No one knew what to do the day the sunrise got stuck on the horizon. The orb of pink and gold and the purple shaded clouds just sort of slouched there, watching us.
The engineers didn’t know what to do. The same engineers that brought back the wooly mammoths which grazed across the farms of our countryside. The same engineers which cloned sheep and multiplied them in size and raised them by the thousands in little cages inside factories, blind as bats. The same engineers which built robots to write our songs and paint masterpieces and create images to sell us clothing, while we worked at cash registers and counters, factory lines, and grills. We had no skills left to call our own when civilization crumbled. All the intelligence was left to the beings that stole our art and forgot our passion.
We are on the verge of a new world! Our president exclaimed on television. But still the sun was stuck upon the horizon. No new day came for years. Long after he was out of office.
Somewhere in some confidential operation, the engineers built a giant gear to spin the world forward and bring about the new day. They bulldozed whole towns to create an open space to plant it in the ground. They drained lakes and felled trees, and started fires that raged throughout the forests. Animals burned alive. Mountain lions ran frightened through suburban sprawls and off-highway strip malls.
The gear was pulled by woolly mammoths. It was built by robots, maintained by humans covered in the blood of faceless sheep. The stain and smell just never left our clothes.
They put the machine into action and I thought that maybe I would miss the forever sunrise. I would miss what it would be like to live off the dawn of a new day. I thought maybe when this afternoon finally comes, it will have been for something; the future, powered by the slog of so many darker yesterdays.
I think it’s funny now. Well, maybe not funny, but fitting. When the giant gear was lugged across the countryside, the earth did turn, and people were filled with hope. But the machine was set in the wrong direction. No one knew how to check its work. And the sun slunk back down the horizon like the night swallowing the headlights of a passing car.
I was heartbroken. I wanted to lasso the moon and pull the earth right round again. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to hold my mother’s hand.
But something changed when the sun went down. The moon crowned the sky with its Mona Lisa smile. The stars splayed the black like shattered glass. Some winked in and out; long dead but remembered.
And in the darkness, the machines went into hibernation. The robots no longer painted. There were no ads or catchy music. No one to sell us something only spoken in our mind. The night was filled with gunshots. And in the blackness, you could hear people scream.
But if you stayed up in bed and stared up at the stars, through the walls and through the alleys, you could hear people typing. Dancing. Strumming. Cooking. Laughing.
You could hear them making love.
You could also hear them sing.
~
Adam J. Galanski-De León is the author of the short story collection, The Laughter of Hyenas at Bay (Raging Opossum Press), and the novella, Intrepid (Alien Buddha Press). He lives in Chicago, IL with his wife, daughter, and four cats. Adam maintains a website at http://www.adamjgalanskideleon.com.