It's Raining Sideways
an excerpt

They waited.
Nothing happened. This is not a completely true sentence. In actuality, lots of things happened, people milled about, politicians lied, and bombs went off, people died, people were born, authors wrote, swimmers swam, and the worldwide climate got one five hundred thousandth of a degree warmer. However, nothing along the lines of six people and a hippopotamus spontaneously appearing in Alaska came remotely close to happening.
They waited some more.
Nothing happened again. Or rather, lots of things happened again, but once again they did not find themselves conveniently in Alaska.
“I don’t think,” Clark finally said, “that it’s going to work.”
Following this, everyone started talking at once.
“I knew it was an absurd idea…”
“I don’t see why…”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing.?”
“Why aren’t we there?”
“What do hippopotamuses eat?” At this, everyone ceased their aimless blabbering and looked down at little Christine. “Well, I was just thinking that Jessie hasn’t eaten since I found her last night, and I thought she might be hungry…”
Everyone continued to look at her, as if she was truly something else entirely. Finally Gwenivere sighed and answered her, “We can find your hippopotamus some food once we figure out how we’re going to get to Alaska, honey.” She turned to the rest of them. “But first, we have to figure out a new way to get there, since Wallace’s theory seems finally to have failed us.” She looked a bit apprehensive at his, but didn’t know what else to say, and she let the silence resume; at least all the members of their party were silent, the busy airport around them continued to make the same amount of noise as it usually did, if not more. What none of them realized was that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Wallace’s theory; indeed, it had proven itself on more than one occasion. It was the fact that unerringly, once you consciously think of something as unlikely to happen, and thus likely to happen because it is unlikely to happen, it instantly becomes likely to happen and thus will probably not happen anytime soon. If that statement is read carefully enough by the prudent reader that has taken a good grammar or logic course, it will make perfect sense; unfortunately what it meant for Wallace, as well as everybody else, was that the theory could never be practically applied, at least not easily; in order to get it to work properly, one would have to think of something, and then studiously not think of that very same thing at the exact same time, not an impossible feat, but an extremely difficult one that would probably take a lifetime of silence and meditation to master.
Regrettably, an airport is not exactly the place to find silence and meditation, and the predicted time that life would even continue to exist was getting shorter by the second.