What’s up? I ask, after I come in the door, after I toss my keys on the dining room table, after I flop down on the couch next to her, after a moment of silence for the long day I’ve had. I can’t help but smile. I know what she’s going to say.
The sky, she replies, right on cue. I smile wider and throw open the drapes on the windows.
Not any more. I almost chuckle as I reveal the grisly scene outside. The ground is above us, miles away. We’re falling upward, toward space, away from the gravity well we call home. The sky’s not up any more. The sky is down.
She nods, barely looking up from her phone. Don’t you see this? I ask. Don’t you see what I’ve done?
You’ve flipped our house upside down and reversed gravity in its general vicinity, yeah, sure, she says, nonplussed. She’s concentrating hard on the game she’s playing on her phone.
I’m disappointed. It took me a long time, a lot of research and hard physical work, to figure out even how to flip the house and make it fall up toward space, not to mention the mental toll: the calculations, the rituals, and the sacrifices really got to me after a while. And I think I did a pretty good job of flipping it quietly, too. The only things falling toward space right now were the house, its contents, and one or two inches of regular space all around it. I was able to flip the whole thing without disturbing normality, too. I’m really proud of my work, and it meant, seemingly, nothing.
Well at least look at it, I sulk, holding the curtain wider. She casts a glance out the window at the upside-down clouds rushing past. She frowns, just a little, not enough where anyone else would notice, but I notice. I don’t know what she’s thinking. She says, Nice, I guess. She looks back at her screen.
This is no fun at all. We’re going to run out of air soon, I thought I’d at least get a rise out of her before we blacked out on the edge of space.
It looks like it’ll be a long trip after all.