Once Upon a Revolution
by Jais Brohinsky
Once (just once) upon a time the world got dizzy and stopped spinning. It just stopped—no more rotation, no orbit, not even a sway. The moon spun away from Earth’s gravitational pull, twisting and turning into the sun. People everywhere were jolted or knocked down because the world gave no hint of slowing—it just stopped dead.
People panicked. The Russians blamed the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration blamed China, but, afraid to wake a sleeping giant, accused France and the Axis of Evil. Likewise, France and the Axis of Evil blamed international democratic capitalism, but accused Israel instead. Israel responded through the US, which solidified global suspicions, and until electricity failed, the world powers waited with fingers poised to press the button like in the decades following the Second World War.
In schools they hit the alarms and children piled into corners, under desks, or out windows and doors, unsure whether there was a fire, an earthquake, or another lockdown drill. In Japan the military responded to numerous Godzilla sightings (they were false alarms). The Leaning Tower of Pisa was shaken erect, while every other building now slanted slightly east. Eastern Asia was left in full sunlight and people’s skin began burning. Plants died. While Asian markets were reporting record sales in sun block and parasols, people in the Americas were waking up to pitch black.
Some religious folk thought the Apocalypse had finally come and began praying. Some not-so religious folk saw the religious folk praying and started repenting. But most people just decided not to go to work and turned over in their beds to catch up on sleep. Since no one went to work, everything began to fail—first electricity and water, then telephones and even the cellular phones on which people had come to rely. Soon riots flooded shopping centers and grocery stores as people fought for supplies.
When all the crops had failed, when all the gas stopped pumping, when all the supermarket shelves were empty, and all the water towers and wells dried or spilled, people began to change. As radios, televisions, and internets blinked out across the world, people stopped caring about all those little things that had expanded and filled their minds to the point of suffocating time into a constant, tardy blur. Money stopped printing and banks closed, but it didn’t matter because nobody wanted it anyway. No one cared about the ticking of the stock market with its buzzing ups and downs—fortunes and miseries. No one cared about the strength of the euro or the yen, or the current wage caps guillotined by Wal-Mart, or the national or the global economy. Suddenly people cared only about food and water and survival.
The change happened slowly at first. Communities got together and discussed rational distribution of goods. Leaders arose and preached togetherness. There was finally a common cause, a common, impending oppression to hate or fear or fight. Like a cancer patient, the global populace realized its body was killing itself, and for days millions of browns, blacks, whites, reds, yellows came together and rallied for life. People shared with their neighbors and built an international family. Race, gender, nationality, class all dissolved and identity was defined by starvation.
But slowly, surely, as the bite of empty stomachs leached their bile up into the esophagus of humanity, as this intestinal burning became the flavor of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, people began to eye one another. Families remained in-doors behind locked windows and bolts. Community meetings trickled down to a few, and by the time those remaining found out that the mayor was taking extra rations and hoarding canned tomatoes in his garage, the tree they strung his body from was one of the more peaceful sites of violence.
Bill Gates was found bruised, battered, and floating in his swimming pool. The mob that discovered him searched the mansion, and though the seventy-six inch, high definition television/home movie system was intact and only a little dusty, the refrigerator and pantry were bare save the two trampled bodies leaking blood on the white kitchen tiles.
Neighborhoods turned against themselves. Bands of starving whites, blacks, reds, yellows, translucents looted houses and struck down any resistance. When new prey became less and less accessible, the hordes turned upon themselves, feasting first on the weak, the old, the injured—then the young. These packs disbanded into families who hid and lived in shivering, collective huddles in the shadow of a corner. Soon the families dissolved too. Brothers slapped crumbs from the mouths of sisters. Mothers swallowed the cries of their babies for milk, sucked on helplessness like candy as if will alone could turn bitter sweet.
Soon the gag of rot and decay wafted through the once cities of once states of once nations. The stench settled over the globe until finally there was stillness. And then, just when a silence unheard in millennia crept across the oceans and flooded the continents with its echo, imperceptibly, the world slid back into its motion.