prompt: resolve, title: whoopsie-doodles in misc. flash fiction

It wasn’t so much he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, we all do that time-to-time. It was which wrong side he awoke upon. He didn’t wake up on the right side or the left, he somehow woke up underneath it instead, the wrong-est side of them all. “How did this happen to me?” he asked himself, “I wasn’t drinking last night, I remember falling asleep as normal.” He managed to shimmy out from the underneath and, upon examining the situation, it didn’t seem his bed had been moved over him. The divots in his carpet were where they were supposed to be, the wheels at the bottom of the bed-frame perfect in their usual ruts. The rug, the bed, himself, all creatures of comfortable ruts and yet there he had been, sleeping under the bed. Even in the face of grand mystery like this, it was often beyond him to even investigate, a man of accepting things as they were so he could soon return to his easy-if-uninteresting patterns. This once, he had the resolve to investigate but still didn’t need to, as the answers all came directly.

The previous night, on the other side of the planet, something had gone whoopsie-doodles at the CERN super-collider. It put Earth out of quantum phase with the rest of reality for an itsy-bitsy sliver of a second, but considering how fast it spins on its axis, how swiftly it circles the sun and how quickly that sun spirals about the Milky Way, it was more than enough to put a few things out of sorts. Turning on the television, he learned how awfully that’d turned out for some folks, fusing them into walls or into the ground below, killing them instantly. He also learned that for others, it just moved them one foot over or a single inch up in the sky to take a stumble, barely noticing at all. He was however with the vast majority, having suffered neither swift death nor dismemberment, but having experienced some disorienting temporary effect.

“That’s my life,” he decided, “no big change either way, just another passing inconvenience.”

He got a text from the place where he worked, announcing they’d be closed for the rest of the week, while they sorted out who’d died or disappeared and he thought, “There is that, at least, some paid time-off. A snow day.” So he went back to sleep, a little concerned where he’d next awaken, but happy for the extra shut-eye.

Earth could stop spinning entirely but for most, as long as it started back up and nothing lasting affected them, they’d move heaven and Earth to pretend it never happened or, at least, that it was never happening again. A perhaps-fatal quirk of the human race is how the folks who get “lucky” just end up with a new excuse to never grow or change in any appreciable way. Perhaps those who endure but ultimately learn are the real winners, after all.