Read Online The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker - Free Book Online

really,” he said. “I knew what it was.”
    The nightly news was dominated by the story and featured a handful of eclipse enthusiasts who, before the slowing started, had traveled to a remote Pacific island, one of the few specks of dry land from which it was supposed to be possible to view the total solar eclipse. These people had packed expensive camera equipment in their luggage, special filters designed for capturing pictures of vanishing suns. But their tools sat unused in cushioned cases. Their special filters were unnecessary, their protective glasses remained folded in chest pockets, never used—the eclipse struck the West Coast instead.
    That night the baseball playoffs went on without interruption. To play on in the face of uncertainty seemed the only American thing to do. But that night’s game was terrible. It was harder than ever to defy gravity. Seven pitchers were pulled. No one could hit. With each new hour, every bit of matter on the earth was more and more fettered by gravity.
    It seemed the stock market, too, was subject to the same downward pull, having plunged to a record low. The price of oil, on the other hand, was shooting upward.
    By the time I climbed into bed that night, we’d gained another thirty minutes. All the television stations had added perpetual crawls to their screens, which reported, instead of stock prices, the changing length of a day on earth: twenty-six hours, seven minutes, and growing.

6
    The days passed. More and more people drained away from our suburb. They fled to wherever they were from, and this was California—almost everyone had migrated here from someplace else. But my family stayed. We were natives. We were home.
    On the third day, my mother and I drove out to my grandfather’s house after school.
    “He says he’s okay,” my mother said as she drove. “But I want to make sure.”
    He was my father’s father, but it was my mother who worried over him most. I had begun to worry about him, too—he lived all alone out east.
    We stopped at a gas station on the way and discovered a long line of cars, waiting for the pumps. Dozens of minivans and SUVs formed a chain that overflowed the parking lot and wrapped around the street corner.
    “Jesus,” said my mother. “This line looks like something out of a war zone.”
    A woman in a pink-floral-print dress hurried between the cars, slipping orange flyers beneath windshield wiper blades as passengers looked away:
The end is now! Repent and save yourself!
    I avoided her eyes as she passed, so frantic and so sure, but she sought out mine and paused at my window to shout through the glass: “And the Lord God said, ‘On that day, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.’ ”
    My mother flicked the lock on the doors.
    “Is that from the Bible?” I asked.
    “I can’t remember,” my mother said.
    We inched forward slightly. I’d counted nineteen cars ahead of ours.
    “Where is everyone going?” asked my mother. She rubbed her forehead and exhaled. “Where is there to go?”
    My grandfather lived in the middle of a luxury housing development. His old house was a holdout against the new. Once off the freeway, we drove through a network of fresh black streets, sliced at every corner by a shimmering white crosswalk. The stop signs were new. The speed bumps were new. Everything here was new. Curbs remained sharp and unscuffed. Fire hydrants stood gleaming and rust-free. Rows of saplings grew at evenly spaced intervals along the sidewalks, and the sidewalks literally sparkled. All the houses had lawns like thick heads of hair.
    Amid all this newness, my grandfather’s dusty acre persisted, invisible, like a patch of dark matter: You could tell it existed from the way the roads curved around it, but you couldn’t see it from the outside. You only sensed it. The developer of the neighboring community had planted thick pine trees on every side of my grandfather’s lot, so the