In his prefatory note on “When” the action of Fat Ham takes place, James Ijames writes that: “The American South, to me, exists in a kind of liminal space between the past and the present with an aspirational relationship to the future that is contingent on your history living in the South.” This chapter explores Ijames’s conception of time as somehow caught between past and present through a reading of its cross-hatched temporalities, asking how Shakespeare’s Hamlet interacts with queer Black esthetics to produce its regionally specific liminality. From Fat Ham’s opening lines, Tio’s porn streaming suggests the repetitive and non-progressive condition that its characters inhabit—a theme further manifested as the narrative begins between a funeral and a wedding, as well as Juicy’s inability to finish his college degree. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is similarly preoccupied with such in-betweenness, as the past intrudes upon the present, and the future threateningly lurks behind an arras. Soliloquies are delivered outside of time; Hamlet wishes to sentence Claudius to an eternal punishment, and capture by—and escape from—pirates takes no time at all. In contrast to the always-contingent aspiration for the future that Ijames’s American South embodies, withering pessimism and a resignation to outside forces define Hamlet’s Denmark. Fat Ham’s characters never exit their liminal southern time, but they do iterate toward healing intergenerational trauma. This chapter concludes with an analysis of Ijames’s deviations from Shakespeare in its final scene, as it aspires to a world in which joy supersedes the logic of linear progress.