have we got an ID on the body?” It took a few moments for the kid to make any sense of what I’d asked. “Oh yeah, sorry.” He opened the clipboard he had tucked under his arm and looked in it. “Uh, it’s Thursday. Harold Thursday.” “Thursday, huh?” That didn’t exactly narrow it down; about a seventh of the city’s population shared that name. “When was he? What day?” The cop looked at the clipboard again. “He was… December twenty fifth, nineteen eighty.” He looked back at the corpse again. “Jeez,” he said again. “Who’d kill a Christmas?”