FICTION
The Day the Earth Stops
Jeremy Lawrence
There is only a brief moment before its rotation reverses, taking time with it. It happens so instantaneously and imperceptibly that the scientific community is denied the chance to investigate and empirically explain what’s happened. So, quite unnoticed, and at a tempo that raises no alarm, the planet’s history begins to unspool in reverse, like film from a reel, sparing no species or phenomena. It all appears so familiar that, as many are wont to observe ad nauseum, life goes on. The members of the human race proceed to execute the events of their lives backwards with as much thought and consideration as they did forward, which varies greatly on an individual level.
Very few are capable of holding onto the present moment long enough to even notice anything amiss. Those who do are constantly entering a new moment existing prior to this realization, such that, unless they are constantly reminding their selves of it, they forget. And even fewer think to question an unpredicted event that only occurred at the elbow of time’s unlikely boomerang—somewhere out there in the future-past—an instant experienced exactly once, never to return.
Those who notice time slipping around them decide that this order of things is not so terribly different from the old way. They are an enlightened few. They believe the best chance at happiness is to embrace their helplessness against time’s inexorable moonwalk. This acceptance comes harder for some. But, in many ways, for many people, surrendering to the new way is as easy as simply existing.
Entire lives are sent in reverse. Bad blood is cleansed, air is cleared of smog and tempers. Quarrelling lovers reconcile, detangle, and disengage. Bullets return to their barrels and are rechambered. Wounds close and heal. History is eaten. Discoveries are forgotten, and regrets wiped away. Broken hearts heal; healed hearts break.
Spines decompress, and shattered bones mend. The old get younger and younger and are returned to the womb. Everybody gets shorter. Tragedies are reversed. Old friends, once lost to distance or petty disagreements, rekindle. Innocence is regained. Orphans reunite with their parents, and plucked flowers return to the root. Stolen objects are replaced, and shattered materials are reconstituted. Trees shrink in size but grow in quantity.
Mutual antagonists, separated once by choice or by law, collide. Mistakes are repeated. Abusers and villains reclaim their victims. Blackened, smoldering earth catches flame again. Cursed spaces are reinhabited. Evil, once strangled and pummeled and subdued, rises from its defeat. Injustices profligate. Escaped prisoners return to their captors. Progress and growth are lost to time.
The infrastructure of modern conveniences crumbles. From the rubble, anachronisms emerge. The digital becomes analog, the virtual, tangible. Birds return to their nests; dogs and cats grow feral. Booming markets collapse. Highways and byways and bridges and tunnels and airports and bus terminals are disassembled. The electric grid is shut off. Light bulbs are replaced by gas lamps and candles. Canvases get erased and museums emptied. Stories are unwritten. The parts that make up the whole are steadily and regularly shaken loose to embark on their journeys toward their disparate origins. Homogenization gives way to individuation. And with each passing generation, the willingness and ability to confront the institutionalized dictums of purpose and being grows slimmer and slimmer.
The micro is swallowed by the macro, the macro by time’s maw. Empires recover from their falls, enjoy their apex early, and watch their dominions dissolve. One era replaces another.
Wars are reignited, followed by tense periods of peace. Pyramids are dismantled, obelisks are unerected, and monuments to deities and kings are disassembled stone by stone. Invaders retreat. Conquerors, colonizers, missionaries, and the fleets they towed across oceans and straits return to port in their motherlands. Stakes demarcating borders are lifted from the earth. Tribes and villages, once united in fiefs or absorbed by a common ruler, are released piecemeal and drift apart to rediscover their autonomy. Extinct dialects and languages are revived, as are certain, lucky species. Indigenous populations flourish, then shrink, funneling back into the earliest versions of their nomadic Cro-Magnon ancestors. Evolution’s backward trend increases exponentially. Rudimentary tools are discarded in the dust. The stories depicted on cave walls fade. Extinguished are the last embers of a fire built by intentional hands. Everything known as aesthetics and taste is eliminated.
