The Day When the West was East

No one noticed.  It didn’t even make the news, but when I woke up that morning, the world as we knew it had changed and nothing would ever be the same.  Consistency and routine have been the mainstays of our understanding of the universe, but when there is a change, even a slight variation, what is and what was becomes an uncross-able border.

Sunrise on that May morning did not seem to be such a big deal.  The summer was on its way melting the past weeks of winter away in one warming breeze.  The homeostasis of our community is vital when you get right down to it in order to keep the natural order of things in check, but on this morning, the sun rose from the western horizon unnoticed at first. Such a detail does not seem so extraordinary when first considered, but what followed would cause such irrecoverable changes that it is difficult for me to describe the events of that day rationally and free from emotion or personal biases of having witnessed this event.  

“Marvin!” My bothersome brother called to me from the other side of my door having learned never, never open my bedroom door without explicit permission after receiving the mandatory noogies for violating that rule a few times in the past. 

“Whhaaa.” I groaned from under the shelter of my pillow.

“Time to get your lazy butt out of bed and get ready for school.” I could see him smile vengefully with his chubby cheeks and his big old blue eyes shining in delight at my misery.  When I got up out of the embrace of my blanket, I noticed something wasn’t quite right, but I pushed it aside since my dread of getting myself ready for school and the English test I hadn’t studied for waiting for me in Miss Pentriss’ fourth period class just before lunch.  

So with feet now on the floor, I proceeded to the bathroom that awaited me to start my daily hygiene routine.  Something wasn’t right as I stepped into the shower with the warm water waking me.  My teeth were cleaned and shiny, but now I needed to bring the rest of me back to life.  

Shadows?  Who cares?  I have a stupid English test and I didn’t study.  Nope, I wasted my time playing my Xbox until bedtime. My stupid brother Marty had beaten me in my favorite game and was gloating.  He had practiced while I was doing homework during the week and I was rusty. I couldn’t let my twerpy brother beat me in Slaughter Sergeant.  Him beating me, was like having the world stop spinning, it just wasn’t in keeping with the natural order of things.  Before bedtime, I managed to best him, but it took several frustrating tries.  Even my dreams reflected that frustration as I kept finding myself dressed like Sergeant Slaughter himself trying to defeat an ever increasing army of Marties.  I woke up at midnight, my throat dry and feeling like something large and heavy had stepped on me. Walking to the bathroom, I noticed how dark it was outside, but then it was night after all, still it was darker than I ever remember it being.  

In science we had been studying about the orbit of the earth around the sun and the moon around the earth.  Galileo was the guy who observed that the earth orbited the sun and this made the Pope so mad, he wanted to have Galileo executed for lying.  Pretty harsh stuff if you ask me.  We also talked about black holes and that kind of scared me a little bit, because everything gets sucked into it, even light and time, like a big old vacuum cleaner.  Some English dude in a wheelchair named Hawkins wrote about these things called black holes.  What happens if earth got sucked into one of those black holes?  Marsha Williams said, “Yeah, but it is more likely the sun will explode before that and wipe out earth.”   

That did not make me feel any better, but I just laughed it off because Marsha has this big brain and likes to show off in class.  Mr. Ownsby, our science teacher, just nodded and told her she was probably right.  That did not make me feel any better either.

Mom kissed me on the top of my head as she put my bowl of Cap’n Crunch on the table in front of me while my dad slurped his coffee as he read the local newspaper.  Without looking at me, he asked, “So what’s up champ?”

“Nothing.” I shrugged.  The kitchen was usually dark, but this morning, the sun was shining through the north side window.  Strange.

“We’re gonna have a pizza party.” Marty was bragging.

“Great.” Dad still did not look up at him.  Ms Hensby was always giving out pizza parties since she was still a new teacher and wanted her third grade class to like her.  I hated the way he paraded around his privilege in front of us, especially since I had an English test I had not studied for.  It would be alright with me if the world would just stop turning for a minute and let me catch up.  Maybe I could turn the clock back and study some of the poetic devices used in some of the bards of the past.  What good would it do for me to know all about the metaphors Shakespeare used over five hundred years ago, anyway?  

Walking to the bus stop with Marty, I saw a bunch of the high school kids zip by driving their parents’ cars. I was going to be in high school next year and I could hardly wait, because I would be on a different bus from my twerpy brother and I could finally talk to Mary Jane without him butting into the conversation.  Mary Jane lived on the next street over and she was as smart as Marsha, but she did not feel the need to show off like Marsha did and since she had a twerpy brother like me, understood the pain of having a younger sibling to weigh you down. 

