UPSIDE DOWN

The sky was the color of a fresh bruise, a heavy, pulsating violet that hummed at a frequency that made the silverware vibrate.
Elias reached across the breakfast table and adjusted his napkin. The hum was loud enough to make the milk in his cereal bowl form perfect, concentric ripples, but he simply took a bite and nodded at his wife.

"The forecast said we might get more of it this afternoon," Martha said, gesturing toward the window where the neighbor’s golden retriever was currently drifting twenty feet above the lawn, rowing its legs uselessly against the air.

"More of the violet?" Elias asked.
"More of the heaviness. I should probably bring the patio chairs in before they start to leak."

Elias glanced at the heavy wrought-iron chairs on the deck. One of them had already begun to soften, its legs stretching like taffy and sinking into the floorboards as if the metal had forgotten how to be solid. "Good thinking. Wouldn’t want a mess."

The Commute

The drive to work was standard, despite the fact that the road now required a thirty-degree tilt to navigate. Gravity was becoming subjective in the suburbs, a suggestion rather than a law.
Elias pulled into the office lot. Most of the cars were parked at odd angles; some were resting on their roofs, though the drivers simply climbed out of the windows, smoothed their suits, and beeped their fobs to lock the doors.
In the lobby, the receptionist, Sarah, was wearing a thick veil of gauze over her face. Behind the mesh, Elias could see the faint, rhythmic glow of something that definitely wasn't a human eye, but he offered a polite smile regardless.
"Morning, Sarah. Did you catch the game last night?"
"Briefly," she said, her voice sounding like two stones rubbing together. "But the ball turned into a flock of starlings in the fourth quarter. It made the scoring quite difficult to follow."
"Referees have been leaning into the chaos lately," Elias remarked, tapping his badge on the reader. "Consistency is a lost art."

The Meeting

The conference room was humid. This was largely because a localized rainstorm was occurring exclusively over the mahogany table.
Mr. Henderson, the department head, sat at the head of the table, his tie soaked through, water cascading off his nose and onto his notepad. The rest of the team sat around the dry perimeter, pens poised.
"Our quarterly projections are… fluid," Henderson said, ignoring the lightning bolt that arced from his water glass to the ceiling fan. "We need to address the stagnation in the Midwest sector."
"Sir," Marcus interrupted from the far end of the table. Marcus’s left arm had been replaced since yesterday with a crystalline structure that hummed a low B-flat. "The Midwest sector doesn't exist anymore. It folded into the Fourth Dimension during the Tuesday lunch hour."
Henderson sighed, a spray of mist leaving his lips. "I know, Marcus. We all saw the memo. But 'non-existent' is no excuse for a dip in productivity. We need to pivot. Adapt. Perhaps we can market to whatever resides in the Fold."
"The geometry is a bit hostile," Marcus noted, adjusting his crystal sleeve.
"Every market has its hurdles," Elias added, feeling the sudden, sharp sensation of his own teeth turning into soft velvet. He didn't mention it. It would have been unprofessional to derail the meeting for a personal dental shift.

The Evening

When Elias returned home, the front door was three inches wider than it had been that morning, and the house smelled faintly of burnt cinnamon and static. Martha was in the kitchen, stirring a pot of soup. She was standing on the ceiling.
"Hard day?" she asked, her hair hanging down toward the floor like a dark curtain.
"The usual," Elias said. He kicked off his shoes, which floated toward the ceiling to join her. He climbed the wall with a practiced, rhythmic gait, hooking his knees into the crown molding to sit beside her. "Henderson wants us to expand into the Fold."
"He always was ambitious," Martha said, handing him a bowl. The soup stayed in the dish through sheer force of habit.
They sat together in the corner of the ceiling, looking out the window. Outside, the sun was setting, or perhaps it was cracking open—a great white rift was tearing across the violet sky, revealing a glimpse of a clockwork mechanism so vast it defied the eye.
"Beautiful evening," Elias whispered.
"It really is," Martha agreed, leaning her head on his shoulder. "I'm glad we stayed in."

