i have achieved very little in this world and i'm not even proud of what i have done Come anonymously vent or tell a secret here!!! Or come here and read my phanfics!
omg, i got bored and wrote this in a night based on the book titled age of miracles. i haven’t written anything in forever wow
Summary: They call it “The Slowing”. Scientists are at a loss for how it is happening and if it will end, all they know is that the earth is spinning slower. Dan and Phil are childhood best friends and forced to face a world trying to destroy itself.
Word Count: 10k
Tags: (Spoiler Alert) Angst, hints at sexual stuff, death of animals and humans, drugs, & semi-suicidal thoughts.
In November they released a time capsule into space. It had Michael Jackson Records, Shakespeare plays in 17 different languages, pictures of earth, a book of everything earth with pictures and words, samples from plants, and a picture of the president in front of the Whitehouse. Our days had gotten to be 89.7 hours long. The wheat point was closer than ever.
Phil and I never defined what we were, and it was a slow process. We started off as each other’s rock, staying strong when the other one needed us to be, then we became comforters and planners for each other. Both of us were on set to graduate from our online program early. On one dark day, we both said screw it and took a few shots and leaned over and it just felt right. It wasn’t a kiss from Lauren but instead, I kissed him, and I think Phil was just as proud as I expected him to be when I had my first kiss at that party. The beds were pushed together and would be for the foreseeable future. It was never defined but somehow cuddling became okay, then kisses, then the stuff I only saw online back when the power was on.
More often than not the power is off now. They are saving it for industrial greenhouses. We live in the night, but not in fear. There is no fear anymore about facing the end because we’ve been facing the end for so long now.
One night when the sun was out and radiating blistering heat, we sat inside, and we realized we wanted a forever. Maybe that forever would lead us to an end very soon but that is to be expected. We also wanted to leave our mark. It seems silly when you’re facing death in the eyes and claiming it as your future that you want to embrace your life, but we tried. We took our pens and notebooks we had accumulated, and we wrote. We wrote out our stories. We wrote out a tale that could hopefully survive us, the wheat point, and possibly all of humanity. We weren't special, we were ordinary best friends that happened to be born in a time where we lost consistency. So we grew from that and built our own.
summary: if you actually want fanfiction don’t read this part i guess
After my mother died I stopped coming to my own house. It hurt too much. My dad felt the same way. He said he wants to move into his office at work and that there would be a place for me there too if I wanted but that was the last place I wanted to be. I told him I was moving into Phil’s house.
Phil and I moved in full time to the McAnderson’s. I will never know how they never noticed they still paid bills to their house they didn’t live in but the electricity stayed on and the water flowed. I’m sure they had a lot on their minds.
I grew up then too. The night of August 20th I told Phil to bring enough for two and he did. We smoked the night away in silence. He said he was sorry so many times but it wasn’t his fault. We both knew it was just the polite thing to say. I never liked smoking but it became a routine and a part of the day. We stopped going outside too, who cared if it stank up the house, we were all dying anyway. I realized that night that I was fascinated by Phil. The way he held his hands around a joint, the way he threw his shirt back without a care in the world and the way he could hold it all together was fascinating. That night the power went off while I was showering and I fell apart. I looked at myself in the mirror like I did at Phil’s that night so many days ago and I just broke down. At some point, I fell to the ground. I don’t know when he did it but he had pushed Killian and Sam’s twin beds together and once he found me in a ball on the floor he picked me up and got me in bed. He claimed it was because it was a dark night and we were going to be very cold with no power. I think he knew that I needed the comfort.
I woke up with my head on his chest. I couldn’t tell the time but the sun was rising, like that meant anything. I pretended to sleep for a moment, trying to enjoy how I felt. Then I realized Phil was already up. I jumped up, pretending like It was weird I was on him but he didn’t seem phased.
“Good morning. The powers still out, it’s cold as hell in here I wouldn’t get out of bed if I were you”
I look back. He was messing with rolling papers. He was becoming a chronic user. I didn’t care. I wanted to get out of bed and face the world but another piece of me knew it was useless. We had no school to go to. We had no families to go back to. We also had to plan for the future because it was impossible to make one without knowing if we were going to be alive. I don’t know why but that realization made the little things mean so much more. I took a risk and put my head back on his chest. He didn’t flinch.
August 3rd they officially announced that schools were closing. Online programs persisted and could get you degrees but they barely meant much anyways. The world was at a standstill with its labor force. Most efforts were going towards survival anyways. On August 17th we reached a record high of 132 degrees. It didn’t matter though, the radiation had developed a new trick, It could burn you through your clothes.
On August 19th my mom was doing alright. She was on the couch when I came out of my room at the end of a dark night. It was nine in the morning, the sun should have been shining, but instead, it was pitch black. That was normal. My mom was slowly doing a crossword but just by watching her you could tell that was making her dizzy despite laying down. She saw me and smiled. I asked if she wanted anything and she just smiled and politely said no and that she was going to bed. She got up and started walking towards her room and only three steps in, she collapsed. I was the one to call the ambulance. She died on August 20th in the hospital. My dad took his first day off work in a year.
Around that time death was common. The birds were already gone, eradicated from the sky by the increasing gravity, and their own confusion. The homeless were disappearing as fast as the birds did. If they couldn’t make it into a shelter by the end of darkness, they were being hauled away in body bags by morning. Starvation was becoming real also, but not by calories, by nutrients. We took daily vitamins because the food was becoming scarce and bland. We were coming up on the wheat point.
Summary: is this a relationship? wow its almost like this is fanfiction
The last day of school was heartbreaking. Instead of the parties, we had the year before we walked out solemnly. We all knew deep inside of us that this would be the last time we saw each other. We would never get to go to high school. At that point, we were only going to school in the darkness a few times a week. No one wanted to risk the radiation or sunburns so if school hours didn’t fall during complete darkness where we could come and go without seeing the sun, we just wouldn’t go. No one complained. No students were filed truant. Teachers wouldn’t show either.
