“Dad, have you seen my matches?” Sarah called out from the kitchen, her voice tinged with frustration.
“They’re probably where you last left them,” her father responded without looking up from his newspaper, which had mysteriously transformed into a sheet of burning paper that didn’t consume itself.
Sarah sighed, opening drawer after drawer. The matches had become an obsession lately - not for lighting cigarettes or candles, but because they were the only things that kept her family from floating away. Each morning, she had to light one match per person, letting the smoke wrap around their ankles like ethereal anchors.
“This is getting ridiculous,” her mother chimed in, currently hovering a few inches above her favorite armchair. “We should just accept our new reality. The neighbors haven’t questioned why we bounce along the ceiling during dinner parties.”
Sarah watched as her mother’s hair drifted upward, defying gravity like seaweed in an invisible current. “But what about Tommy? He’s only seven - he cried all night when he woke up stuck to his bedroom ceiling last week.”
As if on cue, Tommy floated past the kitchen doorway, giggling as he performed slow-motion somersaults. “Look, Sarah! I’m an astronaut!”
“You’re not an astronaut, honey,” their mother said softly, though her words came out as tiny butterflies that fluttered around the room before dissolving into sparkles.
Sarah’s father finally folded his eternally burning newspaper. “The matches are becoming harder to find,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Last week, I saw the local convenience store selling them by the individual stick. The cashier’s head had turned into a cash register, but that’s beside the point.”
The family had learned to take such transformations in stride. Ever since the day they’d woken up to find gravity had become optional in their household, things had gotten progressively stranger. The matches were their only tether to normalcy, though Sarah sometimes wondered if normalcy was worth pursuing anymore.
“Found them!” Tommy suddenly exclaimed from above, pointing to the top of the refrigerator where a single matchbox lay. Sarah stretched upward, her feet leaving the ground as she reached for it.
Opening the box, her heart sank. “Just one match left.”
The family gathered around the kitchen table - or rather, floated in a rough approximation of their usual seating arrangement. The single match seemed to mock them from the center of the table.
“We could share it,” Tommy suggested hopefully. “Maybe if we all hold hands when you light it…”
Sarah’s mother reached out, her fingers intertwining with her husband’s. “It’s worth a try.”
As they joined hands in a floating circle, Sarah struck the match. The flame danced, casting shadows that took the shape of distant memories on the walls. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, they all dropped - not to the floor, but through it, falling into a sky that had somehow replaced their foundation.
They held tight to each other, falling up (or was it down?) through clouds that tasted like cotton candy and past birds that spoke in rhyming couplets. When they finally landed, they found themselves exactly where they’d started - in their kitchen - except everything was upside down.
Or perhaps they were the ones upside down now.
Tommy broke the silence first: “Can we have breakfast like this?”
His mother laughed, and the sound materialized as tiny golden bells that rolled across the ceiling-floor. “Why not? Nothing says we can’t start a new normal.”
Sarah smiled, watching the last match’s ember fade away. Sometimes, she realized, convenience wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Sometimes the inconvenient things - like floating families and upside-down breakfasts - made life worth living.
“Pass the cereal,” her father said. “And watch out for the gravity - it tends to get playful around mealtimes these days.”