“Reset Day”

Reset Day

Every year, at exactly 11:59 PM on December 31st, the world holds its breath.

For one minute, time bends. The lights flicker, the air hums, and everyone gets their single reset — the power to undo one event from the past year. No one knows how it works, or why. The scientists stopped pretending to explain it after the first decade. Theologians called it mercy. Politicians called it chaos. The rest of us just called it Reset Day.

I never used mine. Not once.

Until this year.

The first time I saw Anna, she was sitting on the floor of a record store, surrounded by vinyl sleeves like petals of sound. Her hair was messy, her smile quick, her eyes like a dare. She was playing some forgotten jazz record, tapping her finger against her knee, mouthing the trumpet solo.

“You look like you’ve time-traveled,” I said, leaning against the doorway.

“Maybe I have,” she said without looking up. “Want to join me?”

We were inseparable after that. Two people orbiting each other in reckless, perfect symmetry. Until the car crash in October. Until her side of the bed went cold.

They told me it was instant. They always say that.

By December, my apartment looked like a museum of grief. Her half-finished painting still stood by the window. Her toothbrush was still next to mine. Her shoes still lined up neatly by the door, waiting for feet that would never return.

Everyone told me to move on.

Everyone forgot about Reset Day.

I started preparing the way a surgeon prepares for an operation — carefully, methodically, with shaking hands.

I wrote down everything I remembered about the day she died: the time, the weather, the turn signal she forgot to use, the truck that never saw her coming. I replayed it until my mind felt bruised.

I knew the rules. You can only undo one event. Not a person, not a life — an event. But what if you erased the right event? What if you pulled at just the right thread?

What if you erased the person who caused it?

It was 11:58 PM on December 31st.

The city outside my window pulsed with countdown energy — fireworks ready, people holding champagne, laughter bubbling up through the cold. I sat on my couch, holding Anna’s photo. My hand trembled.

I whispered to the air, “I choose to erase Daniel Rowe.”

He was the truck driver. Fell asleep at the wheel. I’d read the police report a hundred times. He’d lived. She hadn’t.

The room filled with that strange hum that everyone feels on Reset Day — that brief, impossible shiver through reality. The walls blurred. The air folded inward.

And then… silence.

When I woke up, the world was quieter. Brighter, maybe. My heart pounded as I rushed to her apartment.

She opened the door.

Alive.

She blinked at me, confused. “Eli? What are you doing here?”

I couldn’t speak. I just hugged her. I held her so tightly she laughed into my shoulder. “Hey, what’s gotten into you?”

I didn’t care. She was warm. She was here.

For a while, everything was perfect again.

We drank coffee from chipped mugs. We argued about nothing. We kissed under streetlights that flickered like applause. The world had rewound itself, and I was its luckiest mistake.

But the news started to change.

First, it was small — a headline about a pileup on the interstate. Then a factory fire. Then a chain reaction of accidents across the city.

By the fifth day, hospitals were overwhelmed.

By the seventh, half the power grid had collapsed.

Every disaster traced back, somehow, to Daniel Rowe. Or rather, to the absence of Daniel Rowe.

The man I erased.

It turned out Daniel had done more than drive that night.

He was also the mechanic who fixed the brakes on an ambulance two months later.

He was the one who rescued a child from a burning building in March.

He’d donated blood that saved someone in July.

A thousand small, invisible ripples — gone because I’d erased him.

Anna was alive. But thousands weren’t.

I told her the truth on the tenth day. She didn’t believe me at first. Then she saw the news.

She didn’t say anything. Just stared at me with an expression I’d never seen before — not anger, not fear, just heartbreak.

“You brought me back,” she whispered. “But you broke the world to do it.”

I tried to explain, to promise I could fix it next year, that I’d undo myself if I had to.

But she was already fading.

When Reset Day came around again, I was the only one left who remembered. That’s another rule — only those who make the change remember the version before. The rest just... live in the new story.

It’s 11:59 PM again.

The air hums. The world holds its breath.

I close my eyes and whisper:

“I choose to undo my choice.”

The light swallows me whole.

When I wake, the record store is playing that same forgotten jazz tune.

A girl with messy hair is sitting on the floor, tapping her knee.

She looks up at me, smiling like a dare.

“Hey,” she says. “You look like you’ve time-traveled.”

“Maybe I have,” I say. “Want to join me?”