That summer Phil and I decided it was too risky to always sneak around so we just started living at each other’s houses instead. During white times we’d stay at one person’s house until it was over. During dark times we’d often pretend to be separate, and run away to our home we had created. It was hard being alone when it seemed like every moment was one of the last.
When we were alone I took advantage of it. Killian’s magazine was pulled out and I grew into myself a little bit more. The magazine felt more real than the websites with their pop up ads and their awful video names so I just preferred the pictures I had come to know until they grew old and I got sick of them. Then I just decided to brave the websites.
It was disgusting how much I liked them. I quickly realized though that something wasn’t right with what I wanted. I didn’t care about the women in them but I cared more about the men who stood behind them with their abs and their other parts. I didn’t think much about it. I didn’t acknowledge myself and what I watched until I decided to try out a new category one day. Gay. It felt dirty in a way but another part of me just blamed circumstances. It wasn’t real. I liked women too I just had needs that had to be filled and this was faster. Right? I kept it to myself. Phil didn’t need to know.
Meanwhile, Phil was sinking. He started working at his dad’s store full time on dark days. Our days that we spent together were when he came alive. He didn’t smoke anymore, or so I thought. He was fantastic one dark night while we studied and chatted in Killian’s room with the big window. He was fine until I went into his bag to grab a pencil and found a Ziploc filled with green.
“Phil. What the hell?” I asked. I was confused. I didn’t know why he had it. He was fine, he didn’t need to smoke.
He looked around and stopped dead in his tracks. He told me how it was the first time that he had it again but I didn’t believe him, and he knew I was smarter than that. I wanted to get more out of him but he shut up and got mad that I persisted.
Maybe it was dark for me to do but I figured that night we needed a little pick me to get us both talking again like we did that first night we spent in this house. We grabbed some of the McAnderson’s vodka they left and downed enough to feel warm, but then Phil drank almost double what I did.
“Do you ever feel like we aren’t doing enough and we never will?” He asked out of nowhere.
“Phil, it’s the slowing, we’ve talked about this. We’re low on vitamin D no matter how many supplements we take and we’ve had to grow up but that-” He cut me off
“No. Like. We aren’t doing enough to even be worth suffering for.”
I stopped. It made sense a little bit. What is the point of suffering if nothing comes out of it?
“Dan. There’s no point to me suffering here. I’m tired of watching my dad try to meet bills and the world slowly die.” He started to babble on. He went on and on about the idea of dying for something that is worth it but his words started making less sense. He took another shot or so.
“I’m a fucking liar too. No one wants me. I haven’t even kissed someone in almost a year. Do you want to hear the kicker Dan? I don’t even want to kiss the girls. I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense`` he was slurring like a bitch at this point.
“Fuck it. I’m going to go smoke.” And just like that, he walked out to the back porch. I realized how dumb I must have been to not of notice his crumbling when I watch him go outside and realize his remnants of disaster line the table tops of the patio furniture. He’s comfortable smoking too. It’s comfortable for him to be out there. That was the moment when I realized he never came back to his house once we split off for our occasional separate ways. He just came back here to the home we had created and made his own mark in it.
For some reason, he takes off his shirt and throws it back against the window that separates me and him. For one second I take notice of his body in a way I never have before and then decide it is probably best if I leave him alone.
Summary: update on how everything is dying i guess
Soon after the party, we received the first good piece of news about the slowing. It seemed like it was slowing down. We were only gaining a few seconds a day. We all prayed for an end that began to seem like it might come. Meanwhile, we had reached 48 hour long days and the grocery store shelves stocked less and less as the long cold nights wiped out more crops.
In December the divorce was finalized. Mr. Lester was going to stay here and run his shop and Mrs. Lester was going to go live with her mother. The kids were old enough to have the option to stay with whoever they liked and they both chose to stay at the home they had grown up in.
My mom was still having good days and bad days but most days were worse. Even on her good days, she could only be up for a few hours. I often came home and found dishes half washed or food burnt in the oven. She slept more often than not.
The worst part of it all was when my father came home. He usually would be alternating days he slept at work and days he came home but his work days just continued getting longer as the wheat point grew closer. His work became an obsession. He could have cared less about taking care of himself or of me. He started muttering during our dinners about how his plans just never worked and how the mythical 98-hour carrot never existed.
Meanwhile, sunny days got longer. In the dead of winter in the middle of a long day it would be a hundred degrees. In the nights it would be well below zero. We all started to dread the summer when we realized going outside in the sun would no longer be an option. Many things were not an option anymore at all. Now entire 24-hour blocks were all sun or all darkness. School canceled gym entirely because we couldn’t go outside and we were not healthy enough to exercise hard. Supposedly people living on the streets started dying. Food was running out and now no one dared to donate their can goods to the homeless, not even for Christmas, and with the hundred degree days, the homeless were stuck. White night crime began including even more violence as people broke into the closed stores to stock up on food or would riot in front of the White House because the government wasn’t doing enough. I always felt bad watching the news and seeing people desperately fight for government help that would never come because, in reality, they had nothing they could do. A congressman got shot on his way to work on a Thursday morning because he was eating canned peaches and a protester turned violent believing he was rubbing it in their faces.
