I can now say with some authority that a consequence of experiencing the inexplicable is that it recontextualizes everything that has happened and continues to happen. The entirety of your history is as irreal and inescapable as that impossible moment when the uncanny trod upon your life. Later, in the yawning, chasmic aftermath, the banality of the impossible no longer being possible becomes intolerable by comparison. Perhaps that is the truth of all things, as untenable as that is.

Dude. Lighten up. It’s a funky dresser.

Angling my head (which, despite the shock[s], hadn’t cleared and filled with the static of dread, of the fear of the near future, as if there were any other type of fear) I looked and pleaded for space between the dresser’s legs and the floor, and I did not find any. I uprooted and slowly backed away. The camera rattled in my shaking hands, and I waited for the other shoe, as they say, to drop. I didn’t have to wait long.

The dresser rose off the floor and hovered in its elevated position. To be clear, it wasn’t resting on the floor and then in a blink back where it had hung previously. I watched it lift and traverse a vertical distance. One of the rusted rollers swiveled and turned in lazy airborne circles. Autonomically shuffling backward, my right leg clipped the couch. I stumbled but didn’t fall. After a breathless pause, perhaps impatient with my clumsy interruption, the dresser continued its ascent.

Then the coffee table drifted off the floor, taking Mercy’s bag as a passenger. To my right, the lamp and the end table knocked into my elbow as it too clambered toward the ceiling. I turned my back on the levitating scene. If I refused to watch, then it wasn’t happening. I didn’t want to see any more. I couldn’t see any more because I was full. There was no more room in my head for madness.

The quality and focus of the light changed as the lamp continued rising behind me. Spotlighted, miles away, was the apartment’s door. I would leave. I had to leave. The first step was always the slowest, the most unsure, the most vulnerable, and the stone in my chest splashed into the bottom of a well as I knew something was now behind me. Something with big eyes to see me. More than the sensation of being watched; it was the feeling of being sized-up for predation, a feeling centered not in your brain but rattling within the brittle bones at the base of your exposed neck. I would not turn, and I would not confront. I would run.

My first step didn’t land. I lifted off the floor as though there were strings that began inside my toes and the tips of my fingers, and those strands ran up the length of my body, weaving into a thin rope at the crown of my head, and it poked through like the wick of a candle that had been pinched and yanked upward. I moaned a prey animal’s elegy and lament that not only was I powerless to save myself, but the final horror and indignity to be suffered through apparently required so little effort to perpetrate.