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Moving

Day

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Copyright © 2008 by Lex Fonteyne

Internal illustrations (such as they are) by Lex Fonteyne

Cover design and layout by T44 Studio

(773) 474-9525

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MOVING DAY

BY

LEX FONTEYNE

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For Teresa: The light of my life, now and forever

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MOVING DAY

Chapter One

It was about 8:30 that night when I finally pulled into the driveway. It had been

one of those days, and I had one of those headaches; you know the kind, it feels like some

cartoon coyote is dropping an anvil on your head every four seconds.

I turned off the car radio (a call-in where the host was pontificating about the

President‟s ongoing claims of direct, one-on-one talks with God; most of us can‟t even

get his divine e-mail address), parked, trundled out of the vehicle, and made my way into

the house.

Mrs. Weaver, my three-and-a-half-year-old German Shepherd, was there to greet

me, as always. She did her standard “dance-around-in-circles” routine, no doubt with the

intention of informing me she was hungry. “Sorry, Weav,” I told her, “I got tied up at

work again. Give me a minute and I‟ll get you something to eat.”

To my surprise, a small dog I had never seen before came dashing up the basement

stairs and headed for the front door. I looked at him and said, “Hey, pal, how did you get

in here?” He scratched at the door, turned and barked once or twice, and resumed his

scratching. I went to the door and let him out. I said, “Ya‟ll come back now, y‟hear?” as

he rocketed down the driveway to the street.

“Friend of yours?” I asked Weav as I followed her into the kitchen. “Look, I don‟t

mind you entertaining while I‟m at work, but at least keep an eye on your guests. No

telling what the little guy might have gotten into downstairs.”

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And how did he get in? Could Weav have learned to open a locked door, and then

to relock it? Seemed a little far-fetched. Maybe a basement window was open, or....?

I found a can of something, featuring a picture of a blue poodle on the label, but

there was nothing in the nutritional information about whether or not this product would

change your dog‟s color, so I figured it was probably pretty safe to give it to Weav.

Worst case scenario, if she turned blue, one of the neighborhood kids could use her as an

art project. I dumped the food into her bowl, and she gulped it down in about three-tenths

of a second.

“Remind me never to take you to the Tivoli,” I remarked, somewhat unnecessarily.

They would never manage to get her in a jacket and tie, anyway.

A lot of people have asked me why my dog is named Mrs. Weaver. Well, when I

first bought her, I thought she was a he, and I was going to name him Earl, after the old

Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver. But then he turned out to be a she (the dog, not

the manager), and I figured Earl wasn‟t really a good name for a girl, rhymability

notwithstanding. So she became Mrs. Weaver. If I knew the actual Mrs. Weaver‟s first

name (presuming, of course, that Earl is married, which, frankly, I don‟t know), I might

have used her first name for my dog; but I don‟t know if he‟s married, or what his wife‟s

name is, or if it might be something like Agnes or Hortense or Clytemnestra or some

other moniker not especially suited to a German Shepherd.

So, Mrs. Weaver she became, and Mrs. Weaver she shall remain, world without end,

amen, so help me God. Unless I think of something I like better. No, that would probably

just confuse her. And me too.

But I digress. In fact, if you want me to be totally honest about it, I digress a lot. It‟s

a bad habit, and you know what they say about bad habits....they come in threes, or

something like that....?

Anyway, feeding the dog hadn‟t done anything for my headache (it almost never

does), and so I plodded upstairs to the bathroom and opened up the medicine cabinet,

hoping to find some aspirin or Tylenol or curare or something.

After digging past some Q-Tips, toothpaste, cotton balls, vitamins, eye drops, nail

clippers, an Indian Head penny (how did that get in there?), and about a half dozen

razors (when I go to the store to buy refill cartridges, I can never remember which razor

I have at home, so I always end up buying a new one instead of taking a chance on

buying the wrong refills), I found a brand-new bottle of Excedrin P.M.

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“This package for use in households without small children,” the label advised

condescendingly, saving me the trouble of having to call one of the neighbor kids over to

remove a “childproof” cap.