Phil and I found an escape in the house down the road. We cleaned up Killian’s room and dragged Sam’s bed into it and would spend nights there while we claimed to our parents we were at the other’s house. We worked harder on our homework than ever before because if there was any hope of a future we desperately hoped to be a part of it. Phil took up biology, he would come over for the occasional dinner and he would chat with my dad who would talk nonsensically about his plans that seemed to always fail. I instead got more invested in arts. An idea started to form among politicians and the community that followed them about preservation when we are gone and whoever might find our ruins. It was dark but honest. People would discuss whose music should be on the records the government saved or what plays should be translated into 17 different languages and placed in the time capsule. It was morbid but we all realized that whether it be The Slowing that killed us, or maybe the eventual natural death of the sun, we were all going to die one way or another.
Sometimes people tried to give us hope. NASA released they found a planet that is hospitable to humans. The issue was it was 300 lightyears away. The grocery chains started a section of food that could grow in the dark but it was mostly mushrooms and the weird squash they tried to develop that could go for 36 hours without light. It wouldn’t be enough.
The worst part became the power outages. In May the trend of slowing was officially gone as we hit sixty hour long days. The heat started to get unbearable during white times and we cranked air conditioners up along with freezers. During the darkness industrial greenhouses lit up fields while everyone else had them in their backyard with their lights glowing through the darkness as we turned up our heaters or electric blankets just hoping to stay warm. The power grid just couldn’t keep up. The first shortage happened while I was with Phil in our house that we had colonized.
“Stay safe. It should come back on soon. No matter how hot it gets don’t go outside” My mom texted me.
That was the cruelest trick of it all. The sun was shining for so long at a time that the radiation levels were getting dangerous. For so many years of human history, we feared the dark until we had to learn to live in it and hide from the sun.
summary: it's back to school season bitches, witches, and all of my switches. (watch these summaries fall apart with me lmao)
School started August 20th. We were eighth graders. For the first time in my life my mom was no longer a teacher at my school and wasn’t even awake for my first day. I got ready alone on a dark morning. People hugged a little bit tighter on the first day back. A girl named Meghan passed around birthday invitations and somehow invited me too. Teacher’s introduced new lesson plans that would accommodate The Slowing. We were going to learn about the science of growing food and the new greenhouses that were starting to pop up everywhere. We each took home a pack of seeds.
It was dark after school but Phil and I walked home. The party was the only thing on his mind as he walked, however. It was supposed to be a chill party, her parents were gonna be gone, and it was going to have high schoolers. He wouldn’t shut up about it next Friday.
I got home to find my mom active and moving around the house more than usual. She was doing an inventory of sorts on the first aid supplies under the stairs. She asked about school and gossiped about the teachers. It was weird having her gone from my school for once, she didn’t even know my science teacher who was new this year. I figured I should bring up the party but it never came out, instead, I smiled and nodded through her talking and tried to enjoy a rare moment of her being herself. I’m sure she noticed but she never showed it.
“I’m cooking dinner tonight!” She proudly exclaimed. “Does Phil wanna come over?”
I shook my head. He would be with Hannah tonight.
She smiled anyway.
“Would you prefer hamburgers or tacos tonight?”
I just went upstairs. My room was dark all the time. My blackout curtains just stayed closed. My laptop screen was dark from inactivity. The whole room was shadows. I sat on my bed. I felt the darkness creep up from the room and into me. I felt so incredibly alone. I had never had many friends but I had always had Sam, Killian, and mostly Phil. Slowly I was losing Phil to whatever he was trying to fulfill within himself. I would have taken being punched in my chest by him again over feeling this gut-wrenching loneliness. People always talked about the effects of The Slowing on the mind but they only ever talked about the physical deficiencies of Vitamin D or sleep but never on the darkness it crept in your mind and you wonder how long we could live like this.
I ate with my mom that night. Dad never came home. I got a text from Phil later that he was no longer a virgin. I sat on my bed until the sun rose at three in the morning. I started crying so hard I couldn’t breathe and decided I was never going to let myself be so alone again.
My mom had good days for those whole weeks. We bought a greenhouse of our own to build in the backyard so we could plant a few things for ourselves. She built it mostly alone with my dad stepping in occasionally when he wasn’t too tired. There was still no progress on the magic wheat. Our days were at 47 hours.
I always planned to mention the party. However, I couldn’t risk my parents being overprotective. It would just be easier to lie and say I’m going over to Phil’s. So I did and on the night of September first, I left saying I was going down the road to sleep over.
Phil thankfully walked into the party with me. He was right about it all. Despite the glitzy invitations handed out in classrooms, it was nothing like the parties I had been to. It made sense why I had been invited though because the entire house was filled with people. It was probably everyone Meghan had ever met. The whole house had music blasting through it and people chatting.
“Beer is in the kitchen!” Someone directed us that way.
A magical thing about The Slowing was the effect it had on the police force. White nights became high times for crime so cops began busting parties less and less to focus on the murders in break-ins over in the bad side of town.
Somehow a beer bottle ended up in my hand but when I look over Phil was gone. I started looking for him. The pretty-enough girl named Lauren who Phil had mentioned seemingly years ago that he was fond of came up to me all giggle.
“Hey, you’re Phil’s friend right?” She swayed a little bit as she talked. She was in the year above us and going to be a freshman. It was funny how she couldn’t keep her eyes straight.
“Yeah, I’m Dan” I tried to remember that I was here to have fun too but god where was Phil?
She started saying something but got distracted by a friend and ran away. People were everywhere and most of them sat at least 5 inches taller than me. It was almost funny how I came here to feel less alone and instead I had never felt lonelier in my life. I figured if I couldn’t find Phil I might as well find a bathroom to collect my thoughts in. The party mostly had high school rejects who figured any party could be lit if enough chill people showed so it was filled with Theater kids or B-Team soccer players. It wasn’t ideal but I asked one of the guys in a soccer shirt to point me to a bathroom and once I made it inside I locked the door. The music continued to pound through the door but the bathroom muffled the noise and left me alone inside of it while I looked in a mirror. Phil’s friend was my ride so I knew I would be stuck here until someone let me know that he was ready to go. I sat on the closed toilet lid with my head down waiting for some cue to let me know that things were going to be okay. It is funny how that works because suddenly a loud pounding on the door and a loud yet familiar voice hollered.
