There is a pink room in the Roseworth house that resides in a dark void and spins around its left corner. It appears where it chooses to–the Roseworths have lost track of the amount of times they raced to the kitchen to grab a snack or trudged up to their rooms to fall into bed only to open the door and find the room hovering in the darkness. But no matter where it is, it is always present, rotating at its steady, moderate pace.
Sometimes fish leap out of the bottom of the room and its floor splashes like the surface of a sparkling stream. Then the room rotates, the side becomes the bottom, and the fish disappear into the new floor. Other times copper rings will rain down from the ceiling and fall to the bottom with a soft clink. Then they tumble around the room like colored glass in a kaleidoscope until they slowly evaporate in a cloud of platinum steam. There is always something new falling and tumbling in the room.
The room is always empty. There is no way to gauge how far it is from the house, or any way to gauge the depth of the darkness that surrounds it. Teddy Roseworth thinks the darkness may even expand every time someone looks into it.

“Like the universe,” he says, spreading his arms and wiggling his stubby fingers. “Always getting bigger and bigger in every direction. Spreading into places nobody knows about and turning them into more places that people can know about. Do you think that’s where the darkness is going?”

“Maybe you should jump into it and find out,” Maggie Roseworth replies. She isn’t sarcastic in the slightest, just very curious and very bad at grasping consequences.

At first, Frederick Roseworth swore he would ground them if he ever caught them trying to interact with the room, much less trying to jump into the darkness and hope for the best. But eventually, every Roseworth gave in to the urge to satisfy their curiosity. They used to wake up in the middle of the night and peek behind every door until they found it. Teddy threw paper airplanes in the room’s direction. Maggie emptied out her piggy bank and listened for the sound of coins hitting the bottom. Frederick just stared.

Now, after months of experimentation, the children mostly use the room as a landfill, tossing banana peels and candy wrappers into the infinite black below. Every time they throw something in, it begins vibrating, releasing the sound of a soft F sharp.

The Roseworths still do not know much about the room, or why it is there, but every month, a different man wearing shabby overalls and a magenta baseball cap shows up at their door, claiming to be an electrician and stuttering about broken fuse pipes. He always pulls out a flute, flings open every door in their house, and shakes his flute over the carpet. Salt comes pouring out the holes. The spinning room never shows up when the supposed electricians come by, and the men always leave with a look of distinct disappointment.

The Roseworths don’t usually mind the intrusion, although Frederick complained of having to clean up the salt afterwards.

“I just don’t get it,” Frederick muttered once after sweeping another pile of salt into a dustpan. “What is the room doing here? Does it want something from us? Does it have a purpose?”

Teddy shrugged. “Do we?”

There is a pink room in the Roseworth house that resides in a dark void and spins around its left corner.

Last Monday, an asteroid fell to Earth and fell directly on the Roseworth house, killing the family instantly.