Victor Mayhew sat in a metal folding chair in the Corwintown art museum where his latest work was being displayed. It was a lifesize oil painting, a panoramic view on a series of canvases. It started with a local dirt road with the familiar cornfield to the left and cow pasture to the right. It continued along the cow pasture, coming back to the dirt road going the other direction. But there was now a field of wheat on the other side of the road from the cows. Further on it came back to the dirt road ... and on the other side from the field of wheat, there was an old Victorian farmhouse with dark windows. One that did not actually exist. It looked cold and foreboding. Continuing on, it returned to the dirt road, and the cornfield again.
"This is really quite creative, Victor," I told him.
"Ah?"
"This dirt road, that's Corwin Way, just a few miles from here. I've been there. You blend it into this spooky mansion, but in a way that looks entirely realistic."
"I did try to paint it right."
"How did you come up with the idea?"
"Ah?"
"Of the spooky mansion?"
"I just painted what's there. It's the old Corwin mansion."
"No ... there isn't any house there. There's a field of corn, and a field of cows. That's all there is. You made up the wheat too."
"No, the wheat is really there too."
"But ... look. You look down the road, there's the corn on the left and cows on the right. If you turn around, what do you see?"
"Turn left or right?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Yes it does."
"No it doesn't. You turn around either way and you see the cows on the left and the corn on the right."
"No, I never see that. If I turn right I see cows and wheat, and if I turn left I see corn and the mansion. Just like I painted."
"Wow, Victor. That really IS imaginative. You're better than I thought."
"Ah," said Victor, "thank you." He'd learned not to press things like this too hard.
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "Every time you turn around you smoothly transfer to another universe that is ever so slightly different. To stay in the same universe, you keep count of how many times you turn in one direction and balance it out by turning the other way around." I'd been wanting to do this story for awhile anyhow because electrons really do need to turn around twice to get back to their original state.