The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

We were distracted back then by weather and war. We had no interest in the turning of the earth. Bombs continued to explode on the streets of distant countries. Hurricanes came and went. Summer ended. A new school year began. The clocks ticked as usual. Seconds beaded into minutes. Minutes grew into hours. And there was nothing to suggest that those hours, too, weren’t still pooling into days, each the same fixed length known to every human being.

And it seems to me now that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper. It disrupted certain subtler trajectories: the tracks of friendships, for example, the paths toward and away from love. But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging. There is such a thing as coincidence: the alignment of two or more seemingly related events with no causal connection. Maybe everything that happened to me and to my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.

had produced a radically simple plan: in the face of massive global change, we, the American people, would be asked to carry on exactly as we always had.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There’s a certain boldness to inaction.

But doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?

Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.

So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light?

But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest. Six or seven weeks after the slowing started, a certain boredom developed. The daily count of new minutes dropped off the front pages of the newspapers. And television reports on the subject became hardly distinguishable from the more ordinary bad news that streamed each night into our living rooms and went largely ignored.

so that no one would ever discover how little I understood what seemed so obvious to the other girls I knew.

Meanwhile, the sun shone—dusky and smoke-dimmed—and the wind blew bits of ash around until it settled on the patio like snow. Those distant fires only added to our enjoyment. They meant we were living in important times.

They were preparing for a time of monsters, it seemed to me, but the monsters were only the neighbors, maybe even their friends.

was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kind of people we would be. Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy. Some would be smart, others smarter. The chubby ones would likely always be chubby. The beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life. And I worried that loneliness might work that way, too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.

We heard that everything plastic would outlast the rest, and so we pictured the houses on my street reduced to piles of PVC pipes and LEGOS, tupperware and beach pails, computer chips and cell phones and razors. Bottles of every variety would tower over everything else, the labels fading across the decades and the plastic cracking under the force of a harsh and lifeless sun. “Think of all the toothbrushes,” said Seth.