The Tuesday Taste

The day it began, Andrei woke to the sound of water on zinc. That soft, relentless drizzle that always came before a memory — or worse: a cataclysm.

It was Tuesday. Cold lingered in the kitchen like a thought forgotten.

He boiled water in the tin kettle that whistled too soon. Poured it into a flea market glass — thick, with blue flowers fading around the rim. He drank.

And stopped.

It tasted like bitter cherries in syrup. Not the sugar-slick kind, but the ones his bunica kept in reused compot bottles. Cherries picked in silence, hands stained red, time slow as jam.

A hint of salt too — like sweat on the upper lip during harvest, or tears swallowed before they fell.

He stared at the glass.

He poured another. Thought: lemon peel. Drank. Exact. Then: caraway. Then: frunze ude — wet leaves. All perfect.

A short, sharp laugh. It bounced off the tile.

The rain kept falling like it knew something he didn't.

He called his cousin, Toma.

“I think I’m losing it,” Andrei said.

“Why, mă?”

“I can make water taste like anything I think of. Anything. But only today.”

Andrei never knew how to name it. It wasn’t taste, not really — more like memory, emotion, time itself, melting on the tongue. As if his mouth had become a key to something forgotten.

Toma paused. “Are you drinking again?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you should be.”

Tuesday came again. So did the taste.

Only on Tuesday. Only water.

He tested spring water, tap water, even snowmelt from the freezer. All worked. Wednesday arrived, though: nothing. The water was plain, dull.

He started a notebook on squared paper, meticulously documenting his peculiar gift.

> Week 2:

> Sânziene – faint and golden, like midsummer wildflowers at dawn.

> Regret – like oversteeped linden tea, a lingering bitterness.

> A missed train – cold iron and cigarette smoke, the acrid essence of departure.

>

He told no one else. In Romania, some things weren't discussed; magic was simply carried in silence. You didn't speak of the strange occurrences – you lived with them, like cracked walls or whispering ghosts.

On the third Tuesday, she appeared.

Ioana.

She knocked — her gas had been cut off. She just needed boiled water.

The scent of wet wool and cloves filled the doorway before she spoke. Her red scarf was tied a little too tight, but her eyes held a curious light — the kind you get from roads far away, from seeing many horizons.

“It’s Tuesday,” he said, almost apologetically.

She blinked. “Și?”

“I can make water taste like things. Today. Only today.”

She tilted her head, a slow, appraising gesture. “That’s the most Romanian superpower I’ve ever heard,” she mused, a hint of amusement in her voice.

He smiled. “Want to try?”

She did.

He poured a glass. Thought: zăpadă veche — old snow, stepped on a thousand times but still unmelted, clinging to shaded corners.

She sipped. Silence settled between them.

Then, her voice soft, distant:

> “It tastes like the road to my grandmother’s, when we went for Crăciun. Like sitting in the back seat, watching fields go by, endless white stretching out. I didn’t know you could taste nostalgia.”

>

“It’s stronger with tap water,” he offered, softly.

She stayed a while, her curiosity insatiable, her spirit open. She asked for more.

He gave her:

Țuică fără foc (plum brandy without the burn)

First heartbreak

Wet laundry in an empty house

The moment she tasted that last one, Ioana was truly somewhere else.

A house that no longer remembered warmth. A window with warped glass. Homemade soap scenting the air. Sheets hanging damp on a rope. She was barefoot, a little girl, whispering nonsense poetry just to hear it echo in the quiet.

No fear. Just absence. The profound stillness of people long gone.

She opened her eyes, looking at him with a vulnerability that startled him.

“I haven’t thought about that house in years,” she confessed.

He nodded, a quiet understanding passing between them. “Water remembers the shape of the containers it’s been in. Even if those containers are people.”

Her heart clenched.

Every Tuesday after, she came.

They sat by the small table where the light bent through the window, caught in their unique ritual. They drank water that wasn't water. They talked about nothing and everything.

She told him about wanting to be a poet but never finishing a stanza. About a brother she lost too soon. A city she hated leaving, yet felt drawn back to.

He told her he used to be a cook but couldn't stand the smell of oil anymore, the grease clinging to his skin and clothes.

They shared their stories, each one a thread woven into the tapestry of their Tuesdays, tasting their memories, a unique language understood only by them.

“I like this,” she said once, her voice hushed. “It’s useless. That’s what makes it beautiful.” Andrei tried not to fall in love with her. But he started tasting words before saying them, just to make sure they were sweet enough.

But Tuesdays are not forever.

One Tuesday, Ioana didn’t come.

No knock. No message.

He waited.

The kettle boiled. Cooled. Boiled again.

He made the water taste like waiting – a flat, metallic boredom.

Like dust on a piano – dry, forgotten.

Like the space between a question and its answer – a hollow echo.

Nothing.

The next Tuesday: still nothing.

He knocked on her door again, harder this time, his knuckles aching. No answer. He pressed his ear against the cold wood, hoping for a breath, a whisper—nothing.

With trembling hands, he folded the note once more. The rain started falling, cold and sudden, drenching his coat as he slipped the paper beneath the door and stepped back, heart pounding.

The rain started tapping gently against the windowpane, and Andrei rose to close it, his fingers brushing the cold glass.

A week passed. Then two.

The florist downstairs, a woman with kind eyes who knew everything about everyone, eventually told him. Ioana had returned to Constanța. Her mother was ill. Or maybe it was a new job.

People leave, she said with the weary wisdom of experience. That’s what they do.

The rain tapped gently again.

In the other room, the kettle clicked off by itself.

It was Tuesday.

Andrei poured a glass. A familiar ritual.

He thought of Ioana — her red scarf, her curious eyes — and the water swirled with the taste of linden tea and woodsmoke. Comforting. But not her.

He frowned. He hadn't thought of that particular memory. He focused harder, tried to summon her scent, the taste of her laughter.

But the water stubbornly clung to damp earth and the distant chime of church bells — a memory from his own childhood summers.

Andrei stared at the glass, then his hand. A chill settled in his chest.

The tastes had never been hers. They were always his.

>Week 4:

Absence – like dust on a piano, a silence that gathers. Hope – underripe plums, sour but persistent.

Ioana – untastable, like music after it ends. She was never the magic. Just the key that turned it.

>

Before she left, Ioana had whispered one last thing:

Awakened by her presence. By what she stirred.

Her departure hadn’t taken her memories — only the mirror that let him access his own.

The magic wasn’t a shared link. It was a solitary journey inward.

Before she left, Ioana had whispered one last thing:

“Don’t let the useless things go.

Sometimes they’re the only real ones we have.”

He held the words, fragile and uncertain, like a whispered promise.

Andrei still tastes Tuesdays in that useless magic —

in the silence between words,

in memories folded inside a glass of water.

Now, the magic is quiet.

But it’s still there.

And it’s his.