Shift

Within the walls of my home, I have noticed oddities and strange occurrences. These strange happenings were at first seen by me, as isolated curiosities but have occurred so consistently now, that I have come to see them as clues and I have begun to string them together in my mind.

In doing this, I have uncovered a pattern and it has become clear that something is happening here. I believe it to be some sort of shift in space, some collapse of physics inside my home. It has been happening so slowly that until it reached its current level of skewness, I could not fully perceive it, but now it has become undeniable.

For the sake of this record, I will try to recall the events that put me on my current path of understanding.

It was July, I think when I went into my bathroom and found that the roll of toilet paper was in an odd and incorrect position. As you well know its home is, of course, to be secured upon its spring-loaded spindle and resting in its notches between the arms of the holder.

To my surprise, it was a couple of inches above its intended home. It rested upon its spindle, laying on its side, unsecured and ready to topple off and leave a trail of itself running across the bathroom floor. I quickly attached it to its holder and went away scratching my head.

On that very same day, before the toilet paper roll incident had even been settled in my mind, the bathroom offered me another mystery.

Against the wall, next to the shower, valiantly stands a wicker laundry basket, ready to hold all of the dirty laundry discarded as one enters the stall for their shower. On this fateful day, there it stood at its post, but six inches to the left lay an inexplicable pile of laundry.

I stood for quite some time in my disbelief before I managed to rouse myself to action. I picked up the laundry and found that it had been lying there long enough to become soggy upon the floor. I placed it into the basket and then pulled the basket six inches to its left to compensate for the error in distance. Coming back, sometime later, I again found the laundry basket standing next to a new pile of dirty, damp laundry. I again pulled the basket toward, what I believed might be a more suitable location, only to find that throughout the day, the clothes were not within it!

At this time, I was still trying to correct each occurrence, as I had not yet come to my current conclusion regarding these events. But, as I went about my day, many more anomalies presented themselves to my ever more suspicious mind.

Some examples of what I noticed are, the dog food half in and half out of the food bowl, signifying that the bowl had somehow shifted slightly to one side or the other beneath the food. The milk jug, whose home is on the top shelf within the refrigerator, was found sitting warm on the counter, just outside of its spot within the refrigerator by approximately 13 or 14 inches. A sleeping child, fully dressed but with one sock off and next to his foot on his bed, Garbage on the floor next to the can, pee on the floor next to the toilet, dishes on the counter mere inches from the sink, water surrounding the coffee maker and a shirt on the wrong brother causing fights to break out.

As is clear to see from this list, which is in no way comprehensive, my house is overrun with examples of some sort of a shift in the physical plane of space. I am but a lowly and undereducated housewife, but even I, with my layman’s mind, can see the shift.

And for those who think that I have given myself over to hysteria, let me just point out that I rejected my first explanation of a supernatural manifestation having taken up residence in my home.

And also, I rejected my second theory, that I was being invaded and occupied by some otherworldly alien being.

Instead, I have turned to science to try and explain these strange happenings. And it is within the great and powerful realm of science, that I will one day find my answers and also the remedy to my problem.

Someday within my home, it will be discovered and documented that the laws of physics, the very fabric of our understanding of the physical world, have come to naught, right within these walls.

I may even be heralded as a foremother of scientific discovery. A photograph of my head and shoulders, may one day hang in a great hall of science with Madame Curie on my left and Jane Goodall on my right.

And I may one day discover the secret to repairing this anomaly of physics and come in to take my shower and find that all of the dirty laundries lie predictably within the wicker walls of the laundry basket.

Until such time as the scientific community stops rejecting my letters and attempts to enlighten them, I will continue to persevere. I will ignore their threats to have me reported and hospitalized if I do not “cease and desist,” and I will continue my research, study, and documentation.

And each day, I will go from room to room putting things right and battling the shifting universe as it relentlessly toys with me.