A Sinking Feeling

The scale must be lying — seven pounds in twenty minutes was impossible. What’s worse, the scale in the downstairs bathroom was part of the conspiracy too; it had said six pounds. While I’d been feeling mentally sluggish all day, now I felt physically heavy and slow to boot. That the scales confirmed my suspicions was alarming.

Pulling up Google, even my fingers felt like they were dragging, and I clumsily typed in “rapid weight gain.” There was nothing close to the rate I was gaining.

My lunch was just a handful of chips with salsa, washed down by a glass of water, but my stomach felt drooping and bloated. Now searching for symptoms, I realized I felt a bit dizzy, and I was starting to sweat too.

As I scoured the internet for answers, a sudden loud creak downstairs startled me. It was just a floorboard flexing as the house settled, but my mind was on edge, imagining all sorts of crazy scenarios that could explain my present dilemma. Had someone poisoned my food? Did a foreign spy inject me with some DNA altering drug? Were they still in the house? I told my brain to shut up, next thing I'd be imagining I’d been bitten by a radioactive spider.

I needed something to perk up. Ice cold soda usually helped with hangovers, I thought, so why not with this. But getting to the stairs was harder than I expected, and with each step my joints were beginning to ache. How could going down stairs make me winded?

Since I had to pass the downstairs bathroom, I stopped to weigh myself again — I was up eight more pounds. Frightening visions swam through my head. Mutant tumors. An alien growing inside my stomach and bursting through my abdominal wall. It was ridiculous, but clearly something was wrong.

Ok, I thought, just have a drink and then call someone for help.

Squatting to rummage though the fridge was almost unbearable and popping the tab of the tin can seemed to take every ounce of energy I had. The ice from the freezer pelted the glass as it shot out if the dispenser and the clink made me shudder. Even the soda seemed to pour violently, its fizz sounding deeper than normal and somehow sinister. I must be going loopy.

Halfway through the soda, a picture fell from the wall on the other side of the kitchen. Shards of broken glass littered the floor and the cracked wooden frame lay askew, face down. Was there a demon tormenting me? Was this affliction some cruel satanic prank?

Another loud creak from the studs in the wall made me nearly jump out of my skin. I realized the noises had become more frequent.

It was time to call for help, now. I stood up. Then I nearly passed out.

My vision went black around the edges and the room spun. As my sight closed in like a tunnel, I collapsed onto the ceramic tile. Rolling onto my stomach, my arms weighed a ton and it felt as if I was glued to the floor.

Suddenly I was stricken with panic. My phone was upstairs.

There was no way I could stand, let alone climb the stairs — my only hope was to get out to the street. With my strength draining, I crawled down the hall and into the living room. As I rounded the couch towards the front door, another picture fell from the wall.

A moment later the TV crashed down.

Like a bolt of lightning it dawned on me. Gravity. I wasn’t sick and there were no ghosts at play. Gravity was getting stronger. That's why I weighed more, why the house was creaking constantly now, why my stuff was falling from the walls. My muscles were screaming from the extra load and I was sweating from the tremendous exertion.

But why wasn’t there more commotion? I heard no sirens outside, no crashes or explosions. If gravity was increasing planes should be falling from the sky. Cars should be careening off the roads as their drivers felt just as helpless as me.

As I reached the front door, it took all my strength and will power to reach up and twist the knob.

I spilled out onto the stoop and the world was calm.

Down the street I could see cars driving like nothing was wrong. On the horizon a flock of geese sailed through the cloudless blue autumn sky.

Then a sparrow left its perch on my neighbor's roof and flew across the street towards my yard. The second it crossed the threshold of the sidewalk it plummeted like a stone into the flattened grass. That's when I saw the pattern.

The grass was matted flat from its own weight in a rough circle around the house. Beyond the edge of the circle it was standing tall, green, and springy. The distortion of gravity was only affecting my house. I had to get across that line.

Pushing with every fiber of my soul, I crawled towards the sidewalk, wondering how this could be happening. Was it some kind of weapon being tested by the North Koreans? Maybe some Bond-esque super villain sitting in his chateaux in the Alps targeting the wrong woman.

Behind me the house was tremoring as its beams began to flex and splinter, creating a symphony of cracks and snaps. The ground was shaking. I realized my entire yard was about to collapse in on itself.

Somehow amidst the madness I remembered the news saying the number of sinkholes in the state had skyrocketed in the last few months. All the incidents had been fatal.

With my last surge of energy my arms crossed the threshold of the matted grass and felt instantly lighter. Then my head and shoulders. And my chest.

At that moment the house imploded with a thunderous roar and the ground gave way beneath my legs.

My torso was on a solid patch of lawn, but my legs hung down, straining, still in the field of augmented gravity. It was still getting worse.

I slipped back an inch, clawing at the grass and dirt, but the more of my body that re-entered the field, the stronger the pull.

As my fingers failed, I finally felt the force relent.

Too late.

Regular gravity was more than strong enough to pull my falling body into the black abyss.

---

The smell of stale coffee and burnt resin from overworked circuitry were the only things guaranteed in the control room of Z-orbit Inc. The rest was chaos, hanging on the minds of a few brilliant scientists.

Looking at the readouts of some instrument panels, the lead engineer frowned.

“All the calculations say it should be working.” she said. “And the sensors on the anti-gravitational inductor show positive traction, but the readings at the launch pad have been zero the whole time.”

The billionaire-owned space company had just failed their latest full-scale test to levitate a shuttle using anti-gravity. It was the first step to an actual launch.

“Check the calibration and try again.” The CEO barked. “I don’t care how revolutionary the scale model tests were, if we can’t get the gravity manipulator to move the test shuttle soon, it’s all of our asses on the line.”

The engineering team went back to work, unaware of a missing conversion from English units to metric deep within the code — one that shifted the machine’s effect by a hundred or so miles.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to read some of my other short stories, check out:
The BitFriar Files: Theft of the Stolen Prototype – Part I.
The BitFriar Files: Theft of the Stolen Prototype – Part II.

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