Even so, it took me a minute to line up the arrows the right way, and when I popped

the cap off, it flew into the air and fell somewhere between the toilet and the bathtub, or

so I thought. I got down on my hands and knees, searched the area, but couldn‟t find it.

Then I realized that this wasn‟t a top priority project; it could wait until tomorrow

morning. Right now, I had a headache to deal with. Assuming my head was still attached

in the morning, I could organize a rescue mission for the cap then.

I glorted down seven Excedrins (yes, I know that‟s too many, and I know what it

does to the stomach lining!), and headed down the hall to the bedroom.

I didn‟t even bother getting undressed, just took off my shoes, unplugged the phone

on the nightstand (there‟s another phone in the kitchen, and one in the basement, but the

ringers are set on low, and I can‟t hear them if I‟m in the bedroom), and fell onto the bed.

Mrs. Weaver padded in, giving me a look that was both sympathetic and skeptical at

the same time. I told her, “I‟ll make you a deal, Weav. You don‟t bark tonight, and I‟ll

get you some more of that blue poodle food tomorrow.”

She snorted, hopped up on the bed, licked my ear, and then jumped back to the floor

and trotted off downstairs. I took that as a yes.

Actually, Weav almost never barks. I don‟t want to be one of those people who are

always bragging about how smart their dogs are, but she‟s no dummy. I mean, she‟s no

nuclear physicist, but I was really impressed at how quickly she picked up golf. No, not

really.

The clock said 8:54 just before I drifted off into a timeless haze of

aspirin/acetaminophen dreamlessness....

I felt Weav jump on the bed in the middle of the night. She made a strange noise,

half growl, half whimper -- a sound I‟d never heard from her before.

“What‟s wrong, Weav?”

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She nuzzled my ear (she seemed to have an aural fixation right about then), then

jumped off the bed and ran downstairs. Very strange. I wondered if she had seen a mouse

or....?

The clock said 2:24.

I went back to sleep.

I was awakened by sunlight streaming through the window, directly into my eyes. A

little too bright. I couldn‟t remember ever being hit in the face with that much sunlight in

the morning before.

Had I overslept?

The clock said 4:35 A.M., but the numbers weren‟t illuminated, as they should have

been.

I still had my watch on; it said 8:41 A.M. There must have been a power failure

during the night.

That seemed odd, given that there hadn‟t been any storms or rain or anything last

night. Then again, maybe it had rained after I passed out....? Seven Excedrins might be

enough to make a guy oblivious to a lot of things....

I sat up, feeling a little groggy; the headache was mostly gone, but I had a little bit of

“stiff-neck” soreness. I had a feeling that something wasn‟t quite right, but I couldn‟t put

my finger on it.

When I went into the bathroom, I noticed the sink wasn‟t working. No water. I tried

the light switch -- nothing. No electricity.

“Wow,” I said to my poorly-lit reflection in the mirror, “it must have been some kind

of storm to knock out the electricity and the water. That never happened before.”

Knowing I was going to be late for work, I picked up the phone to call Emily, our

secretary who always showed up at the shop a little early. I was planning on making up

some excuse she could pass along to Jack (the boss). But my phone wasn‟t working,

either.

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“Idiot!” I blurted at myself. “I unplugged it last night!” So I replaced the cord, but it

still didn‟t work. No dial tone, nothing.

“OK,” I said, trying to take stock of the situation, “I‟ve got no phone, no water, no

electricity. Maybe the outages hit the whole area. Maybe a bunch of other people will be

late to work today, too.” Misery loves company. Me, I love my electricity.

I went downstairs. Weav was gazing out the living room window as if there was a

squirrel convention in progress in the front yard. I walked to the kitchen and noticed her

water dish was empty. Without thinking, I picked up the dish and went to the sink, but

this sink was no more cooperative than the one in the bathroom.

Luckily, I had some bottled water in the fridge, so I filled up her dish with that.

“Hey, Weav, here‟s some water for you. It doesn‟t have all the radioactivity and

chemical impurities you‟re used to, but it should hold you for now.”

