Dizziness Day Part two

Two hours and fourteen minutes after the wobble ended, the repercussions began. It wasn’t the kind of thing that announced itself with a grand fanfare, but rather with a quiet, undeniable oddity.

It started with Nora O’Brannigan’s baguette. She’d been holding it loosely for hours, a long, crusty question mark. When the world righted itself, the baguette didn’t. It hung in mid-air, a foot above her hand, suspended as if on an invisible wire. Nora poked it tentatively, then firmly, then smacked it with the flat of her hand. It didn’t budge.

“Mrs McFadden!” she called out, her voice a little shaky. “My bread! It’s… stuck.”

Mrs McFadden, who was already meticulously checking the condensed milk supply, squinted at the floating baguette. “Hmm,” she said, blinking four times, a new, more serious anomaly response. “Looks like some of the dizziness got stuck, too.”

And she was right.

All over Ballykillduff, little pockets of the wobble remained. Mr O’Shaughnessy the butcher awoke to find his pyramid of sausages still staggering in a figure-eight pattern. When he tried to restack them, they simply continued their hypnotic dance, a conga line of pork. The church steeple remained politely bowed to the chemist’s shop, and every time the bells rang, the entire building swayed with a gentle, polite nod.

The postbox, which had flung out its letters like confetti, continued to do so. Every morning at 8 a.m., it would spin on its little leg, sending a new bundle of letters—addressed to people who had moved away years ago or contained grocery lists from the week before—fluttering across the village green. The postman, now resigned to his fate, simply collected them with a sigh and went on his way.

Even the birds, now flying straight, occasionally got caught in a pocket of old dizziness. A flock of sparrows would suddenly break formation and perform a series of perfect, dizzy loops before righting themselves and continuing on. It became a new local sport for the children, who would gather at the village green and throw breadcrumbs, waiting for the aerial ballet to begin.

The most magnificent residue of Dizziness Day, however, belonged to the Official Anti-Spin Beacon. The golden traffic cone, placed with such gravitas by Councillor McGroggin, had become the epicentre of a permanent, low-level spin. The fountain beneath it, once gushing water straight into the air, now swirled it in a gentle, perpetual vortex, creating miniature whirlpools that mesmerised anyone who watched for too long.

One day, a tourist passing through the village stopped at the duck pond, utterly captivated by the sight. “What a remarkable piece of kinetic art!” he exclaimed to Farmer Doherty, who was trying to milk his cow while it stood at a permanent 45-degree angle. “Is it for some kind of art festival?”

Farmer Doherty looked at the swirling water, then at his oddly angled cow, and shrugged. “Art? No, sure that’s just the day the world went a bit daft and never quite came back.”

And in Ballykillduff, that seemed like a perfectly good explanation. The villagers learned to live with their little wobbles. They accepted that some things, once truly off-kilter, would never quite return to normal. And that, in its own way, was a kind of new normal—a quiet, constant hum of the unusual that kept life from ever being boring. After all, if the world doesn’t wobble every now and then, how do you know it’s still alive?