The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

Something similar had happened once to the bees. This was only a few years before the slowing began. Millions of honeybees had died. Hives were found abandoned, inexplicably empty. Whole colonies had vanished in the breeze. No one ever did conclusively pinpoint the cause of that collapse.

long-standing, and our fault: pesticides and pollution, climate change and acid rain, the radiation emanating from cell phone towers. The slowing, some said, had simply tipped the balance in exactly the wrong way, leaving the birds more vulnerable to all the man-made threats they’d been battling for years.

and this whole thing is its way of correcting itself,” continued Sylvia. She was a woman who grew her own wheat grass in a greenhouse out back and then squeezed her own wheat grass juice. “All we can do is give in to it. We have to let the earth guide us.”

I was getting used to the sight of lifeless things. I’d been learning, since the slowing, about the qualities of the dead, the way a bird’s body deflates after a few days, the way it drains, growing flatter and flatter until only the feathers and the feet remain.

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible. I like to think about how my parents’ lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold. Back then the future was whatever they imagined—and they never imagined

Lately, I’d begun running out of things to say to other kids. I’d stopped knowing how to respond. “Hey,” she

think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things.

But I was not convinced that we would go back. Instead, I sensed that someday, if we survived, we’d be telling stories of how it once was on Earth.

She looked lonely through the lens of my telescope, like one of those faraway stars, still visible to our eyes but no longer really there. She looked lonelier even than I was.

“You’ll see when you’re older,” he said. “You won’t believe how quickly the years will pass. I feel like I was just here, but it’s been twenty years.” The tide had risen to my calves. I felt the strong pull of the water against my skin, and it scared me.

“You used to be much braver, you know,” said my father as he started the engine. “You really did. You’re getting to be as bad as your mother.” And he was right: I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight.

This was the first of the solar superstorms, triggered by the withering of the magnetic field. My mother called my father again. Nothing.

Much study has been devoted to the physical effects of gravity sickness, but more lives than history will ever record were transformed by the subtler psychological shifts that also accompanied the slowing. For reasons we’ve never fully understood, the slowing—or its effects—altered the brain chemistry of certain people, disturbing most notably the fragile balance between impulse and control.

“A paradox,” he went on, “is when two contradictory things are both true.”

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words: I never heard from Seth Moreno again.