She clattered in, lapped up a few tonguefuls, and meandered back into the living

room.

Something was still nagging at the fringes of my awareness.

I thought about the cap from the Excedrin bottle which was still hiding in the

bathroom somewhere. No, that wasn‟t it.

I foolishly walked around trying a few light switches and other electrical devices,

finding (somewhat predictably) that nothing worked.

Well, this was an inconvenience, but life goes on. I picked up Weav‟s leash; I

figured I‟d take her for a walk, come back, get cleaned up (as much as possible, under the

circumstances), and try to sneak into work without being seen.

Weav looked at me from the living room.

And then it hit me.

The sunlight!

Shining in the window....

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Waking me up....

Not possible! The bedroom window didn‟t face east. Sunlight can‟t shine in that

window at that time of the day....

That‟s why I had never been awakened like that before....!

But....then....

I went to the front door. Behind that door should be my car, my driveway, my

garage, my neighbor Mrs. Grossman‟s house....

I opened the door....

No car. No driveway. No garage. No Mrs. Grossman‟s house. No Mrs. Grossman.

No yard, no street, no mailbox, no....

There were weeds and grass and dirt where my driveway should have been; a few

trees clustered together where the garage should have been. More trees off in the

distance.

I ran back into the house, up the stairs, looked out my bedroom window, as if I

thought things would all go back to normal if I looked through the right one. No such

luck. I saw more trees, weeds, grass, rocks....

For just a moment, I thought my house was exactly where it belonged, and someone

must have obliterated the rest of the neighborhood. But that made no sense....

Not that any of this made sense....

I took a deep breath. It was time to go outside.

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Chapter Two

Maybe I should explain a few things about the house first.

See, I was married once, for eleven years, and it was not exactly a lot of fun, kind of

like being thrown off a 73-story building into a burning pit of angry crocodiles is not a lot

of fun, although I think being married was worse. Kathy and I originally had a little

apartment in a town called Harvey, Illinois, and we were actually pretty happy together

for about six or seven weeks. Things started to go downhill after that -- Kathy started

getting a little too possessive (in the same way Walter Hudson was a little too heavy), and

she developed a taste for certain illegal chemical substances which she seemed to be

ingesting every time she visited her mother. Me, I‟m a Total-with-a-capital-T teetotaler -- I don‟t use anything stronger than Pepsi and the occasional handful of Excedrins. I did go

through a brief “experimental” phase in my younger days, but got scared away when I

saw what alcohol and drugs had done to some people I worked with. Let me tell you,

those zombie movies that pop up every once in awhile? -- those are not fiction. There

really are people out there like that, and most of them are holding onto a bottle or a pipe

of some sort, probably not PVC.

Once I found out she was using drugs, I figured the only thing to do was to separate

for awhile. So I packed up all her things (and her) and dropped the whole magilla off at

her mother‟s.

Kathy‟s mom was not real happy with this turn of events, particularly since she

knew I was in line to receive a fairly good-sized inheritance from my Aunt Alice, who

was at that time about two months away from being on her last toes (her last legs having

given out some years previously).

Anyway, Kathy‟s mom, at one point, tried to hire a “hitman” (actually a shyster

lawyer who had connections with corrupt law enforcement people) to take me out, and

I‟m not talking about dinner and a movie, though I might have gone along with

something like that if he was paying. The thinking was that, if I died before I could obtain

a divorce from Kathy, she would have a claim on my inheritance as my surviving spouse.

Without going into too much detail, let me just say that the murder attempt was

unsuccessful (well, duh), I did eventually manage to get my divorce, and I decided it

would be a good idea to move out of Harvey, in case dear ol‟ Mom-In-Law got it into her

head to take another shot, so to speak.

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Once the inheritance was all finalized, I bought a house in a town called Hazel

Crest, which was just far enough away from Harvey to confuse Kathy and her family if

they were ever looking for me. It‟s not a big house; but it‟s got more than enough room

for me and my dog and all my junk. And I even had some money left over, which I

almost immediately invested in some horribly immobile stocks which haven‟t moved

much one way or the other since around 1987. (Damn you, Stagnantco!)

