The Account of the Breaking

It has happened. The tremors shaking every street, mountain and baby carriage, upturned most of mother earth into a grave. We carried the glory of a sick society boasting individual enrichment, but not anymore. All is lost. Humanity, the animal kingdom, the plants and insects have been taken in the blood of mother’s lava. The mineral kingdom prevails. Game over. Reset. The blue globe boils over, viewed from space by astronauts, now shaken out of their dull, wristwatch-measured days. Explorer, we have a problem. Houston..? no more. How many months of oxygen left? Better get going with that population experiment on mars...

The earth explodes, implodes, tumbles all over herself, folds in, a frying doughball. but a shard, a tectonic plate.. europe..? floats away from the turmoil, pulling smoggy atmosphere along with it, out into orbit of this dying, rebirthing planet. Deep, incessant breathing without pause between inhalation and exhalation can cause dizzyness and cramping of the muscles of the human body, cramping back into its original fetal position. The deep breaths of choking mother earth caused her to curl up into something primordial. Civilisation brought to its rightful place: fleas in the earth’s pelt. Earth decided to scratch herseld. But a sliver of her skin flies off: astronauts stare at the drifting mountain, its bottom bleeding lava, pushed out by flares from earth’s hottest center. Who could survive that? Three months, six days, seven hours estimated oxygen remaining. To plan ahead. To die well-aware. But who could survive there?

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The house trembled, grandpa’s paintings finally fell down, mother’s coffee spilled and dad’s traffic jam suddenly did race forward, and down into the water below the tumbling bridge, hoola-hooping its pillars as if trying to dodge the seagulls. To no avail. Water rescue couldn’t get out of its collapsing building, electricity fell out, while nuclear reactors dismantled themselves much cheaper and faster than the government ever could have wished.

‘grim.’ Said the old man. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of this. Not this serious. ‘
‘may you live in interesting times’ came coughing from the rocking chair next to him.
The coffee and cake were abandoned by the running nurses, who still had lives to save. To no avail. Unless your GPRS-position, valid until just before that same globe started churning itself up, renewing her skin, was located on that one shard...

It was as if the heavens filled up with underwater ink clouds, and came down upon us. Those experiments shouldn’t have been allowed to continue. Not with all those obvious risks involved. Black holes, solar radiation, the sensitivity of nervous systems. Extremes meeting here, at this moment in novelty. I mean History. Sensing there was something wrong with this shaking all around, i carried my lemonade outside, for the bouncing table wouldn’t hold it, I suspected.

The earth was bursting. My home land, mein heimat, was being propelled into space. For me, it wasn’t so disastrous. I held my lemonade, staring at the neighborhood tumbling to the ground, babies, children and parents running outside against the blackening sky. The sun moved back up again from her summer 5 pm position, now peering down through the fists of black clouds punching out the daylight. Houses folded up. Pavement rattled, asphalt looked like the origami of a bored down-syndrome three-fingered toddler.

The astronauts watched this shard peel off like it does off of an orange when the flesh comes with it. Unripe. Yes, not ready to die. So I didn’t. I finished my lemonade as i walked to my neighbor, while my house touched hers as if to finally say hello to its interior since their construction period. ‘havent seen your insides for a while, heh?’ ‘Yes, its been awhile, want to come in?’ She held her four-month old son, and little Lily stared with eyes protruding forward as far as her puckered lower lip at me, at the windows blazing, the car folding up under falling concrete, while holding mama’s too-tight skirt, too tight to get a grip on.

Where was this to go? homeless on a folding continent, i thought. What was i to say to her. Are you alright? Her frowning eyesockets stretched open to reveal instincts on full throttle, and words were as i suspected: useless in this pre-rational state. I looked around the street that was still rumbling, rattling, unter the charcoal sky. I stood at an angle with the ground, I noticed, as the sun appeared to head on for the end of the horizon from which she had started every day, until this one. Some sort of night set in. Screams died away over the hours. Not a siren to be heard. Where in space are we? Cars made their lights protrude several meters into the solidified darkness of ash particles,  through a few hours until some light came again, from a sun still showing itself over a trajectory through the clouds that was not what we were used to. People were excavating family members, food and water from the ruins of their houses, now lying still in a truly post-apocalyptic landscape.

interesting how the things we fear most last only a few moments, to become bearable in their own becoming. The ones i have lived through have, anyway. Including this one. In the hours of muffled silence after what would from now on be referred to as ‘the Breaking, I helped my neighbors seek their spouse, get radios to work, only to pick up new forms of static, and make a fire to gather around. Many sat staring blankly into vague but recent memories. While some decided the beer might as well be opened, others franticallly set everything to everything to dig more dead bodies out into the grey open.