“Let me the fuck in”
It was from Phil. I stood up and opened the door. He was standing there looking pissed.
“God, don’t you have any fun? You wanted to come and then I find out you’re hiding in the bathroom?” He walked in and slammed the door behind himself. I stood there shocked.
“I didn’t realize you were babysitting me considering you left me at the door”
His eyes narrowed and he put his head down against the counter, his beer that was in his hand sat dangerously close to the edge of the sink.
“You don’t understand just get the fuck out and let me be,” He said as he turned to me.
I looked at him but something wasn’t right. He was mad but he wasn’t mad at me, or maybe he was so I just left him resting there.
I walked back into the party where girls sat up and down the stairs and tried to find another place that was quiet enough that I could be ignored. I eventually found a corner with a locked door that no one seemed to be trying to go in or out of so I settled in the corner. Time passed incredibly slowly and my phone battery died incredibly quickly. I waited around for something to happen yet again. This time Lauren came back up to me. Her hands were now just as shaky as her eyes but she could still talk fairly fine.
“Why are you here?” She asked. It seemed bold but I didn’t want to lie.
“I thought it could be fun. It’s not my scene though”
She seemed to think on that a little bit and then with a little bit of vigor she gained from nowhere she leaned over and kissed me. I pulled back.
“Oh my god was that your first kiss?” She asked with almost fear in her voice.
“Hell no” I responded and with the little bit of vigor I had been given I went back in. Later she left when a friend pulled her off of me and said her ride was here to take her home. I figured the same and realized it had been hours since I had seen Phil and I had a lot to tell him.
It was funny because the kissing itself wasn’t great but the excitement in being able to tell Phil what I did was so much better, hopefully, he would be proud. A part of me wished my first kiss was special, but it was The Slowing, special moments happened at weird times in weird ways.
After about fifteen minutes of searching the house, I realized I couldn’t find Phil. I figured he could have left without me so I started asking around if anyone had seen Hannah. People shrugged and said that they thought she had left hours ago. Somehow I made it back to the bathroom from earlier and lightly knocked on the door asking if Phil was inside.
“Yeah”
“Shit man, you good? We should probably go.” I told him from outside the door.
I heard the sink briefly run and the door clicks as it unlocked and I saw as the doorknob turned and revealed Phil behind it. His eyes were red and puffy and he looked like a disaster.
“What the hell happened to you? How much did you drink?” I didn’t care if I sounded like a scolding mother because he looked straight out of a movie about people drinking too much. He pressed his lips a little bit and started crying.
“I barely fucking drank. Hannah broke up with me okay? She said I’m too young and immature for her.” His beer bottle sat half empty in the same spot halfway into the sink he had left it in before, so I believed him.
“Let’s just get back to yours so we can get some sleep okay?” I reached on the inside of the bathroom to turn off the light.
“Oh shit shit shit shit!” He started panicking. “I told my mom that I was going to yours.” I paused. He looked down trying to figure out a plan.
“Can’t we just sneak back into your house? Your mom has been all sick anyway I doubt she’d hear us.”
I shook my head. “She’s been feeling good today”
We stood in the doorway trying to make a plan. It was 3 in the morning on a white night and we would certainly get caught trying to sneak into either of our houses. Eventually, we figured out that we left the McAnderson’s house unlocked and we could crash there. It would only be a twenty-minute walk or so and it was late enough that even in daylight we shouldn’t get caught. We headed out.
Once we made it inside their door, past the overgrown grasses and foliage, and once we double checked no one was inside, we strolled inside and made it into the couch so we could finally sit and talk things out.
Phil seemed blank like all life had been taken out of him, it was odd realizing that for once I was the one who had enjoyed myself and was not bumming us out.
“What happened?” I asked. I figured he needed to talk about it.
“She basically met me at the door. Told me that this was her friend’s party and I couldn’t ruin it by being immature and oh also we’re breaking up because you suck.” He seemed bitter more than anything else.
I tried to smile and listen but something was off, girls had broken up with him before but he had never cried about it.
“Why did this hit you so hard man? She’s just a bitch. Was it-” I paused “the sex?”
He sort of laughed it off but then looked away to not get tears caught in his eyes.
“I’ve been a terrible friend Dan. I haven’t told you everything” he stated.
“Sure”
“My parents are just about done, Dan. They want to file a divorce but they don’t like talking about it. Hannah has divorced parents and she was so chill about it, she made me feel like it would be okay. She was older and made me feel like I fit in. She got me out of my own head when I needed it the most. The funny thing is I don’t even think I liked her, she was just someone who could save me for a bit” He paused while I nodded.
“Do you think The Slowing has something to do with all of this?” I asked out of genuine curiosity. I was forming my own theories about the slowing and what it does to people. How darkness and dead birds decay our minds while we have to reach for some greater purpose about the planet.
“Definitely. Mom and Dad never argued before it. Plus it made me think about myself you know? Our own mortality. How we can’t run or hide and it has the power to control every aspect of us. I’m scared we won’t have food one day and I’m scared we won't have anything to do except stand still and let this world kill us in a cruel slow death. The Slowing has aged us, Dan, we aren’t kids. We’re useless but standing older. We’ve survived fewer days and fewer nights but we had to grow up.”