The house sits (or used to sit) in the middle of the block in a very average

neighborhood. I‟ve got three bedrooms (one of which is allegedly my “home office,” a

metaphor for “accumulation of crap”), one and a half baths (wouldn‟t you love to see a

home with one and two-sevenths baths, or one and eleven sixteenths baths? I would. I

was never much good at fractions), etc., etc. I mean, how many houses really have

anything exciting or different? I haven‟t got a dungeon, or minarets, or gargoyles, or

flying buttresses, or a bell tower, or any of that stuff. I‟m not even sure what a flying

buttress is. I think it‟s an old wrestling maneuver.

So I did my best to set things up so that Kathy and her mother and their various and

sundry relatives and lawyers and assassins can‟t find me. Unlisted phone number, post

office box, the whole ninety-nine yards. Decent home security system, I suppose, but I

couldn‟t get them to put in the crossbows. “Liability issues,” they claimed.

You ask me, they‟re just chicken.

Of course, Kathy knows I work as the manager of Village Vacuum, Inc., because

I‟ve been working there since before she and I got married. But I doubt if she‟ll mess

with me at work. The store is too busy, too much traffic, too much chance of her being

seen and identified if she shows up causing problems. Anyway, I‟ve never had any

problems there. So far.

When I first moved into the house, my next-door neighbor Mrs. Grossman came

over and introduced herself almost instantaneously. This frightened me a little at first

because I was picturing a scenario where she would have been peeping out of her front

window 24 hours a day, just waiting to see who was going to move into the vacant

house next door to her, the one with no bell tower or flying mattresses or dungeons.

Turned out this wasn‟t the case, though -- she just happened to be coming back from

walking her dog when I pulled into my new driveway for the first time. I didn‟t see her

because I was too busy trying to figure out how to work the garage door opener. Within

minutes, she was ringing my bell, carrying a basket of cinnamon rolls and a bushel of

local information.

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Mrs. Grossman is one of those “elderly” ladies who never quite grasped the concept

of getting old. She‟s well into her seventies, but she still jogs and exercises and takes

food over to the Senior Citizens‟ Center (even though she‟s older than a lot of them), and

so on.

That first day, she rang the bell and announced, “Hi, neighbor! I‟m Bev Grossman,

I‟m right next door. You need anything? Soup? I could make some soup. Have some of

these cinnamon rolls, they‟re good. I‟ve had better, but these aren‟t too bad. Edible,

anyway. I‟m making beef burgundy tonight, whatever that is. I thought burgundy was a

color. I see you have a dog!”

I introduced myself, a little taken aback by this display of neighborliness.

“I have a dog, too,” she continued. “Black lab, her name is Chloe. Strange name for

a dog, huh? You know, the people who used to live in this house, well, they had some

problems. I don‟t like to speak ill of the drunk, but you know how it is.” She mimed a

glug-glug-glug drinking motion.

“Mrs. Grossman,” I interjected, “could you tell me where‟s the best place to buy

groceries around here? And also I‟ll need to know where there‟s a gas station, and....” “Oh, sure! I‟ll make up a list for you. I‟ve been here thirty-seven years, I know every

store in town, probably. Since my husband, Leo, passed away, I have all the time in the

world to explore the local business community. If you go over to the Book Place on

Artesian -- that‟s a book store -- tell Marlene -- she‟s the owner -- I sent you, she‟ll give

you a little discount....”

And so began a beautiful friendship.

Mrs. Grossman and I occasionally dog-sit for each other, she cooks a meal for me

every now and then (although the beef burgundy turned out to be beef periwinkle), I

shovel the snow off her sidewalk in the winter -- we have something like a symbiotic

relationship, I think it‟s called.

I‟ve come to know a few of the other neighbors on a casual basis over the past few

years, but Mrs. Grossman is the star of the block.

