When I shuffle into his bedroom, Felix is sitting cross-legged on the ceiling, upside down, already in his PJ’s, his shaggy blonde hair dangling from his head. I stop in my tracks, lean against the doorframe. I thought we’d have more time.

“Oh buddy…” is all I can muster at first, my stomach sinking. I try again, not wanting to seem panicked or scared, not wanting to make my fear his fear. “How’s the view from up there?”

Felix doesn’t miss a beat. “Weird.”

“So much for cleaning your room before bed, I guess.”

Felix smiles at this, all teeth, and my chest warms. “Well technically it’s super clean up here!” he says, spreading his arms out. I laugh, seeing what he means. The floor is littered with all the usual controlled chaos of toys, books, art supplies. But the ceiling — his floor now — is almost totally bare, save for the bed I’d mounted up there just last week, anticipating this very thing. There’d been the signs. The growing moonbounce of his walk, his arms slightly levitating off the dinner table when we ate together. But I was hoping for a longer in-between stage before he inverted completely. I think of the videos Mark and Peggy sent of their twin girls giggling, floating around their living room, bouncing against one another like balloons.

“I can mount more stuff up there for you next weekend,” I tell Felix, my neck craned, trying to seem like it’s the most normal thing in the world talking to him like this. “Glad we got your bed done though. Oh wait! I have special sheets. And a pillow.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Felix says, already groggily yawning. They say the first few days of the switch wear them out like nothing else.

“No, no, they have velcro so they stick to the bed. I’ll go get them.”

I watch Felix crawl across the ceiling, over the metal brackets keeping his bed suspended and secure, and onto the mattress. It’s heavily reinforced, but I still worry I didn’t do it right. I worry about everything.

Before I leave to get the sheets, I turn back to Felix, sprawled out on his bed and quickly drifting, eyelids heavy. “They’re going to figure this out, bud. They’re close. I was reading an article today,” I’m rambling.

“I know, Dad,” he says, his voice thick and drowsy.

Downstairs I sort through the stack of boxes, all the supplies they have for this now. An assortment of braces, tethers, harnesses. I ordered a little of everything, not really knowing what I was doing. Ashamed to be this clueless.

Felix is eight years old, and I have no idea how to keep him safe in this world. When a child’s gravity inverts the family has two choices, basically: Try to fight it and keep them earthbound with straps and leashes and even sometimes, like the McKinleys did with their twins, cartoonishly large suction cups. Option two is to try to make the house more accommodating for them. My coworker Rosa actually bought identicals of every piece of furniture in her house and had them mounted onto the ceiling, mirror-like, so her daughter would have the exact same experience after she flipped. I guess this is the route I’m taking, too, gradually. But it’s hard not to second-guess myself. I cock my head, trying to see everything from Felix’s new perspective.

I finally find the boxes with the sheets and pillow in them. Through the kitchen window, across the alley, I notice another house has put poles and netting up, enclosing their backyard. Lucky. I’m still on the waiting list for netting while they prioritize schools, daycare centers, playgrounds. At some point, if this goes on long enough, they’ll just cover the whole city with nets, or a giant cage, or something. I wish I could find more comfort in that, more hope. We’ve all seen the photos, the videos. We all know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody. There will always be a kid who slips away. There will always be a chance that kid will get scared, grab hold of another kid, take them into the sky with them, beyond the clouds.

I trudge back upstairs and find Felix already sound asleep and snoring gently in his ceiling bed, the northern lights projector I got him for his birthday spinning an array of violets, oranges, greens, pinks, and blues across his fragile body, his perfect face. I stand underneath him, reach up on my tiptoes and graze the tips of his golden locks with my fingers.

“You’ll be okay,” I whisper. “First they need to figure out why it’s happening to just kids, and then they can…” I trail off. I have no idea what I’m talking about, not really.

I suddenly remember I loaned our step ladder to Rosa. I have no way to get up to Felix and tuck him in. I scan his dark room, looking for a solution. Then I realize the solution is everywhere. Quietly I begin making a pile of Felix’s stuff. Ottoman, chair, boxes, cushions, up and up. Not totally secure, not perfectly stable, but good enough. I scale it slowly, sheets and pillow folded under my arm, until I’m up at his bed, right next to him. My son. I unfold the sheets and cover his body, velcroing the edges along the sides. I gently lift his head, tuck his pillow under it, carefully fastening it to the mattress cover.

Then, heart breaking with more love and fear than I know what to do with, I kick my leg up, above his bed, hoist my body up, leaving the floor behind, and swing myself over so I’m clinging onto the side of the bed next to him, gripping with all my strength, imagining for a moment that nothing has changed. Lying next to Felix, watching him dream, gravity be damned. Pretending I can hold on forever without falling.

 

 

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Okay Donkey, HAD, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.