And that was the start of it. Just the two of us sat on the couch talking about our world’s slow escape into death and why we believed it happened. The gap that had started to grow between us was destroyed as we got personal and asked about dreams and aspirations. He was right, we were older than we should have been. Eventually, I snuck in the circumstance that happened with Lauren that night and Phil paused clean in his tracks.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I don’t know.” It seemed silly to lie to him there and hide a lie behind our moments of honesty. I no longer wanted Phil to be proud of me I sort of just wanted to get it off my chest.
“I don’t know if I enjoy kissing either. It seems like the hype is pretty silly don’t you think?” He said. With those words, I felt validated beyond what I had ever felt. Maybe it wasn’t just me in my innocence and inexperience.
We stayed up till ten in the morning and didn’t go home until we both felt better. I felt a little less alone.
I stopped enjoying being home. My mom was getting sicker. “Gravity Sickness” scientists were calling it. It was the same thing that left birds dying in the roads. She was fine some days but others she was nauseous and stuck sleeping for hours on end. It was summer so thankfully she didn’t have to go to work, but once the school year would start again we were clueless if she would keep her job.
My dad was gone constantly. Late nights turned into sleeping at the lab as the days officially reached 40 hours long at the end of the summer. The Slowing was destroying my family.
Meanwhile, the magazine stayed at the bottom of my own drawer until one night when the darkness had been persisting for 14 hours already. I finally decided I was ready to take a look.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in sex or girls it was just that they were a mystery. I wanted to like them but I didn’t know what I was supposed to be fascinated by when they walked down the street. Maybe I was innocent but I knew which websites I could open in a private browser and I knew what the other guys were into. It just never made sense.
The magazine wasn’t special, there were articles and pictures and bright ads boasting how to grow your boner. I read them all. I finally decided to check out that website I knew too. I clicked off after one video title about a busty teen. It just felt gross.
Phil, on the other hand, was getting ready for school. He had bought new clothes and stolen some more of his brothers. He also met a girl named Hannah. Hannah didn’t go to school with us and had only moved to the area when The Slowing started. She had long hair and knew how to do her eyeliner. He talked about her constantly.
“She can really hold her alcohol.” He told me as we walked down the road towards the creek at two in the afternoon with the setting sun. “Her brother has access to harder stuff too”
We came towards the creek hidden behind the trees.
“He has weed and he’s only charging us $15 for a gram” He bragged while starting to climb into the undergrowth to get under the bridge. “It’s good stuff too”
I just sort of sat blankly, mad at how he was acting.
“You’re too young for that shit” I had finally picked up cursing this summer too.
He shrugged and took a seat with his feet dangling over the edge.
“It’s The Slowing. Who knows how much that has affected aging” He reached into his bag and pulled out his newest toy, a bright red vape. He looked stupid.
He was right though. Who knows how messing up a circadian rhythm could mess with aging. Who knows if days and nights shifting could make a person grow up just a little bit faster. For once I decided I was done being innocent. I wanted to be like Phil. He was growing up. I was stuck living in times where day and night made sense. He taught me how to take a hit. I coughed like a pussy the whole time but eventually, it got easier.
Summary: With houses left empty and their childhoods being wrecked they say screw it and commit a felony (i hate writing descriptions ok just please read the original book titled Age of Miracles by Karen Thomas Walker. It's fantastic)
After a few more weeks our days were up to 34 hours. They got longer irregularly but we watched the charts the scientists made as if they would somehow predict which days the earth would slow down less as if one day it would stop. 17 hours of sunlight in summer made the concrete unbearable to bare feet. Temperatures started reaching 116 regularly. No one wanted to swim anyways, the water always felt hot and it was too hot for the neighborhood to send people out to clean it anyway, so it shut down in early July. More birds began dying. People claimed it was the temperature but others claimed that gravity was changing. Birds crashed into windows or died in their nests only to be discovered when they fell down.
Phil and I got bored of the summer and felt our lives getting dull. The bruises had healed so there were no remains of our excitement anymore. We took one day down the street on a bright evening to the McAnderson’s house. The grass was overgrown and newspapers littered the lawn with the occasional bird corpse. Phil and I felt daring in the sunshine and decided to try the door. To our surprise, it opened.
They left in a hurry. That was obvious by the rotten fruit on the counter or the dead fish in the bowl. Phil asked if I wanted to turn back but I knew better than that. The McAnderson’s weren't coming back to this house, they would of already if they wanted to. Phil started exploring, looking for money left behind or some item they could pocket. I followed behind him looking in the places he missed. Phil confidently ran up the stairs to the guys’ rooms.
“I’ll look through Sam’s and you go to Killian’s alright?” Phil said while already walking that way.
“What am I even looking for?” I asked back
“Anything!” He called through the wall. “Maybe he had a secret stash or a diary. Find his secrets!”
Killian’s room was smaller than Sam’s but had a bigger window. His twin sized bed was up against the wall with sheets unmade. His drawers were open but mostly empty. I grazed past his pile of clothes he left and over to his bed where I just sat down.
Killian was a quiet but chill sort of guy. He went to the parties with Phil but would never taste the beer bottle they passed around. He had a girlfriend for a while but he never told his mom because she was a Christian and would never let him go over to her house if she knew they might kiss, or worse. Sam was the opposite. He was bold. He would steal his parent's liquor or try to smoke with the other kids if he had the chance. Sam wasn’t a bad guy but he overshadowed Killian.
His bed was soft enough but not very large. I reached down and opened his bedside drawer. The drawer itself looked like it had been untouched as they were leaving. It was filled with cords and nonsense but at the bottom was something else I reached out and pulled out. It had pages torn but it was a dirty magazine, modern but still with that 80’s sex magazine feel, right on the cover was a woman with her arms above her head in just her bra. I knew deep down that Phil didn’t deserve to have it so I rolled it up and threw it in the bag that held my water bottle. I kept looking.
“Jackpot!” Phil came around the corner and strutted in. “Did you know Sam had pics of Sarah? Polaroids nonetheless! She was into some artsy shit!”
