Poisson d'avril

Last night, I realized my watch had been turned back one hour.

I know what you’re thinking. “What a…gentle April Fool’s joke!” That was my thought, too. My next thought was, “Who has done this? And how?” The only time the watch was off my wrist was when I took a shower that morning. The puppies could have done it, I suppose, except that they don’t have opposable thumbs. Still not ruling them out, but it seems unlikely.

The obvious choice would be Bill, but when I asked him about it, he denied it instead of admitting it right away with a sneaky giggle like usual. This is a man who in past years has installed plug-ins on my laptop so that every image changes to a picture of Nicolas Cage, or every instance of the word “cloud” changes to “butt” (I kept the second one because it made checking the weather extra entertaining).

So maybe it happened when I took Junebug to the vet. Things got pretty wild, so my watch could have been knocked out of time by accident—but by exactly one hour? Seems suspicious.

Or maybe the guy who came to fix our air conditioning unit did it. It was the second time he’d come out, so maybe he felt like he knew me well enough to play a trick on me.

Or maybe at the vet again when I went back to retrieve my credit card that I left there. It would be the perfect excuse to lure me back for tomfoolery. Verrry convenient that I just happened to leave my card there.

Then again, I remember checking my watch at the pharmacy when I went to pick up Junebug’s prescription, so it couldn’t have happened before 4:51. Even though it would have been the perfect chance, since I was distracted by a supplement bottle called Steel Libido—for Women! (What does that even mean? Out of all the words in the world, why go with steel?) Other supplements from this brand included Sunny Mood, Stress Defy, Brain Awake (which sounds like something you say when your brain is distinctly NOT awake), Mighty Moringa, whatever that is, and something called FORSKOLIN. I don’t know what that last one does, and I don’t really want to find out.

Anyway. It could have happened at the gas station, I suppose, or at the bar in town where we went to dinner. It was crowded last night, with TWO twenty-first birthdays being celebrated simultaneously. The scene was rife with shenanigans.

Still, it doesn’t seem likely that any person could mess with my watch while it was on my wrist without me noticing. Which leaves only one possibility. And I think you know what I’m talking about. Let’s say it together. Ready? GHOsss…ts. Oh. You don’t—wait, what did you say? Never mind. The way I see it, ghosts might want to have a little fun on the tricksiest of holidays. And if it wasn’t ghosts, then I have to assume I did it to myself, somehow. Which would make me simultaneously the greatest April Fooler of all time—and the greatest April Fool.