So, all in all, I‟ve been happy with the house and the neighbors and the area in

general. I‟ve got a nice yard for Weav to run around in, a garage that‟s big enough for

me to screw up my car when I try to change the oil or the spark plugs or the catatonic

converter or that weird orange thing that really doesn‟t look like it belongs in there.

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But, on this particular day, all of that was about to change....

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Chapter Three

I stepped outside.

It was not an illusion, not a mirage, not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story,

as they used to say in the Superman comic books.

My house was not where it was supposed to be.

My house was not where it had been last night.

Weav followed me out the door, walked around for a few moments, and watered a

nearby patch of weeds. The situation didn‟t seem to be bothering her at all.

Then I thought about her weird behavior in the middle of the night. Did she know

something strange was going on? Had she been trying to tell me? I remembered seeing

something on TV about dogs who had warned their owners of impending heart attacks

and earthquakes and things. Maybe Weav was like that. Maybe she had the ability to

sense things before they happened. The Psychic Dog Hotline?

I walked all the way around the house. Everything looked intact -- no broken

windows, no shingles missing from the roof....A snippet of music ran through my head.

Something about “houses in motion.” Talking Heads....?

The front door seemed to be a little higher than it should have been. It looked to be

about four or five inches above its normal level, as if whoever or whatever had plopped

the house down here hadn‟t quite been able to push it all the way into the ground.

That got me thinking about the basement; so I ran back inside and down the stairs.

Sure enough, the basement was all there.

I went outside again, grabbed Weav‟s leash, and we started to walk. A hundred

yards or so to the left, I thought I saw some partially-constructed homes in a sort of

semicircular formation, so we walked in that direction.

It turned out to be four houses -- one just about finished, the others still in the early

stages of framing -- on a little cul-de-sac called Crescent Circle. I was vaguely familiar

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with this area, having driven nearby a few times when dropping off a co-worker who was

having some car problems. Crescent Circle would run straight into Traber Street, which

would intersect with Lincoln -- so, a quick calculation told me I was only about a mile

and a half from home! Er -- from my lot, I mean. Well, you know what I‟m getting at.

It was clear that I‟d have to get to my car, which was (presumably) still in my

driveway -- unless, of course, the driveway, car, garage, yard, etc., had all been

mysteriously transported away, too. Whatever, they definitely weren‟t here with the

house. And that meant a little walk was on the agenda.

“OK, Weav, let‟s see if we can find our way back to Kansas....”

Weav gave me a disgruntled look, as if to say, “We‟re not from Kansas, you moron.” I told you she was smart.

On our little trip, I had some time to think about the implications of a house

suddenly transporting itself a mile and a half in the middle of the night for no apparent

reason.

OK, it probably wasn‟t somebody‟s idea of a prank. I mean, some of the nervier

local kids might steal your mailbox or throw a few rolls of toilet paper into your trees.

Heck, I did some of that stuff when I was a kid myself.

I remember this one time when Craig Tremblay and Paulie Martch and I found this

old, really really long coat in somebody‟s garbage can. We must have been about twelve

at the time. So we took this coat, and a pair of old, black rubber boots, and we stuck

them on a mannequin that Craig‟s mother kept in their basement. I don‟t even want to

know why she had it! Anyway, we took the mannequin, all decked out now, over to old

Mrs. Lilleman‟s house, about 10:00 on a Thursday night. Mrs. Lilleman was a mean,

crabby lady nobody liked -- the kind who would yell at you if you rode your bike past her

house (“Hey, you, kid, get out of here, get away from here! I‟ll call the cops!” even

though everybody always said the sidewalks were public property) -- she had the nerve

to hand out big rubber erasers on Halloween instead of candy (“Something to help you

cope with all the mistakes you‟re going to make in life, young man, and, believe me,

you‟re going to make plenty!”). And don‟t even think about the consequences of tossing

a baseball or a Frisbee in her yard if she was anywhere in the vicinity!

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Well, Mrs. Lilleman had a long row of bushes along one side of her house. These

things were huge; must have been eight or nine feet high, or at least that‟s how they

looked to us at the time. A great place to duck into during neighborhood games of hide-

and-seek, provided old Mrs. Lilleman didn‟t catch you in there.