I grabbed the pictures and took a look.
Phil looked around.
“Did you find anything?” He asked me.
“Nope. Not even a condom”
“I always knew he was a pussy.” Phil pocketed the pictures and we moved downstairs again, this time straight to the kitchen, or more specifically the liquor cabinet. It was filled. Phil didn’t take any though instead he went back over to the pantry and started grabbing can goods.
“Just in case.”
“Just in case,” I responded. It made sense, he was scared just like me. I wanted to have faith in my dad but his late nights seemed to always amount to nothing.
We went back home at around ten with the sun still shining, it wouldn’t set for another 4 hours.
Summary: Suddenly life seems vulnerable as the idea of the wheat point forms and gravity sickness
When I got home my mom was asleep on the couch and my dad sat in the office. I didn’t knock before entering but my dad invited me in any way. His computer was open in front of him and he was designing something elaborate that I would never understand. He looked exhausted. Late nights were becoming normal for him just like everyone else, but he was only awake because he had to work.
“The Wheat Point”
As I sat with him I started to understand what it was but I would never understand if that was a new word or an old one pulled out of history books. The Wheat Point was the maximum amount of time wheat could survive without consecutive sunlight. Bioengineers were working all across the world trying to figure out ways to save crops but time was slowly running out. Already bananas and avocados were getting more and more expensive from increasing tensions between countries. Rumor had it that a Somalian man living in Mexico had discovered a strand of carrot that could go 98 hours without seeing the sun but rumors were rumors. Countries were desperately planning for a future that may come and were trying to save their people by invading other countries to stock up on supplies. Maybe nuclear war could be close?
My dad explained his plan for editing the chloroplasts but it made no sense. It was all a theory anyway. He reached over and gave me a few bills. He finally looked at me too.
“Go buy some fruit, something from Mexico. It sounds dumb but please just go, and dear god Dan what happened to your face?”
“I was out with Phil and I fell while at the pool”
“Don’t let your mom see. She’s not feeling well anyway.”
I left after that and went to the store. It seemed silly but while I was there I grabbed a few cans of tuna and corn too just to help settle my fears more than anything. When I got back my dad sliced the avocados and we ate them plain. It felt strange but I still savored the bites like my dad did, eating each one slow and looking at each piece. I’m glad I did because that would be the last time I would ever have it. The bananas sat on the counter and went bad by the next week, completely untouched. I would never see a banana again either.
Summary: slowly they are trying to find a new normal
Three weeks later the world was trying to find a normal. Our class was down to 11 kids, and that was with the other class joining ours. More cans showed up on the top of the refrigerator and began showing up in the closet under the stairs too. Now the days were 27 hours long and getting longer. A timer sat in the corner of the news channels telling how long the days were now and we all just learned to adjust. Clock time began to feel off from the Earth. We began to fall asleep in the light and wake up in the dark. Stores sold out of blackout curtains and melatonin pills. Herbal remedies popped up but still, insomniacs would often roam the streets at 3am when it was still light outside. The news warned about vitamin D deficiency and in school, we were taught the importance of sleep.
Phil and I survived. We were almost to the end of the school year and we were still excited for summer like any other year. At some point someone coined the idea of a “White Night”, a night illuminated by daylight. White nights were hard but the dark days were harder. Phil came over one dark day and we tried to ride my skateboard but he was riding it and he hit the edge of the curb because he couldn’t see. He fell and broke his arm. He promised he wasn’t mad but after that, my mom banned us from running around outside on dark days. The neighborhood agreed and closed the pool on dark days, but kept the hours the same so even on a white night, it would be closed at 10. Suddenly the idea of summer seemed a little less fun.
On the last day of school, our class of 10 kids combined with the other classes for a sort of party. There were snacks and music playing. We were going to be eighth graders next year and it was a big deal. We were going to be at the top of the school and at the top of the world. The whole school walked out together. Girls were crying and all the guys walked a little bit closer than they ever had before. Phil and I had opted to walk home that day so we could take advantage of one sunny day and go swimming right after. We walked out and chatted about anything but how the days were up to 28 hours and the clocks felt useless. We walked home the usual way, waved to my mom as she passed by in her car and promised her yet again that we didn’t need a ride. As we turned the corner a bird sat half lifeless in the middle of the sidewalk. Its wings were sprawled against the hot concrete and it twitched all around like it was grabbing for something that wasn’t there.
“Oh shit”
Phil had picked up cursing these last few weeks of school. I promised I would never tell his mother.
He grabbed a folder from his bag, wedged it underneath the bird and then paused.
“Where should it go?”
“I don’t know”
“The grass?”
“Why would a bird want to be in the grass”
“Dammit, Dan I don’t know, it can’t stay up in a tree right now.”
We opted to rest it gently in the grass under a tree so it could have some shade as it died. It was the middle of a long day at the start of summer, the heat was inevitable either way but the shade offered some relief. Phil dumped the folder into a neighbor's trash bin and we kept walking and debating how it had died. Our best guess was some sickness.
We spent that night at Phil’s and it was the rare sort of night where the sunset at a normal time and we could pretend everything was normal. Phil’s mom was home running back and forth trying to get his brother out the door for some high school event, she explained as she darted from one room to another that we were on our own tonight, money was on the counter, order a pizza, and most importantly don’t make a mess.
Phil and I went up to his room. We played his Xbox but mostly we sat on his bed and just talked. We talked about eighth grade and how we would have no one above us to make fun of our clothes. We talked about high school and how we would have to get ready for college. We started talking about girls.
“Lauren is really hot. I don’t know what you mean” Phil said as he gripped a pillow in front of him.
