• Inspire Stories #3: Buildings and Bridges
    >> http://www.amycaseypainting.com/images/cityupsidedown.jpg <<



    She’d felt like she had been growing upside down for quite some time, so she was fine when the city tipped over.

    It had happened at night, while everyone else slept or was otherwise occupied with nighttime deeds. She’d been tucked in so tightly that when it happened, she’d stayed put. She didn’t realize it until morning.

    It made going to the bathroom a little more difficult, but other than that, nothing seemed to have changed. She simply walked around on the roof instead of trying desperately to find a way to get to the old floor. Some houses seemed to have fallen away, but luckily, hers had gotten caught in the telephone poles.

    She peeked outside the door that first morning, looking down. The sky was on the ground now. It was the color of old parchment, with a tiny white dot where the sun was. Or maybe it wasn’t the sun anymore. Maybe the whole planet had been flipped around. Maybe it was the center of the earth, now floating inside a whole universe made of ground. That would be neat.

    She walked back inside to find a brush. It would be harder to find things now that the cabinets were all on the ceiling. She picked one up off the window, glad that her house had fallen just enough that there was a nice, straight-across floor, instead of one of the houses that had a particular corner facing down, so that all they had were slides. She wondered how she’d go and visit Abigail now.

    She yanked a brush through her fleecy brown hair and sighed. Even upside down, this city was boring.

    She went to sit on the porch, but settled for the doorframe. She heard her sister gasp behind her.

    “Get away from there! Quit swinging your legs like that! You could fall off, or worse, swing us all the way off the cables!”

    “We’re fine,” she groaned, laying back. “And even if we fall, who’s to say we wouldn’t end up somewhere nicer? We might just be in Hell now. Or maybe Purgatory. I hear you stay there quite a while.”

    “You’ve gone absolutely mad!” her sister yelled, running off. She chuckled to herself grimly. Running was probably worse than any leg-swinging.

    She sat there for a few hours. She’d gleaned from the few neighbors who’d chanced a yell at her that Abigail hadn’t been so lucky. Her house had apparently fallen as soon as the city flipped. Unfortunate.

    Then a voice came out of nowhere, literally. There was no way someone could be standing in front of her, but there was the voice, asking her, “Hey there. How are you?”

    She sat up and saw a boy about her age hovering in the air. He had a helmet, old-fashioned aviator goggles, and what seemed to be a jetpack keeping him afloat. From what she could see, he was rather cute.

    “I’m fine,” she said, neither her face nor her voice betraying her surprise. “You?”

    He smiled. “About the same. Not too happy about my house, but hey, what can you do?”

    “Ah, I know how that is.”

    He chuckled and looked at her. “You’re not scared of this like everyone else is?”

    She shrugged. “It doesn’t feel much different than before. Just a little harder to do certain things. Learning how to flush the toilet was interesting.”

    He let out a loud laugh and held out his hand. “You’re all right. Hey, wanna take a look around?”

    She nodded, again refusing to let her feelings show. She liked that he liked her. No one ever liked her. She was that dour girl living in the big white house on the corner of Orchard and Main. It was nice.

    When he picked her up and started flying, though, she suddenly understood why everyone was afraid. There was nothing below. There was that little white dot hanging around, the sort-of sun, and a vast emptiness that, were she not fearing for her life, she might have spent the day contemplating.

    The pilot-boy didn’t seem to care that at any moment, they might plummet down toward the void, a wistful sort of smile on his face. She carefully put her arms around his neck. “Where are we going?”

    “Somewhere. Not really sure. Anywhere you particularly want to go?”

    She almost said Abigail’s, but remembered that her house had fallen. There wasn’t a way to get to her now—or was there?

    “Um…do you know why this happened?” she asked. Flooding thoughts were building up her paranoia. Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted him.

    He sighed. “I’m afraid not. I’m the scientist’s son, you see, so we’re not terribly frightened of things like this. You should’ve seen the things I was scared would crawl out from under my bed as a child. Those were something truly terrible.”

    She nodded and looked around. There wasn’t a scientist in their town. He talked differently, too. For a moment, she thought he might be British, but that wasn’t quite it. It was a crisper dialect, still distinctly American, but not exactly right.

    “What year is it?” she blurted.

    “Why, 1941, dear girl,” he replied. “Shouldn’t you know what year it is by now, what with the war on and all?”

    “It’s 2009 where I come from,” she said quietly. “Do you think…do you think this is hell?”

    “Oh, far from it,” he said. “I mean, this is actually rather a peaceful place. No bombs, no bodies, and no noisy sirens to keep me up at night. 2009, though. Long ways off from my time. What’s it like?”

    She sighed. “Uh, normal? There’s sort of a war, but it’s not on our soil or anything. If you know where Iraq is?”

    He nodded. “Always a war on, then, it seems.”

    She smiled uneasily. “Do you know what’s down there?”

    He shook his head. “No. Think we ought to find out?”

    She bit her lip and looked back at her home in all its overturned glory. She turned back to the pilot boy, his jetpack, the unknown.

    “Let’s.”