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.
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.
