There is something uniquely alarming about a heavy object moving where no heavy object should be, a wrongness that bypasses your thinking mind and goes straight to some ancient animal alarm system.

If the thing under the bed had been light, if it had rustled or crinkled, I do not think my morning would have gone the way it did.

But it was heavy, and it slid, and the specific dense scrape of that slide told my body, before my mind could get a word in, that there was substance under there, mass, a real and considerable quantity of something, and my body responded to the mass the way bodies do, with a flood of cold adrenaline and a heartbeat I could suddenly feel in my throat.

It is almost funny, in retrospect, that the sheer weight of Jacqueline’s flour, the honest heft of fifty bags of good heritage grain, was the very thing that convinced my nervous system something was terribly wrong.