Someplace Else

My wife and I were having people over for a surprise house warming party. The surprise lay in the fact that no one was aware that we had actually bought a new house. We had found a house a few streets over that was nearly identical to our old house. The new house was on a quieter street on a somewhat larger lot, but it was the same blue Dutch colonial, the stars just hanging in a different configuration in the cold clear night above the snow-covered roof.

Somehow the guests found their way to the new house. They didn’t even realize that they had taken different turns and had wound up on a completely different street, and they didn’t notice that anything was up or off or out of place when we met them at the door and invited them in. We had gone to great lengths to make sure that the walls were all painted the same colors, and we had brought all of the old furniture over and put it in the same spots, even measuring the divots left in the carpet for the exact precise placement. We broke the news in the middle of the party with a dropdown banner showing the new address drawn on a cartoon mailbox, and it wasn’t until that moment that any of the guests were aware that they were in a different house.

Everyone looked around. There was a long second or two of silence and they were all confused at first, but then they slowly began to laugh. They couldn’t believe it; they thought we had to be joking. There was a couple that we were friends with and my wife took them upstairs and showed them a spot in the master bedroom where she had cut a long scratch into the doorframe so that it matched perfectly with the scratch in the doorframe at the old house. The husband ran his fingernail along the groove in the wood and chuckled to himself. He muttered that we had gone to a lot of trouble just to pull off a simple trick, but he had to admit that it was a good trick. He said that he could almost feel the boards of the hardwood floor shift and tumble under his feet, throwing him through space. He reached for the arm of a chair to steady himself, the chair sitting in the same corner where it had always been.

The Breakfast Table

I woke up groggy and confused, yawning and shuffling through the rooms of a stranger’s house. I came to the kitchen, and there on the table I saw that someone had been working on a diorama. There was a shoebox lying on its side surrounded by brushes and acrylics and glues and scraps of newspaper folded into different objects, the newsprint still showing through in the spots that hadn't been painted all the way. I picked up the box to have a look inside, and I saw the scene of a back yard. The sun was beginning to rise from behind a hedge in the background and there was a folding lawn chair sitting in the open in the middle of a long expanse of trimmed green grass. The chair's long shadow stretched out in front of it, and the grass had a bit of a shine to it, like dew. As I stared at the little scene in the box, admiring all the intricate attention to detail, the sun rose up over the hedge in bright needle-pricks of light, and I squinted my eyes and looked away.