Opposable thumbs disappear, and the continents are pulled into each other as if connected by a tightening thread. Interstellar objects retract from the Earth’s topsoil and return into the cosmos from whence they came, leaving craters and clouds of debris as voluminous and intermittent as the objects themselves. Rivers rise, canyons close, and mountains fall into the sea. A very special set of precociously motivated creatures flop erratically back into the roiling foam of an edgeless body of water, a soup teeming with life, never to return to land again. For a while, all is calm, until the seams of tectonic plates steam, loosen, and fissure. The Earth’s core destabilizes. The hard surfaces of land soften and grow hot, then molten. Magma careens back into the mouths of volcanoes. Furious high-pressure fronts of air and moisture compete for dominance above ground. Molecules split, bind, and rattle about the agitated atmosphere. The planet becomes a swirling mass of elements, power, electricity, and conflicting velocities—a tempest orbiting madly about an indifferent star. Its mass compresses, prohibiting life to any multicelled organism. Space and time coil tighter and tighter. The confines of all that is conceivable begin to close in. The raging little orb, regressed beyond recognition, grows increasingly unruly as it’s vacuumed into an indeterminable point in the blackness alongside countless other celestial bodies, a place beyond words, a loaded spring containing anything and everything once considered conceivable. It is here that time lies coiled, ready to begin again.
Where It Resides
By: Yetunde Olagbegi
Tw: mentions of suicide
I leave the residential district in a hurry, desperate to put as much distance as I can between that man and his family. I find myself at the edge of the city’s bustling harbor. The salty tang of the sea mingles with the acrid scent of industry. The scent wafts through my nostrils as the cacophony of the crowd stirs my immortal soul. I watch in fascination as cargo vessels laden with goods from distant lands glide gracefully into the harbor, their hulls creaking with the weight of their precious cargo.
I am suddenly struck with the urge to be taken out on the water, drawn to the idea of taking in the city from afar. Plus, I have lots of money to spend, and with a quick check of my phone, not a lot of time to spend it. I ask every person I encounter with a boat to take me on as a passenger, and am rejected a countless number of times. They either aren’t in the habit of taking on strangers, especially a frail old man, or they simply do not have the time. After about fifteen minutes of asking around, I finally convinced someone to take me on a boat ride.
His name is Junichiro, a short man in his late thirties who owns a small boat for fishing, he informs me.
“Will twenty yen do it?” I ask, pulling the paper notes from my wallet.
He eyes my wallet and then looks up at me. Sensing my desperation he says, “Give me all of it, or no ride for you.”
After scamming me into giving him all of my money, he finally motions for me to board his two-seater sailboat. By the looks of it, it hasn’t been cleaned in a while, but I don’t mind.
“There is nothing to see out here for endless miles. Why waste all your money on a boat ride?” He asks me, an eyebrow raised in question. I am not one to lie, so I don’t. After all, it is a valid question. “I want a nice view of this beautiful city before it is blown to bits.”
He sits there in silence for the next five minutes as he navigates the boat.
I check the time: 7:45 AM. “I don’t understand,” he mumbles softly, as if that stretch of silence was something of the imagination.
At the moment, I am not interested in getting to know Junichiro on a deeper, more personal level. I could share with him all the secrets I have kept hidden deep within my soul for millennia, after all, there would be no way for him to repeat what I tell him. But I had a more interesting and spontaneous idea, perfect for the occasion!
“If you could see anything, at any time, anywhere in history, hypothetically, of course, what would it be?”
He chuckles softly, as if we are two friends, reveling in an inside joke over a glass of wine. “Funny enough, I’ve thought a lot about this. I would want to be on the moon to watch as a meteor hit the Earth.”
It takes me a moment to fully register his answer. “So morbid, Junichiro, I love it.” His answer is even more bizarre than what I had imagined he would say. I suddenly regain interest in learning a bit more about this man before our bodies become dust.