So anyway, we took the mannequin and laid it on the ground, with the upper part

sticking into the area where the bushes were. This left the lower part of the torso, and the

legs, sticking out. It looked just like somebody had passed out or died while wandering

around near the bushes. We thought this was extremely cool, but then, we were twelve

years old and didn‟t have much of a frame of reference for what “cool” really meant. Ah,

screw it, I still think it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. Sue me.

“I can‟t wait to see the look on the old crow‟s face when she comes out to get the

paper in the morning,” Craig giggled.

Paulie said, “Maybe we should call her on the phone and tell her there‟s a prowler

creeping around in her bushes, huh? Then she‟d see it quicker.”

“Nah,” I replied, “she might get suspicious. Nobody around here likes her. Nobody

would ever give her a warning, even if King Kong was about to step on her house. Let‟s

just let her find out on her own.”

Later, we heard Mrs. Lilleman almost fell off her porch when she spotted the

“intruder” the next morning. She called the police, and four armed officers rushed over to

arrest the mannequin, the coat, and the boots. Rumor has it that the cops had a good laugh

(they didn‟t much care for Mrs. Lilleman, either), but she didn‟t think it was so funny.

One of the cops suspected Craig might have been involved (he had a bit of a

reputation for this sort of thing), and had a brief talk with him about it.

“You know, Craig,” the cop told him, barely suppressing a grin, “Mrs. Lilleman is an

old lady, and she could have had a heart attack or something. I realize she‟s not a very

nice person, and she doesn‟t care for kids at all, and my own kids weren‟t especially

happy about getting those chintzy erasers on Halloween. But we all have to try to make

allowances for our neighbors who might not be all there upstairs. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir,” Craig answered, in his most sycophantic manner. He could really lay it on

when necessary.

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“Good boy,” the cop said. “Now, I‟m not saying you were involved in this thing, but

maybe you‟ll hear someone talking about the incident, and maybe you could give them a

little advice about not torturing our cranky senior citizens. If you catch my drift.” Then he

gave Craig a donut and drove away.

But I had no reason to believe Craig and Paulie were involved in my house turning

up in a field near Crescent Circle: Craig was (last I heard, anyway) an art teacher in

Colorado, and Paulie was an auto mechanic in southern Illinois.

The new generation of pranksters might be more advanced than we had been (I

mean, what‟s the point of technology if kids can‟t ultimately use it to torment irritable old

women?), but I doubted if even they had anything in their arsenal that could move a

whole house.

OK, so it wasn‟t a prank. Probably.

Then -- what?

I thought about Star Trek. They had transporters that enabled crew members to

teleport directly from the Enterprise to the surface of the planet, or to the transporter

room of another ship, or whatever. But that was science fiction. There wasn‟t anything

like that in real life, was there?

I had seen a lot of Star Trek episodes, and I couldn‟t think of any instances where

they had ever transported anything as big as a house....(Scotty: “Cap‟n, she‟s too big! The

whole thing is gonna blew....!”)

What were the size limitations of a 23rd century transporter, anyway?

And that led me to an even scarier thought. It was clear that I‟d been shifted

geographically. How could I be sure I hadn‟t been moved through time, as well?

My watch? It said 9:22 a.m. -- but which day? Which year? Which century? What if

I was now living in the year 2680 and didn‟t know it?

Of course, if that turned out to be the case, then it was pretty clear that home-

building techniques hadn‟t advanced very much in the last 600+ years. The homes under

construction on Crescent Circle looked pretty much like homes under construction in my

own time period....

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As Weav and I walked along Traber and then Lincoln, I was able to determine that

the year 2680 was something of a disappointment, inasmuch as all the cars in front of the

houses were of late-1990s, early-2000s vintage, except for a 1974 Comet in some guy‟s

driveway. “I don‟t care if we‟re in the present or the future, that one should be in a

museum someplace,” I told Weav. She was unimpressed.

Either 2680 was very much into a retro-auto movement, or I hadn‟t been sent to

another time at all.