The next morning, the "glitch" arrived during the toast.
Elias was reaching for the butter when his reflection in the stainless steel toaster didn’t reach back. Instead, the reflected Elias simply sat there, arms crossed, staring out of the curved metal surface with a look of profound, exhausted boredom.
Elias paused. He moved his hand to the left. The reflection stayed still.
"Martha," Elias said softly, his voice steady. "The toaster is being a bit... literal this morning."
Martha leaned over, her feet suctioning slightly to the ceiling tiles as she peered down. She looked at the toaster, then at the Elias inside the toaster, who was now picking his teeth with a reflected fingernail.
"Oh, dear," she murmured. "It’s probably just the humidity. Or the magnetism from the rift. Did you try unplugging it?"
"I did," Elias said. He pulled the cord. The reflected Elias didn't vanish; he just sighed, leaned back in his reflected chair, and pulled out a newspaper that didn't exist in the physical kitchen.
"It's a bit disruptive to the flow of the room, isn't it?" Martha asked, her brow furrowing just a fraction. This was the most emotion she had shown since the gravity had loosened its grip on the neighborhood.
"It’s an inconsistency," Elias agreed. "I’ll drop it off at the repair shop on the way to the office."

The Repair Shop

The "Fix-It" shop was located in a part of town where the air felt like wet wool and the shadows tended to bark. The proprietor, a man named Arthur whose torso was roughly three feet behind his legs, took the toaster and placed it on a workbench.
"Reflective insubordination," Arthur grunted, his voice coming from the empty space between his head and his chest. "Seeing a lot of that lately. The surfaces are getting tired of mimicking us. High-stress environment, you know?"
"Can it be synced back up?" Elias asked. He tried not to look at the workbench, where a toaster-oven was currently barking at a wrench.
"I can recalibrate the silvering," Arthur said, poking the reflected Elias in the eye. The reflection recoiled and made a silent, vulgar gesture. "But honestly, Mr. Thorne, have you considered just letting it be? Most people are moving toward non-reactive surfaces anyway. It’s much more 'in' this season to have a house that doesn't acknowledge you at all."
"I prefer the traditionalism of a mirror," Elias said firmly. "It grounds the morning routine."
"Suit yourself. I’ll have it done by five. Assuming five o’clock still follows four o'clock today."

The Break in the Script

On the walk back to his car, Elias saw it.
In the middle of the sidewalk, a woman was screaming. It wasn't the scream of someone who had lost their keys or someone annoyed by the sky’s violet hum. It was a raw, jagged sound—the sound of someone who had looked at the dog floating twenty feet in the air and realized it shouldn't be there.
"It’s wrong!" she shrieked, pointing at a lamppost that was slowly turning into a giant stalk of celery. "None of this is real! The sky is broken! Why are you all walking? Why are you going to work?!"
A businessman in a pinstriped suit paused beside her, checking his watch. "Excuse me, miss, you’re blocking the flow of traffic. Some of us have a ten-thirty."

"Look at the sun!" she wailed, grabbing the man’s lapels. "It’s a gear! It’s a literal clockwork gear!"
The man gently uncoupled her fingers from his suit. He looked up at the massive, grinding cogs visible through the rift in the atmosphere, then looked back at her with a polite, vacant smile. "It’s a very efficient design, I think. Very industrial. Now, if you’ll excuse me."
Elias watched. He felt a cold prickle at the back of his neck—a memory of a world where lampposts were metal and reflections were slaves to their masters. For a second, his velvet teeth felt sharp again.
He stepped toward her. He wanted to say... something.
"Miss," Elias said, his voice cracking.
The woman turned to him, her eyes bloodshot and wild. "You see it, don't you? Tell me you see the gear!"
Elias looked at the gear. He looked at the celery lamppost. Then he looked at his shoes, which were beginning to sprout tiny, functional wings.
"I see that you’re overwrought," Elias said, his voice regaining its smooth, rhythmic calm. "Perhaps it’s the pollen. The violet blooms are quite heavy this year. You should go home and put some ice on your temples. It helps with the... hallucinations."
The woman’s face fell. The fire in her eyes went out, replaced by a hollow, terrifying silence. She looked around at the street full of people pretending that the world wasn't unraveling, and she simply sat down on the sidewalk.
"Pollen," she whispered to herself. "Right. The pollen."
"Exactly," Elias said, nodding. "Have a productive Tuesday."

The Return

That evening, Elias picked up the toaster. The reflection was back in sync, mimicking his every move with perfect, mechanical obedience.
He sat at the kitchen table on the ceiling with Martha. They ate their soup in the violet light of the grinding sky.
"Did you get it fixed?" she asked.
"I did," Elias said. "Everything is back to normal."
He looked into the toaster. His reflection looked back, smiling exactly when he smiled, blinking exactly when he blinked. But as Elias turned away to reach for his water, he could have sworn—just for a millisecond—that the reflection’s smile lingered a second longer than his own.
He didn't mention it.
"The soup is delicious, Martha," he said instead. "Is that cumin?"