Now, I will admit, what I did next wasn’t the smartest or the nicest act either. I grab Junichiro by the shoulders, albeit it is more of a tackle. I use more force than I had intended, and we smack headfirst into the frigid water that stings my skin with every passing second. His resistance, coupled with the freezing temperature, makes the time travel more difficult and the transition more painful than usual. A lot more.
I open my eyes to see an enamored Junichiro, his mouth wide open. I keep my hand on his shoulder, transferring some of my life force to him, as it just now occurs to me I took a human to space…without a spacesuit. The cosmic event I have brought us to is not new to me. But to humans, I am sure the sight before us could be described as nothing less than phenomenal. The Earth is a luminous orb suspended against the velvet expanse of space. And as the meteor streaks through the dark, it blazes a fiery trail across the sky before the atmosphere ignites with a brilliant burst of light, the explosion like a dazzling fireworks display.
With the snap of my fingers, we are back in his boat as if nothing happened. “H-How did you...?” He struggles to find the words, so I explain my story to him. I elaborate on what is about to happen to his beloved city. I bare the entire truth to him as the end of the world is not the time to start lying. While I talk, I watch as his eyes slowly fill with tears. He begins to sob, he struggles to fill his lungs with air, so I rub soothing circles on his back until his shaking subsides.
He looked up at me with pleading eyes, “Surely if you have the power to move through time and take me to space, you can save my life, my home? Try something, anything?” His voice began to crack at the end, breaking under the weight of his words.
“I could try,” his face brightens at this, “but I am afraid I would do more harm than good,” I say with a heavy heart. “Perhaps it was wrong of me to even come here.”
“Is it not worth the risk?” He screams. “You could save hundreds of thousands of lives!” He roars at me, punches my chest, but I don’t respond. I think about how ridiculous this is, sitting in a boat in the middle of nowhere, being yelled at by a stranger I just met. In this frail old body, no less. If I survive, I should sue him for elder abuse.
“God, please. Please don’t leave us to die.” It takes me a second to realize he is talking to me. I tolerate for a moment the idea that I may be God, but dismiss it just as quickly. That seems like way too much responsibility, plus I am not a fan of titles in the first place.
“You are a cruel man,” he says with disgust, spitting at my feet. Out of all the insults that have been thrown at me in my lifetime, this one hits the hardest.
I check my phone, 8:12 AM. He doesn’t even comment on it, perhaps he doesn’t notice, or perhaps he doesn’t have enough energy to care. With only three minutes left until we would both pass on, I was interested to know what he thought came next.
“You called me God before. Are you religious at all?”
“I believe where there are laws, there is a lawmaker.” He replies, his panic settling into a calm nonchalance. There is nothing left to say. I watch as he breathes in deeply before closing his eyes, achieving some semblance of inner peace. From the corner of my eye, I see a brilliant
streak of yellow soar across the sky, and I hold my breath. We sit together on the boat silently, each other’s last companion, as the fire blossoms toward the sea.
BELLYACHE
Last spring, they buried my grandmother with a pit in her stomach.
The tumour had whittled away at her appetite for months, leaving her sucking on sour plums to keep the nausea at bay. The women in my family are particularly prone to stomach cancers and ulcers, so our girls are taught not to trust their appetites. If this was the case, I wondered why we always made more food than we could eat. “It’s a Hakka habit,” my mother told me. “What you cook, you make for the whole village table.” Sure enough, we ate the plums my grandmother preserved until August.
There’s a Chinese saying that tells unmarried girls they are no better than overripe fruit, on the cusp of rotting. The nickname for single women over thirty is leftovers, the same characters that refer to leftover scraps at the dinner table. My mother always had strict rules for our own leftovers– no reheating vegetables or shellfish, for instance– but our leftovers were always a welcome respite after a long day.
