by Chris McGinty
The sun was absent that day. The light should have shone across the land hours ago. Not an eclipse. Not bad timekeeping. Perhaps a miracle. Perhaps the opposite of a miracle. The world was in uncharted territory. The entire physics of the solar system was now in question, but he was still rooted to the ground, and nothing was tearing the land apart.
He pulled his phone out again. Rather than checking the time, he opened up a map app to see if global positioning showed him to be where he knew himself to be. It was accurate. He wondered sometimes if these things were fake. He wasn’t sure how they could be, but he also didn’t know how they could be real. It was simply that if he needed to go from one place to the next, the map would be consistent and accurate, as it was now.
He closed his eyes. He opened them again. Still dark.
He was ready to try prayer. There was a colloquialism about atheists and foxholes. Was he there? When everything was this far out of whack… maybe it was time. He chuckled lightly. Time, space, gravity, speed. All the measurements. All the math. Was the universe moving faster than light? Was this some sort of late-stage expansion? Ok, let’s try this.
He closed his eyes again. He prayed. It was awkward and it felt ridiculous. He wished that this wasn’t what purgatory looked like. He did everything to believe. He had faith to the extent that he could. He opened his eyes.
It was still dark. It had done nothing. There was an odd glitch then. It looked like a pause break on a VHS tape. It resembled a flash. It was like there had been an optical shield in front of him that suddenly slid up like a shutter. The light didn’t cast gradually across the land like a sunrise. It was not there and then a split second later it was. It was all normal again, and also never again.