Unforeseen Circumstances

Dear Professor Quistgard,
I am deeply sorry that I was unable to attend class Wednesday. I understand that our research papers were due and that you do not accept late work, nor do you grant extensions, but I beseech you to give me one more day to turn in my paper. The reason for my absence was far beyond my control, and I think that if you would just hear me out, you wouldn’t hesitate to extend the due date of my paper.
6:20AM. The alarm clock should have gone off, but it didn’t, so now it’s 7:17AM. My eyes opened slowly, the lids breaking free from overnight crusts. I noticed that there is more light in my room than usual. A few seconds later I made the connection and realized it must be far later in the morning than I thought. I looked at the alarm clock. The digital display was blank. With my tired eyes I traced the cord from the clock to the wall socket, where their connection was conspicuously absent. A mild wave of distress washed over me. I slid out of bed and grabbed my cell phone off the floor, where it had been charging overnight. The display came on when I flipped the phone open and revealed the time. What had moments before been a mild wave of distress quickly transformed into a surge of panic, pure electricity racing through my veins, overwhelming my neural processors. In one fluid motion I dropped the phone, cursed and spun on my heel. I made it two steps towards the bathroom before my cat darted out from under the bed and attacked my bare feet. Another curse and a failed attempt at Riverdance deposited me on the floor, with my nose absorbing a majority of the impact. Blood was already soaking into the carpet by the time I could fully grasp what happened. With my right hand pinching my nose closed I rushed into the bathroom to jam a wad of tissue into the leaking nostril.
It was 7:43AM when I tried to leave my apartment. I say tried because when I went to open the door I found there was no doorknob. There wasn’t even a door there anymore. Instead there was an empty wall, like someone had put a layer of white sheet rock over the door. I wasn’t sure how to react to that discovery, so I walked through the kitchen to the window, only to find that it too had been covered. Perplexed, I returned to the kitchen and retrieved a steak knife from a drawer. I didn’t know what else to do so I thrust the knife into the wall where the door used to be. I was operating under the assumption that somehow one of my friends had snuck into my apartment, perhaps after drugging me to ensure my unconsciousness, and put in dry wall over the door and windows. But when the knife made contact with the wall it didn’t punch through like I thought it would. Instead, the knife just stopped, having only penetrated the wall by a few centimeters. I withdrew the knife and looked at the wound it left on the wall. Closer inspection revealed that the mysterious material was not dry wall at all. There were many slender layers of what I guessed to be paper obstructing access to my door and, to confirm my suspicion, I grabbed hold of one of the exposed layers and gave it a hefty tug. A sizable section of the wall peeled off in a wafer-thin sheet. It sounded like tearing an unusually large piece of construction paper. Mystified at the ramifications of this new development, I set to work tearing my way out of my apartment. I took my knife and sliced through several layers of the paper and stripped them back one by one. I did this until the dried blood on my fingers from my nose was washed out by fresh blood seeping through a thousand paper cuts. Whole chunks of flesh were sliced away from my fingertips and hands, and blood saturated the countless layers of paper piled up on the floor.
The clock on my cell phone read 9:02AM when I tore the final layer of paper away from my front door. The euphoria I felt was in no small way the result of severe blood loss, and I was barely able to turn the doorknob, much less pull the door open. All the torn paper blocked the the door, at it was only with some time and great vigor that I was able to clear a path for the door to swing open. However, when I at last set foot outside my apartment, at 9:33AM, I was overcome with a rush of optimism and renewed sense of vitality. I hobbled down the hallway and out the door to the parking lot. I hobbled to my car and put my key in the lock. It wouldn’t turn. For many furious minutes I attempted to gain access to my vehicle, only to be denied with each try. By now I was already an hour late for class, and had no idea how I might manage to make it to school at a reasonable time. I sat down with my back against the car door, keys swaying gently over my head, suspended from the lock. It was 9:46AM.
At this point my recollection of events gets a bit fuzzy, but I do know that sometime around 9:48AM I was taken on board a Reticulan spacecraft by Reticulan spacemen on their way back to their home planet Reticula. I can’t be sure precisely what time they took me because during our journey to Reticula, the Reticulans revealed to me all the secrets of space and time. As a demonstration of their mastery of the temporal realm they traveled backwards in time and brought me back to my car at the exact moment they originally abducted me. I was impressed with their abilities and asked them to take me to school. I should have asked them to take me back to Tuesday, so that I could have emailed you a copy of my research paper, but the thought slipped my mind. Nevertheless, the Reticulans obliged and dropped me off at school, except they overcompensated for the loss of time we experienced when they took me back to my original abduction and left me at school at 10:55PM.
Needless to say, every building on campus was closed, and anyway I had forgotten my backpack at my apartment. I couldn’t ask the Reticulans to take me home because they had long since returned to Reticula. So I slept on a bench outside the Library. As soon as the building was opened in the morning I raced to the computer lab to send you this email, which brings us to the present, 8:12AM. If you give me this extension I will take the next bus home and bring my paper to class tomorrow. I promise. Please let me know your decision as soon as possible. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Jimmy Dougan