I wondered what about my body made it more prone to rot. The first time a man called me pretty, I was seven and wearing a skirt that cut above the jungle gym scars on my knees. As a girl, you can go from belonging to no one to feeling like a clock has started ticking in your chest, all in the span of a summer. You lap up warm praise from your history teacher because he calls you clever in a way your parents don’t. You feel your posture begin to twist when boys enter a classroom, like a parched stem seeking sun.
Years before she died, my grandmother used to bring home bushels of raspberries from a farm up north. One of her favourite baby photos is of me in a basket, all eager palms and flushed cheeks streaked with red juice. “You used to eat like a boy,” my mother would chide. “Good thing you grew out of it.” As if there was something shameful tied to girls wanting–or worse yet, baring the evidence of their hunger.
Staving your appetite looks a lot like staving desire, and I think I became a master at waiting. But if you spend a childhood unable to eat as you please, you grow up unsure of what it’s like to feel full. No wonder I inherited a fantasy of being chosen, of a love that felt like being devoured and leaves you no choice, of a desire that can eclipse your own. So the next time a man presses against me in a dark frat basement, air trembling from the pounding bass, I mistake his hunger for something more earnest.
In the morning, I cry to my mother through euphemisms, the more precise words lodged tight in my throat. We were just going to his room to talk. I needed a drink of water. I thought he was just being nice. I don’t tell her about the foreign warmth of a strange body, the sinking weight when you don’t know how to leave. “You didn’t lose your first kiss to him, right?” Is all she asks, with the levity of checking an apple for bruises.
“No, of course not.”
My first summer alone in New York was spent sweating in a shoebox apartment whose windows opened over the compost of a diner next door. I got a job on St. Mark’s and learned how to tie my shirt taut against my waist. Following the other girls, I took inventory of which tops brought in more tips and used the sticky dollar bills as laundromat cash. I fell into the habit of seeing myself through a man’s eyes, a pattern of picking and pruning, suspended between self-preservation and palatability.
Did you know that when you’re far from home and a boy tells you he wants you, your brain can’t tell the difference between love and loneliness? It took several times of being peeled wide open until I realised I feared being undesirable more than I feared being consumed—several more times of detecting with nervous laughter, of saying sure and immediately regretting it. The room would begin closing up like a plum jar, all sticky and so hot it was suffocating. After years of
Liu 3
letting people do things to you, sometimes all that's left is an overwhelming feeling that everything that has gone wrong somehow, irrevocably, is your fault.
I was a child who got motion sickness easily, so on trips my grandmother would always tuck a wrinkled morsel of dried plum under my tongue. The sharp taste pricked tears in my eyes and made my molars ache, but settled my stomach all the same. I watched her boil chopped orange peel in sugar water, adding the plums to the hot jam until they lost shape and darkened. Sweet things made to last. What is that delicate threshold between rot and preservation? I need to self-alchemize, I thought one evening, cheek hot against the bathroom door. Something was eating away at the soft part of my skull, leaving dark spots of gradual decay. Talking to people made me feel like fruit flies were swarming under my skin. My mother would be horrified to learn that I leave leftovers in the fridge for three or four days at a time, and I realised my hunger cues were off when I ate through an entire bag of cherries, gut roiling, before noticing that the flesh was more brown than crimson. Even if I were handed a gentler love, I suspect I would have sunk my teeth into it before it was ripe, starved and over-eager. I wanted to leave my body in the sun until it got wrinkled and golden like a dried persimmon, made soft by a kinder warmth.
I left home early that winter because my brother was getting married. Our fridge was jammed with ceremonial fruit–pomegranates and honeydew melons the size of my head. A neighbour had gifted my father an enormous bough of longan for the altar, wrapped in a red knot. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I would tiptoe downstairs and devour a cluster, the cold burst of gum-shocking juice sobering and sweet. I ate and ate until my belly hurt, juice dribbling down my chin.
I hoped my grandmother could see me. I wondered if she would take a photo.