While reading I glanced out the window and saw a deer. Daylight deer sightings are rare, so I went out to watch. There turned out to be four deer, slowly making their way up the block, stopping here and there to eat a rose or some leaves. One of them was limping a bit, having injured a hind leg. It was a very peaceful scene until the people across the street came spilling out of their house with their noisy kids. The deer hurried up the street then, and I went back indoors. It was still gray and damp outside anyway.
About then I figured that even if I wasn't hungry, the feral cats would be, so I went out and put food in their bowls. Farah appeared, and was very happy to see me, but didn't eat much. Alger wasn't around. I went back indoors, fired up the computer and spent an hour or so on the Internets. Then I noticed that the sun was coming out. There hasn't been much sun for several days, so I went back outside to enjoy it.
I was expecting to see the sun settling among the pine trees to the southwest, but as I entered the garage I noticed that the shadow of the roof was beyond the door, and no light was falling on the garage floor. When I got all the way out I saw that the front of the house was still in shadow. The sun had not even reached noon! I'd been awake well over an hour by then, so it was quite disorienting to realize that I'd gotten up at three o'clock in the afternoon and more than an hour later it was not yet even noon.
The only possible explanations I could see for this strange event were that either I had misread the clock, or the rotation of the earth had been reversed. I've always thought that the reversal of the planet's rotation would lead to catastrophic events such as massive earthquakes and tsunamis and such. Apparently I was wrong. The earth had been turning backward for an hour an a half— it must have reversed its rotation about the time I woke up— and the only other thing out of the ordinary that had happened was that the clocks had also begun to run backward. When I checked the clock on returning indoors after making my discovery, it read 11:54. That means time is going twice as fast backward as it went going forward. At least I'm pretty sure that's what is happening.
So here we are, in a world totally changed. A twelve-hour day is probably going to be quite distressing to most people, but my sleep schedule has been so badly disrupted for such a long time now that I probably won't even notice— just as I didn't notice for such a long time after waking that both the earth's rotation and the flow of time had been reversed. I don't think it's an exaggeration for me to say that this may be quite the oddest, and perhaps even the most interesting, thing that has happened in my lifetime. I can't help but wonder what it might portend.
But wait. The clock on my computer now says 12:42. While I've been writing, the clocks have returned to their normal forward motion! Oh, and now I realize that the patch of sunlight from my south window is slowly moving east. The earth has also resumed its normal direction of rotation!
Whew! That was close! And strangely exhausting! After such an experience, I think I need a nap.