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.
