Epistolary fiction; Experiments -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
When he got well, Mrs. Burroughs told him, "From now on, you're going
to have three meals a day and eight hours sleep, and in between you can
play on your _whiskaboom_ all you please."
The _whiskabooming_ became as familiar to us as our own voices.
Last Sunday, Mrs. Burroughs and I came home from church, about noon.
She went inside through the front door to fix dinner. I walked around
the house to look at the garden. And the moment I walked past the front
of the house, I got the shock of my life.
The house disappeared!
* * * * *
I was too surprised to stop walking, and a step later I was standing at
the back of the house, and it was all there. I took a step back and the
whole house vanished again. One more step and I was at the front.
It looked like a real house in front and in back, but there wasn't any
in-between. It was like one of those false-front saloons on a movie
lot, but thinner.
I thought of my wife, who had gone into the kitchen and, for all I
knew, was as thin as the house, and I went charging in the back door,
yelling.
"Are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right," she said. "What's the matter with you?"
I grabbed her and she was all there, thank heavens. She giggled and
called me an old fool, but I dragged her outside and showed her what
had happened to our house.
She saw it, too, so I knew I didn't have sunstroke, but she couldn't
understand it any better than I.
Right about then, I detected a prominent absence of _whiskabooming_.
"Jack!" I hollered, and we hurried back into the house and upstairs.
Well, Mr. Gretch, it was so pitiful, I can't describe it. He was there,
but I never saw a more miserable human being. He was not only thin but
also flat, like a cartoon of a man who had been steamrollered. He was
lying on the bed, holding onto the covers, with no more substance to
him than a thin piece of paper. Less.
Mrs. Burroughs took one of his shoulders between her thumb and
forefinger, and I took the other, and we held him up. There was a
breeze coming through the window and Jack--well, he waved in the breeze.
We closed the window and laid him down again and he tried to explain
what had happened. "Professor Einstein wouldn't have liked this!" he
moaned. "Something went wrong," he cried, shuddering.
He went on gasping and mumbling, and we gathered that he had hooked up
a circuit the wrong way. "I didn't harness the fourth--I chopped off
the third dimension! Einstein wouldn't have approved!"
He was relieved to learn that the damage had been confined to himself
and the house, so far as we knew. Like the house, Jack had insides, but
we don't know where they are. We poured tea down him, and he can eat,
after a fashion, but there never is a sign of a lump anywhere.
* * * * *
That night, we pinned him to the bed with clothespins so he wouldn't
blow off the bed. Next morning, we rigged a line and pinned him to it
so he could sit up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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