“She’s okay” I explained but mostly just to keep him from getting mad. “She could chill out with the eyeliner”
“So could half our grade. Damn, I miss Sarah. She was a hottie”
“Sarah H or Sarah B?” I asked but I knew already that he was probably talking about Sarah H and her C cup tits.
“Sarah H. Sarah B could lose a few pounds and use some makeup. She looks like a shit show everyday”
I threw a pillow at him. He was being a complete idiot. Sarah B was nice at least. It didn’t even matter though. Both were gone to some far away place because their parents took them away.
“Dan, who do you think is hot? You never really say.”
I sat pretty still, thinking. Certain chicks were aesthetically pleasing sure. Some dressed nicer or did their hair more. Some were nice and others were drama queens too.
“Emily”
Phil’s eyes darted over. He started laughing.
“Emily C? With the glasses?”
“Sure!” I responded putting my defenses up. “I heard she gives good head”
Phil burst out laughing. He threw the pillow in his hands off the bed.
“Since when have you cared about how good of head girls gave?”
I couldn’t run from this one. Phil was the one who had been with girls. He had kissed girls under the bleachers and been to the sorts of parties where girls show their bras when dared. He had experience and always loved to talk about how good making out is.
“Man maybe i’m tryna get some” I tried to play cool.
“You couldn’t get some if your life depended on it”
I’m not sure why but suddenly the whole room felt wrong. Being there felt wrong. Being alone with him felt wrong. I stood up and he stood up after me. I tried to walk about but he ran in front and through his laughs tried to calm me down.
“Bro what the fuck I was just joking, chill, Emily can be pretty cute”
I can’t remember doing it but supposedly I punched him in the chest as hard as I could. He retaliated and I ended up on his floor looking up at the ceiling fan spinning while he stood over me with a face of complete confusion. I seemed like a stranger to him.
He muttered something about ordering the pizza as he walked out. I burst into tears. I could hear him walk back to his room but he stopped and walked away while I sat there sobbing. I couldn’t stop and I didn’t know why. I think it was all the fear I had been holding. It was my hatred of school and trying to fit in. It was my jealousy. It was the resentment I had towards the white nights or the dark days. I was fantastically alone in my world looking for reasoning while I pretended like I didn't care so it all came crashing down. At some point, I dragged myself up and looked in his bathroom mirror to see the damage. I had already started bruising on my chest. My face looked a little rough too. It was summer. I could always just run away for a week to let it all heal before I came back home. I could say I was staying over at Phil’s. My mom wouldn’t mind. I wish I had grabbed my things and left then but Phil came back in.
“Pizza will be here in 20” He went back to his bed and grabbed a controller. He was ignoring it. I decided if he was I would too, but instead of going back to the game he used the controller to turn off the console. We sat in silence.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
I just stood there against his sink. I looked back in the mirror and tried to fix my hair.
“I get it you know? We’re stressed. We’re trying to fucking survive in a world where the world wants to kill us”
I still just stood there listening to what he said. The world was trying to kill us no matter how much I didn’t want to admit it. Newscasters always warned that hurricanes could get worse or people on the street would shout about the rapture. Maybe it was taking a hit on me? Finally, I figured I had to be on the defensive.
“Sorry. I’m not a pussy you know I just have had a lot going on”
He nodded with a “Yeah I know” tacked on.
We went back to just chatting. He eventually asked if he hit too hard and if I thought I broke a rib or something but I just said no. I knew I deserved it since I hit him first. No one brought up the subject of girls that whole night.
omg, i got bored and wrote this in a night based on the book titled age of miracles. i haven’t written anything in forever wow
Summary: They call it “The Slowing”. Scientists are at a loss for how it is happening and if it will end, all they know is that the earth is spinning slower. Dan and Phil are childhood best friends and forced to face a world trying to destroy itself.
Word Count: 10k
Tags: (Spoiler Alert) Angst, hints at sexual stuff, death of animals and humans, drugs, & semi-suicidal thoughts.
Read Chapter One
I guess I don’t believe in a God, but I do believe in what I know. I know the seasons exist and no matter what happens the Earth still turns. I believe in seeds sprouting up towards the sun and worms digging into the earth based on instinct. I believe in birds migrating and the stars in the sky being visible when the sky is clear but I also believe that stars aren’t meant to be seen every night because sometimes the night is filled with rain for hours and the stars can’t be seen until two nights later when every cloud has cleared and the animals come back out from hiding. I know the earth has its plan. The earth plans for seasons and the rainstorms and for birds to fly south and come back north and I believe the Earth would be just fine if we didn’t try to predict and change its plans. The ice age wouldn’t have happened if the sun didn’t mess with its plan. The earth would thrive if no one interfered with its plan. The Earth doesn’t want to sabotage itself but it has to act in self-defense now and again. We destroyed it I guess. We caused this. We would have had to.
No one knew what had happened on the first day. I still ran outside and played with my friends down the street with my skateboard I had just gotten and the basketball hoop Phil’s brother had just gotten. Phil and I took turns with the board and we were so proud to feel so old with our new toys.
Certain people claimed to have felt the change before scientists came out with the news. The overnight employees at fast food restaurants felt like the time above the fry cooker just couldn’t have been correct, and the Olympic runners claimed they just couldn’t hit their personal records anymore. No one knows if there was any truth to their claims but I didn’t know. I didn’t know until two days later when I was upstairs and my mom ran upstairs telling me that Phil had to go home immediately. She seemed scared in a new way. I told Phil to go home even though I didn’t want him to.
I wouldn’t see him for a whole week after that.