“Hey Marvin.” She waved as Kyle hovered around her like an unwanted moon orbiting the earth.

“Hey Mary Jane.” I said in the coolest voice I could manage.

“So isn’t this weird?” She noted.

“What?” I asked.

“The sun.  It’s out of place.” She scrunched up her face which I found very attractive.

“It is?” I had noticed, but I wanted to hear her take on this unusual occurrence.

“Sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” She sounded a lot like Mr. Ownsby which I also found kind of cute.  

When the bell rang, I wondered which teacher would mention the sun rising in the west, but by fourth period it was becoming clear to me that not one of my teachers noticed the natural phenomenon.  Mary Jane and I talked about it at lunch.  

“What could this mean?” She asked as she ate her peanut and butter sandwich.

“I dunno.” I shrugged, because after all I was not an expert in the field.  I know that ancient leaders claimed that this type of occurrence happened to signal the end of the world.  When Montezuma saw Cortes and his men marching through the jungle with colorful plumes in their helmets, he thought Quetzalcoatl had come to Tenochtitlan and so he treated the Spanish explorers as gods while they ruined his beautiful city and robbed them of their gold.   I read about Montezuma and Cortes in one of those National Geographic student magazines.  

“What if we are sucked into a black hole?” She gasped.

“Hey, are you two nerds gonna make out?” Donald Penniger, the grossest kid in the entire eighth grade shouted over to us from the next table.  I could feel my face turn red and for that moment, I wanted to disappear, but everyone was now turned toward, laughing. 

What if the sun rose out of the western horizon?  What if this was the new normal?  What would life be like then?  Mr. Ownsby told us once that the earth was settling back on its axis by over 24 degrees and if this were to continue, Antarctica could become a tropical paradise.  

Thinking those thoughts were certainly mind consuming.  There are always a lot of distractions to be thinking about which is why my math teacher Mrs. Donovan is always calling me the daydreamer of her class.  I can’t help it if she teaches math and my mind just doesn’t seem open to what she is trying to teach us.  Sometimes when we are doing multiplication, I start to drift off.

East?  The sun is moving east.  Why can’t anybody see it?  Why doesn’t anyone notice.  What if the birds start flying north for the winter?  What if my GPS starts acting screwy?  Will I have to put on suntan lotion for Christmas?  So many questions without answers.  Yes, Mrs. Donovan, I have finished my daily worksheet.

In gym class the weather is nice enough for us to go outside and play soccer.  I am not big on soccer, but I do like being outside.  I glance and to my horror, my shadow is in the wrong place.  I want to scream out to Mr. Palkawski about my shadow being misplaced, but he’s really into the game where a couple of the kids who play in the soccer league are moving the ball up and down the field.  I guess something like a misplaced shadow isn't really that important right now.  

They put me in and Eddie Martz immediately makes me eat dirt, saying, “The meek shall inherit the earth, so Marvin you get a mouthful.” His mean laughter followed him as I spit out some grass I had inherited.  Sure Eddie we’ll see who’s laughing when we are all sucked into a black hole.  Ha! Ha!  Our team captain has seen what happened and decides I am not soccer-worthy at this time which is fine with me.  I stand next to Billy O’Malley who is a mouth-breather and a general pain in the ass.

“Pretty cool, huh?” He breathes. 

“What?” I shake my head, pretending to be annoyed at being benched.

“The sun.” He giggled, “It came up from the west this morning.” 

He noticed, of all people, he noticed.

“Are you sure?” I asked testing him to see if he was being for real.

“My dad told me.  We watched it together.” He picked his nose which seemed to be always filled.

I hadn’t imagined it.  I wanted to ask what he thought this meant, but I could not bring myself to ask someone who was trying to flick a booger off his finger. I put my hand over my eyes like a viser and tried to look at the sun which seemed to be moving east.  

On the bus, I sat next to Mary Jane undeterred by the razzing I got in the cafeteria and much to my satisfaction, Mary Jane did not seem too bothered by it either.  “Those guys are blockheads.” 

“So what do you think?” I asked casually.

“I wish I knew.” She sighed.  

“What if we wake up for school tomorrow and the world has changed?” I continued to ponder our present situation.

