Daniel Keohane - Margaret's Ark

Something caught Suresh's eye. He looked away from Meyers and stared at his wife. Neha glared back. Suresh looked past her. A colorfully adorned man, dark-skinned, perfect in his features, stood in the middle of the yard. Suresh’s throat went dry.

Meyers continued, “What I mean is, how many others actually had the dreams, the visions if you will,” he raised and lowered the empty glass unconsciously as he spoke, “but never did anything about it? Maybe they never believed in them.”

The figure's arms and legs were bent in a poetic gesture of running. One leg back and bent at the knee. The left arm behind his back in a similar, awkward gesture. The right arm angled before him. This dark man's right hand was open, palm-out. This was the pose of the god Hanuman, Suresh understood, sent by Rama when Ram's brother was struck down in battle. Hanuman, sent to find a special healing plant. Reaching the sacred mountain, he could not decide which plants to take, so he carried the entire mountain in the palm of his hand. Suresh peered closer, and saw what floated above Hanuman's open palm was not a mountain.

“...the idea is so ludicrous. And to throw everything away for a dream. Just a dream.”

Neha must have realized Suresh was looking past her. She turned, and when she saw nothing her expression doubled in its ferocity.

Floating above Hanuman's palm was a tiny rendition of the Earth. The longer he stared, the closer Suresh seemed to move towards the vision. Clearly he saw the blue and white globe, turning quickly above the palm. Then the god's fingers began to close, slowly, curling upward like brown teeth. They closed in, drawing tighter, and soon blocked Suresh's view of the tiny world which Haunman held within his grasp.

“It's time,” Suresh whispered.

Meyers stopped talking. He looked skyward. Nothing but a deep blue all around. And around. And around.

Meyers fell onto the dock, then rolled into the lake. He thrashed at the surface, letting go of his glass. He tried to get a footing on the muddy lakebed, but for the moment could not decide which way was down. The beach and dock seemed to heave and spin over him. He wondered how much he had drunk, before the water wrapped itself around him in a swirling undertow and pulled him away from shore. The sky tumbled below him. With a panicked thrash, he broke through the surface, only to see trees, then a road roll above him.

Suresh remained on the dock, face down and fingers splayed wide. His legs dangled over the edge, in the water, but the rest of his body pressed hard against the top of the dock. He tried to breathe. The world pulled at him from every conceivable direction but something pressed him down, holding him in place. The water raced away and his legs shot out behind him, desperate to follow. Suresh’s upper body remained pressed against the boards, gulping air into his compressed lungs as the unseen force of Hanuman's fingers pressed him harder and harder in place. He did not notice Bernard Meyers racing away within the retreating water.

* * *

No sound traveled into space. Earth, in its tremendous majesty, hung in the dark, infinite silence. Its perpetual rotation had for so long been constant, unnoticed against the backdrop of the universe. Also unnoticed was the sudden interruption in this rotation.

Like a child's toy on a string, the blue and white planet stopped spinning. It remained motionless for a fraction of a moment. As Suresh struggled for breath against the dock and Bernard Myers released his empty glass into the lake, the massive planet began its rotation once again, in the opposite direction.

Tectonic plates, some the size of continents floating within their molten beds, should have crashed together, torn free of the land with a spray of magma and rock. They did not. Everything above and below the exposed land surface of the planet held fast under some monstrous, gravitational grip.

Oceans and lakes and rivers, traveling along the planet's surface with a millennia of momentum, moving a thousand miles per hour, always in the same direction, had no such restraints. At eight-fifteen Pacific time, the planet stopped and just as quickly changed direction. The water continued forward as it had always done, caught unaware. The proverbial rug that was Earth had been pulled out from under it.

* * *

The pressure holding everyone to the bricks along the park's walkway subsided, followed by the sound of hundreds of people heaving gasps of air into their lungs. Jack grabbed the iron chain-railing. An inner joy verging on ecstasy spun in his mind, more than the vertigo that had just seized them all. God is truth , he thought. His word is truth and He has delivered unto us His promise .

He wiped his eyes so he could watch God's destruction clearly. Circling the water, the neighboring hotel and Commercial Wharf were not a crumbling pile of metal and stone. Jack rubbed his eyes again. Something was happening. The screams of those behind him were overpowered by the roaring of the churning sea. Waves smashed into the slimy sea wall, then each other, sending towers of salty spray into the air. Jack raised his arms with unrestrained glee.

“Behold!” He shouted, “The Power of -”

He stopped. Like a leashed dog watching his master's car drive away, Jack stared helplessly as the waters of Boston Harbor smashed and roared away from him in a flood played in reverse. Out in open water an MBTA harbor ferry was swept away with its screaming passengers. It looked to Jack as if a plug had been pulled from a massive drain far out to sea. He fell against the heavy chain-railing, his mind confused by the sight. Miles away the Atlantic Ocean surged with a momentum built over millennia. It rolled past the shores, then completely over the outer islands. Then the water was gone.

Al ong the milky horizon, the ocean moved eastward like a fading gray wall.

Someone struck him on the shoulder. Jack did not turn around. People grabbed his arms and hands; some with violence, others pleading. Now and then a microphone wormed itself between the bodies, only to be yanked away and tossed aside.

“What did you do?” a man spat, cursing and gripping at his shirt.

“Please, it's not too late, I know it isn't. Please touch me and bless me.”

“What's happening? What's going on?”

Jack didn't listen to their words. He stared across the glistening canyon of mud and whispered to the lost sea, “Come back. Please come back to me.”

“Turn around, you coward.”

“Forgive me, Father....”

“Make it stop. Make it stop; please make it stop.”

Jack's grip on the rail fell away. Pulled and guided and shoved into the throng of his self-proclaimed parish, he floated amid their hands and arms. He stared past the bobbing heads, into the sky. In a sea of a hundred faces that twisted and writhed into their own distinct emotion, Jack twisted, both of his own accord and by the flood of arms and fists. Someone slapped him; another pulled at a chunk of his hair. A woman appeared before him, muttering “Bless me bless me bless me” then she was swallowed up as more faces, angry, terrified, moved in her wake. Something stuck Jack in the leg. Pain shooting.

He could see nothing past the faces.

“Michael!” His shouts mixed, and were lost, amid so many other voices.

He was pulled suddenly to his feet. A Latino man in an oversized Bruins hockey shirt was screaming but the words made no sense. Then the man coughed. Blood sprayed from his face and he dropped from sight. The horde behind him parted like the Red Sea. At the far end of this new path stood the young man with the wild blonde hair. His arm was extended, shaking. Jack noticed the gun only when it sparked and something punched him in the chest.