Talk of hurricane survivals, speculations about the help’s absence, and wonder about the sun’s new trajectory was in the air, which was breathed through t-shirts over our mouths, as we were instinctively driven to believe that our survival would last after this ordeal.  fell asleep on my  garden stretcher, in my backyard, after i left the party. Night or day, i couldn’t see, I wouldn’t believe. Jetlag from staying at home. If only i knew what had happened, i wondered , as well about the strange new angle my garden was in as opposed to gavity’s direction.

In the following days, the sky cleared in the form of ash rain, grayness laid her true meaning of the word over us. Umbrellas, makeshift tarps and cars collected this dead snow, that just would not melt. Did anyone laugh in these times? I tried, sometimes. But without a tv, you had to try something. We worked to build further on our shelters, as the new, constant wind blew any plan we drew off the table and we struggled to keep going in some kind of team- work. Jason from nextdoor worked as a carpenter, and took lead in building our street’s communal shelter and sleeping spaces.

The weather, if you could still call it weather, this grey asthma-incursor all around, was at least notcold. The sky slowly cleared, over the days that now lasted four hours for the sun to pass the sky. It showed us, as a great balloon in the distance, a ball of grey, black and red, mother earth in the middle of her facelift. That, and the horizon had taken on a new twist. What was once East, was now where the horizon lay higher than we were used to, showing us the remains of cities and villages, now from a view as though we were up on a high tower.  And to the west, most of the landscape was flooded, a big lake had formed in the cup that now held many corpses and gave rise to still more memories in the people, ruefully staring over its vast stretch of grey placidity, slowly swaying to the passing of our mother earth that became smaller and smaller each time she passed us, until after a few months she barely outsized te moon.

Like seeing Saint Peter’s church in Rome hadn’t given me a bigger jolt than any breakup ever did, this excerpt from what was left of human history, didn’t amount to much either. No that can’t be, you may say now. You lost your family, your neighbors, your friends... how can you say this? Well, I never felt very connected to the world around me. I guess it pays off now. My mother couldn’t touch me other than routinely kiss my cheek when we met and said goodbye, and my father couldnt look me in the eye after i punched him at seventeen. Fear had taken the place of family values, or the family value had become fear. As for brother and sister: former couldn’t bring it up to call, as little as i could, and latter seeked certainty in job, husband, and house. Certainty. To no avail. And I, I had listened too much to my parents’ fears, took the jobs, pushed myself through graduation to teach language. This didn’t make me love my parents more, seeing them just made me judge them more for showing all the parts that i hated of myself: Dawsome, initiativeless, gutless, afraid of even thinking to step out the door and do something out of the daily ordinary. I was twenty-eight years old, it as  december, at least until the ground broke, and here i was: homeless in a mangled city, careless in a world of tears. Numbed by tv tragedy and hyperreal murder gaming. What to do? I looked at the passing sky once more.

I took what food i had, some gear, and left the quarreling neighbors. I set off... east or west? I flipped a beer-cap. East. of course it would roll onto the printed side, i could’ve known. That’s how careless I had become about my fate. I started walking, my pack slung over my shoulder. East meant up the slope: what was horizontal once, was now uphill. Gravity had shifted to a point below the lake, and trees stood askew but in a straight angle with the ground. Trees, sprouting leaves again. The weather had warmed up over the weeks. Radio transmission had picked up again, there was one broadcast station by the lake, harvesting energy from garbage burning and aggregates. Its broadcasts told of reconstruction activities, requests for aid, and the local governments coming to decisions about the new coalition. But would old ways mend old ways’ wounds? I couldn’t bring myself to help rebuild something, of which i never felt a part. I couldn’t resist saying, you all deserved this. I couldn’t deny the uncanny feeling of freedom. I wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened.

I headed upward, to where the land curled up to the sky, and where fog obscured the distance. I was curious, and unbound by what i left behind. I set off into an unknown geography, which before was known to me. I set off into a shaken, broken world.