“Life likes homeostasis.” She nodded, “Knowing what you can count on so that when it’s out of place, we have trouble dealing with it.  My grandpa told me when he was a boy, the stock market crashed and his father lost everything.  He said it was a really bad time, because everyone trusted the banks to take care of their money and then one day there was no money.”

“Do you think that will happen?”

“I hope not.  My dad is always talking about these hard times and how difficult it is to save with the rising cost of everything.  Sometimes I get nervous when I see him at his desk with his computer whispering curse words he doesn’t know I can hear.” Her face was twisted with concern, “What if the stock market crashes if the sun sets in the east?”

I had never considered being out of money.  We were not rich by any standard, but I never had to worry about if there was enough to eat, because so far there always had been.  How delicate the balance really is when you think about it.  Everyone is talking about climate change and how one day there will be nothing left of this planet, but what if the sun set in the east, how many things would be disrupted by this change.  I guess tomorrow we’d all find out and maybe then my teachers would be talking about it, I just hope they won’t give us a pop quiz.  

The boys in the back who never stopped their ruckus were laughing at one of the smaller kids who was doing his best not to pay them any mind with their cruel remarks about his lack of physical size.  This was the way it had been since I started school, the weak being picked on by the bigger, the stronger.  Miss Critchen, my history teacher was always telling us about the Romans and how they conquered the world and then gave us the foundation of our government, but they were also bullies like the boys in the back of the bus.  And then she told us about Manifest Destiny where the settlers continued to take the land away from the indigenous people and put the survivors on reservations after disease had wiped out over half of their people.  How Hitler had convinced the German people that the Jews were the enemy and the only way to solve the problem was to use his final solution.  For being the top of the evolutionary tree, we certainly have not learned anything from our past mistakes. 

What if everything changed tomorrow?  What if this planet, tired of all the abuse and mistreatment decided to collaborate with the sun and change the order of everything?  This morning, much to my chagrin, nobody had noticed a thing, but that could all change in a New York minute. So many things could happen all at once that no one would be able to handle it. What if all the cars disappeared?  And all the people had nowhere to go?  I closed my eyes, but I could not imagine such a thing. The kids in the back of the bus were picking on a new victim.

“You wanna come over and do homework after dinner?” Mary Jane asked.

“Naw, I gotta get to be early so I can wake up and see the sun rise up in the west tomorrow morning.” I shook my head.

“Me too.” She smiled as the bus came to a stop at my bus stop.  With a wave of my hand, I bounced down the aisle and said so long to Mr. Givens our bus driver.

“Take care of yourself, little man.” He laughed.  He always called me “little man,” but soon I would not be so little.  

“What’s new?” Mom asked when I walked in the door with my backpack slung over my shoulder.

Should I tell her about the sun?  Would she believe me?  She always disregarded whatever I said as childish gibberish since I could remember.     I doubt things would change, so I just shook my head and headed for the kitchen table where she had set out an after school snack just like she always did and I would get out my homework which I always did with hopes of finishing before dinner so I could go a few rounds with Sergeant Slaughter and get a leg up on my twerpy brother.  I had most of my math done, so my hopes were high.  I ate the bag of raisins and apple slices since mom insisted on a nutritious snack.  Another thing that never seemed to change.  

“George.” My mom called to my dad who was in his study finishing up a report for his real estate business.

“Yes Julie.” He answered.

“Garbage goes out tonight.” She lifted out the filled bag and put a new garbage can liner in the empty receptacle.  

“Alright.” He answered.

Just like every Monday.  Nothing out of the ordinary, well except…

The evening went just as planned, I finished my homework with an hour to spare before dinner and I got to my XBox where I gave Sergeant Slaughter a good going over so that when Marty joined me after dinner, I kicked his ass which made him whimper and made me smile.  Just like always.  I went to bed feeling fully vindicated and set my alarm for seven in the morning when the sun would be rising from the west.  I was asleep before my head settled into my pillow.  

My dreams were deep and detailed where I was running from the black hole that was sucking everything down like my brother and parents, but I managed to rescue Mary Jane.  She kissed me on the cheek and called me her hero.

The sun streamed into my room the next morning just as my alarm went off, but when I put my feet on the floor, I saw the shadows, all where they had been the day before since my room is on the east side of the house.  Walking to the window, I looked out and saw the sun rising from the east horizon just like it had done every morning, well except one.