Up Late Reading
It was a dark and stormy night. Everyone had gone to bed and was sleeping soundly, except for Suzanne. She was up late reading and pondering the nature of the universe, as she often did.
All of a sudden, Suzanne heard a frighteningly loud boom emanating from the ground floor and felt the whole house shake. She jumped out of her reverie in the comfortable chair where she had been slumped, and rushed downstairs to see just what had occurred to produce such an enormous cacophony. Once, a long time ago, after having heard a crash and investigating the source, she had discovered her cat sitting on a pile of fallen pans in the middle of the night, pretending nothing had happened in that way that only felines seem to try and pull off. But even though Suzanne didn’t even have a cat anymore, she did have an oddly irrational expectation that such a scene would again be observed momentarily.
Instead, as she rushed around the corner, there was an intense rushing sound in her head and then a feeling of constantly applied pressure building up around her entire body, until finally she experienced everything going dark as she lost consciousness. Her family stayed in bed and asleep, because in fact, there had actually been no sound or movement in the house, just a reading woman disappearing into thin air, for no particular reason at all, at least none that could be discerned by an observer, if any had existed at that exact place and moment in the spacetime continuum. Present company notwithstanding.