Passing the Qwik-Stop (an alleged “convenience store” famed for its

incomprehensibly astronomical prices), I spotted a stack of newspapers by the front door.

Today‟s date. I was still where I was supposed to be, at least in the temporal sense.

Which, I suppose, was a relief on one level (not having to acclimate myself to a

world where humans served giant robot pelican masters)....but that still didn‟t help me

with my other questions.

Who moved my house?

How did they do it?

And why?

We passed a vacant building on Jefferson Street. Some years ago, it had been a

bakery, but the owner had died and there was no one else in the family who had any

interest in keeping it going. The building had been empty ever since, and had fallen into a

state of dilapidation, if that‟s a word.

It occurred to me that if this poor old shoddy excuse for a building had vanished,

instead of my rugged, manly, well-toned house, no one would have missed it. If anything,

they probably would have been glad to see the eyesore gone. I remember feeling a lot like

that whenever my mother-in-law would go home after a brief visit.

But no, it had to be my house that pulls the disappearing act!

“Weav, I‟m developing a persecution complex. Do you think I should go talk to a

psychiatrist?”

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She snorted, then tried to run ahead and investigate an old beer can on the sidewalk.

Weav has her own agenda.

We passed another vacant building. This one had graffiti all over the walls, but it

didn‟t look like any kind of graffiti I‟d ever seen before. Spray-painted on one wall, in

huge green letters, was “Khattam-Shud.” Sounded vaguely foreign. Could it be

somebody‟s name?

I tried to think what I would tell my boss and the rest of my co-workers. And what

would I tell my Mom, and Mrs. Grossman, and my cousin Hal, and....?

I mean, really, who would ever believe that something like this could happen?

“Yeah, Mom, I‟m sorry you haven‟t been able to get me on the phone, but my house

got up and walked over to the other side of town one night while I was sleeping. But

don‟t worry, I‟m fine.”

Oh, sure, that would go over well.

Then I wondered what would happen if I got back to my lot, and the house was still

there. Well, would it be any harder to clone a house than to move it?

Sure, it would be nice to find my house in its normal place, but then how could I

explain the house in the middle of the field over by Crescent Court? That one was my

house, for sure -- I had spent enough time rummaging around in there this morning to

know. That was my bed, my kitchen, my windows....

Still a few blocks from “home” (it‟s kind of difficult to adjust to a new kind of

location terminology when your main frame of reference suddenly goes somewhere else),

I stopped at another convenience store, picked up a Pepsi and Snickers (hey, you have

your concept of breakfast, I have mine), and a paper. I sat at the bench out front, ingested

my nutrients (such as they were), and thumbed through a few articles.

One that caught my eye was about some archaeologists who had discovered some

never-before-seen cave drawings in a remote area of Germany. There were the usual

depictions of early humans hunting some kind of animal, others showing some of the

people in a group that the archaeologists thought might have been a religious

convocation, etc.

22

And then there was one that utterly mystified everyone who had seen it. It looked

something like this:

The archaeologists had tentatively dated this particular image to about 50,000 B.C.,

which was far older than any of the others on the site, or, in fact, than any previous cave

art discovered anywhere in the world.

The thing in the middle certainly didn‟t look like any animal I ever saw. It looked

more like a trampoline with a bunch of extra supports, but I don‟t suppose they had

trampolines back then. What would they have been made out of, rocks? Not much

bounce.

I decided to keep the paper (I wanted to look at that cave picture some more when I

got a chance), but for now I needed to figure out what to do when I got “home” (there‟s

that terminology quagmire again).

Assuming that:

a. my house was actually “missing,” and

b. my car was still in the driveway,

then I‟d ask Mrs. Grossman to watch Weav while I drove to work and tried to

explain the situation to my boss without looking like an insane lunatic.

23

This should be fun.

When I turned the corner onto Orchard Avenue, I realized I was going to have a

whole new set of issues to deal with.

Thank you for reading the first 3 chapters of Moving Day. If you enjoy the story

and would like to read more then don't hesitate to pick up a copy at

www.amazon.com