House of Lincoln

2

I waited with anticipation which hung me by the throat. I felt choked, and I was extremely nervous to the point I couldn't stand still. I know Clyde is coming, I think I'm just eager to show him. That nervous energy soon shoots down into my stomach when I hear a knock on the door. He's here, and I greet him. Now this was a friend—someone who drops a birthday party just to come see what's troubling you. I never took a moment to appreciate Clyde. For a second, while he said hello, I appreciated him. "Thanks for coming. I'm sorry about having you miss the party, but trust me, you need to see." He nods. I lead him inside and up to my room. We enter and I shut the door behind us. Clyde waits silently for me to explain what strange thing I'm about to have him observe. My eagerness forms itself now into anxious shaking hands, which I use to gesture over to my closet. "I want to start with the smallest thing. You see my closet?" He nods with his eyes focused on it. I open up the closet's doors, where Clyde can see nothing inside. "Hand me something." Clyde makes a confused face before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pencil. "Will this work?" I honestly don't know, but it's worth a try, I thought. He hands it to me, and I place it on the closet's shelf and close the doors.

"Okay. What now?" Clyde was willing to entertain my odd interest in a closet, but it was clear to me that he was a bit impatient. He was ready to understand what saddened me, but he wanted to grasp it as quickly as possible. I made him wait, pausing a few seconds. Then, I opened the closet doors again. This time looking inside—we saw no pencil. It had disappeared, just like many of my shirts and jeans had, all gone into a void beyond this world I'd assume—somewhere out floating in space maybe. "Where'd it go?" (It's odd how I bragged to you about how smart Clyde was, and yet he can't figure out something so elementary. The pencil vanished. It disappeared. With his logical thinking mind, it's only natural that when faced with something one cannot explain, they are to ask questions. And so he did, which frustrated me because he had asked the same question that I'd been swirling in my head for the past few weeks. I don't know what to tell him, accept that very fact: I don't know. "I don't know where it went, Clyde. Isn't that strange to you? It's unexplainable." Then he asked a question that I'd never thought of, surprisingly. Maybe my head was trying to keep me safe by blocking out the possibility: "What if I stand inside it?" No doubt it was a bold idea, but just as smarts come with logic, so does risk with danger. It would be foolish to experiment like that when even my intelligent partner doesn't understand the science of a disappearing closet. It would be outrageously dangerous. So, I suggested, "What if we use the cat?"

Clyde and I went searching for the cat, and while we looked up and down for him, Clyde questioned me a bit. "So that's what's depressing you? A magic closet?" He wanted to smile, but he respected me too much to do so. "There's more than the closet. I wanted to start with the simplest thing. I'll show you more after." After, I meant, we found that damn cat, which seemed to be an excellent hider. Perhaps he sensed our plans and immediately ran off to safety. I was pleasantly shocked when Clyde agreed to help me stuff a cat into a "magic closet" (as he put it). It just goes to show how intriguing the unexplainable is, even when it comes to skeptics or those who try to form their own conclusions. But this wasn't the meat of it yet, we were temporarily focusing on a closet—the smallest aspect of a house. We had so much more to go, and it scared me. Eventually, to my cat's dismay, we discovered him in the corner of Lori's room. He was pressed up against the wall and hissed at us with ferocity. He was a domestic cat who at this moment turned feral. He didn't scratch us though, instead, he was carried in Clyde's arms, shaking and nearly paralyzed with fear. I'm guessing we gave the little guy a scare... but it seemed he was already afraid before we even found him. These are the other small things this house perplexes me with. It's something as small as that, and yet it has me running hypothetical answers through my head for minutes, and then probably, hours tomorrow.

We put the sulky fur ball onto the floor of the closet, which he instantaneously shot out of and rushed for the door. Luckily, I caught him before he got out of the room, and I told Clyde to "Maybe close the door." With great struggle, we tried stuffing the cat into the closet and arduously tried to seal the doors without closing them on the cat's head. Soon we were met with a click as we finally got the cat shut inside, and me and Clyde practically wiped the sweat off our foreheads. The cat's fight didn't end there, though, and he tried desperately to scratch his way out. No matter how hard the cat tried, there was no way he would be let out. He was trapped in his arcane prison, and only for the sake of learning the level of maliciousness behind it. He wasn't a cat as much as he was now a guinea pig. A guinea pig being pricked and poked with syringes and needles to see if it got sick or not. The scratching stopped, and me and Clyde looked at each other. He was a little scared to look I think, because he nodded for me to do it. I slowly opened both doors at once, and inside, we saw absolutely no cat—nor any scratches for that matter. Not a hair—not a whisker—not a claw—was left.