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SCENE: In a psychiatrist’s office. The office is spartan yet looks comfortable, with pastel walls and a plant in one corner. On the right side there is a desk, somewhat obscured as the light is coming from the left, directly behind a chair where the doctor is seated. He is small, seems like a quiet type of person and wears thick glasses. The chair is facing a small sofa-type reclining chair, the kind found in generic psychiatrist’s offices worldwide. On it is a young girl, about 14 years old. The doctor is holding a pad and pen, taking down a few notes now and then as they speak. They are in the middle of a session.
| Doctor: | So. Tell me about the hangers. |
| Girl: | They control the universe. |
| Doctor: | How do you know this? |
| Girl: | The doorknob told me. |
| Doctor: | Ah. What else did the doorknob say? |
| Girl: | Not much really. You can’t get much out of them with their chronic headaches and all. From the turning, you see. |
| Doctor: | Go on. |
| Girl: | Well, the hangers are pretty organized. I mean think about it—what would we do without them? It’s such a hassle having to iron our clothes all the time, it’s so much easier to just hang our shirts and pants. They don’t get crumpled and it saves space. And that’s how they rule the world. |
| Doctor: | They control the universe by saving space? |
| Girl: | Yes! And time too. Why spend time ironing or rummaging through your closet when you can be doing something else? It’s so much more efficient to hang things. The hangers control space and time. I don’t really understand how they do it, but the spoons were nice enough to try and explain the whole space-time thing. The whole space-time shortcut thing I mean. But anyway during the First Sock War— |
| Doctor: | The First Sock War? |
| Girl: | Yeah. The hangers are constantly at war with them ’cos socks aren’t meant to be hung, so the hangers have this bias against them, but then the hangers think they’re better than everyone else anyway. Anyway what really triggered the First Sock War was when the socks discovered exotic matter. |
| Doctor: | What kind of exotic matter? |
| Girl: | No, not a kind of exotic matter—exotic matter. Socks are the leading experts in theoretical physics. Ever wondered why you always always seem to lose one sock? They’ve been conducting experiments with transversable timeholes for ages, only a few make it back. They didn’t have much success until one day when one of them finally discovered exotic matter. When the hangers found out they stole the knowledge. The socks were furious. There was a lot of public outrage, demands for apology and repar- repara- |
| Doctor: | Reparation? |
| Girl: | Yeah! That’s the word. Reparation. And then socks insisted that the hangers work with them on the wormholes, but of course they wouldn’t so the socks along with their allies declared war. |
| Doctor: | And this war, it’s still going on? |
| Girl: | Oh, no. It’s been over for decades. The hangers and socks have this whole truce going on at the moment. |