My mom ran downstairs and sat in front of the TV. I came up behind her. Scientists sat around a desk explaining how the Earth’s spin slowed down and we gained an extra 3 minutes to our day the first day, 5 the second, and 2 the third. “The Slowing” they called it. There was no way to predict it and they were at a loss for how it started. I didn’t get it, I knew the days were always 24 hours. I knew that there were 365 days in a year and we had a leap year every couple but I didn’t know that the Earth could slow. I cuddled up beside my mom and we watched the TV and the men sitting around that desk. I wish I could remember how my mom looked but I remember her hand shaking a little as I held it and I remember how she suddenly stood up and called my dad begging him to come home. He did shortly after that.
That night my dad told me to go to bed but the clock was saying it was 10:50. They always let me stay up till 11. I argued and told my dad that the clock didn’t mean anything anymore, we had gained time. He stopped arguing after that.
“Dan, you’re right, but mom and I need to talk. Go upstairs. If you can’t sleep, just read a book.”
I wasn’t in the mood to argue either. A book was better than having a bedtime in middle school.
The next day I woke up late. I came downstairs scared to be in trouble for missing school but no one was mad. Mom and Dad were sitting on the couch again watching more scientists talk about the same thing.
“We gained 6 minutes yesterday. We are on the fourth day of The Slowing and we see no pattern in how much the earth slows each day-”
I came up beside them. There was no school that day, the district had canceled it for the week. It was like a snow day but without the coats. I asked my mom if I could go over to the Lester’s and she just shook her head.
“Dan, I know it's hard to understand but right now we would really like you to be at home. We don’t know what is happening”
I knew what was happening. The days were longer. So what?
A woman came on the TV shouting theories about how this was the end of days, we were all going to die and it would be slow and painful until we were all gone. My mom looked at my dad. My dad was dressed for work but his lunch wasn’t on the counter like usual and his shoes were not tied. He was an engineer but not the kind that built robots and spaceships, he worked on plants. Bioengineering he called it. My mom was a teacher at my school, she taught math for the fifth graders and all the kids loved her. Both of them were smart, they were calm, but when I walked back through the kitchen I could see that someone had gone out last night and bought cans of vegetables and peanut butter and they were all on top of the fridge. We were preparing for an immediate death that would never come.
It took five more days for the government to come forward and tell us a plan. Clock time. We were to keep our clocks as normal and resume daily life. Schools would be back opened and businesses were expected to open as usual. By that time we were only behind half an hour. I hadn't been let out farther than the backyard in weeks but I knew by watching out windows that people were running. Families packed up and left their houses abandoned to return to wherever they called home, trying to run away from something they couldn’t run from. The McAnderson’s left in the dead of night, their boys Sam and Killian were half asleep walking outside as they drove away in a rental truck. I always wondered if they had time to say goodbye.
School wasn’t much better. My entire seventh-grade class was down to 12 kids out of 25 on the first day back and more claimed they were leaving. Phil and I sat talking in the back just like everyone else. There were no lesson plans. Another class with only around 7 kids joined ours because their teacher was gone. My teacher put a video about bird migration up on the screen and the news up on her own computer. Phil and I couldn’t focus on either.
“Do you think this will end? My mom says it isn’t going to end and eventually the days are going to take a whole year.” Phil fiddled with a pencil in front of him.
“I don’t know. It’s going really slow though. I don’t think it’s that bad. The sun just rises later and sets later.”
“I don’t know”
“Do you think your family is going to move away to?” I asked. Phil looked up from the pencil and shook his head just like my mom did.
“My dad won’t let us. He said he has invested too much money in the shop”
It was funny because that was the first time there was silence between us. We were both thinking about it. Sam and Killian should have been in our class, they were the class clowns, twins, and they would always keep us rowdy, but they were gone. We were only kids, susceptible to our parent's wishes. We were not in control in so many ways.
Yes, you have read correctly - we are recruiting new mods for the Phandom Big Bang!
As this event grows from year to year, we always find ourselves needing more help, so if you’re interested in doing just that, here’s your chance!
This time around we are hoping to add between 2 and 6 mods to our team. Though that might change depending on how hard you make the decision for us. If you are considering applying, please be aware that being a mod is a major time commitment, so you need to be able to devote several hours of free time to this every week.
To give you a bit of an idea what the mod job includes, here’s a list of things you might be required to do:
planning and managing of the event at various stages in the process (e.g. promos, sign ups, claiming…)
managing multiple large spreadsheets
writing informational posts/answering questions
running a mod squad (this includes sending out reminders, completing check ins, encouragement and problem solving for 40+ people, among other duties)
But it’s not as hard as it may sound! There are certain perks too:
you will be working side by side with the current mods (and all of us are awesome) and surely gaining some friends
the knowledge that you helped organize one of the biggest events in the Phandom
meeting new people
you could totally put this on your resume (if you’re willing to admit to a potential boss that you organized a gay RPF event)
If you’re still reading and are now seriously thinking about applying, there’s some things you should know.
Your age, number of followers, native language, blog, and the fact whether or not you write fanfiction yourself will not impact our decision.
What we will be considering is how much time you are able to invest in being a mod, your google skills (how much experience you have with google docs/sheets/forms) and your work ethic, attitude, and overall enthusiasm towards this event.
To apply, please fill out this form. The final deadline for your application is March 12th, but the sooner you can get it in, the better.
And should you have any questions, you can ask them here.
We can’t wait to get to know you and start working together!
i may not be v active anymore but if any of you repost the videos to be watched for free then fuck you. just watch it on a youtube red free trial or something. don't take away the monetization from these boys and youtube, and don't forget it is ✨illegal✨ to do that
hey guys a really close friend of mine wants to legally change their name (since they are agender) and their dad won’t let them change unless they get a certain amount of likes on their instagram post. so if possible could you guys like the pic? https://instagram.com/p/BI3qhWmgL0I/ is the link and thank you all sm and if you don’t have an instagram could you please spread the message
thank you all so much
lidia
