When the Rocks Turned to Sand

Indra

[March 2027]

Indra’s predictions were becoming more accurate. A few days late, but as the wind swirled around her ankles it brought with it the familiar drop in her stomach. The veil was shifting. She could smell the change in the air, feel the pull of the breeze that although quiet, had a weight and a strength that seemed to suck and push like a physical force. Moving as fast as she could, without breaking into a sprint, she slipped back through narrow streets toward her hovel of an apartment. The few things she needed were already crammed into a hiking pack; a crank torch, a rain jacket, fishing equipment, a small gas stove, matches and a sleeping bag. She carefully packed her camera equipment and weather instruments into the top compartment of her pack and waited. She stared at the little black notebook on her bedside table, mentally flipping through each page, having committed each calculation, each observation to memory. She wasn’t sure if her adrenaline or paranoia made it seem darker than it was, but she felt as though time was already accelerated, that the light hung too low and the shadows had grown too long.

A week earlier she was approached by a man wearing a battered grey coat. She was standing by the water taking photographs of the sky, adjusting the dial on her barometer and making calculations in her little black notebook. He just stood and watched her for a minute before approaching. Indra was wary of the stranger. Most people just whispered or chuckled as they walked by - taking her for another crazy doomsday fanatic, searching for signs that the sky would fall down on their heads. But this man was different. He was respectful, almost reverent in the way he watched her. When he approached, he did not introduce himself.

He only said “I have been reading your articles online for 3 years. I think your work is very interesting”.

Indra had stopped posting articles since January when she began to suspect what was coming. She did not have time to respond to the man's strange comment. The stranger slipped a piece of paper into her hand, nodded his farewell, and walked hurriedly back up the small street from which he came. After taking in what had just occurred, she opened the piece of paper and read the neatly printed note.

Dear Indra,

You do not know me, nor do you owe me the favour I am about to ask. I have been following your work for years and I have watched you here since you have stopped publishing. I know that you have been making predictions of what is to come. I know you have plans to leave the city and I fear that when you disappear, myself and my family will have no hope in surviving what is to come. I do not know how much time we have left, but I know that for the immediate future, money will serve the purpose it always has. If you can find it in you to take pity on a stranger and his young family, I can pay 20,000 dollars, in exchange for your notes. I am not asking to come with you, I would not dare follow. But I believe that with my training and knowledge of your work, I will be able to use your notes to find safety for my family in the future.

If you should choose to accept this offer, I will meet you at the same time next week, here in this very spot.

Yours faithfully,

A desperate stranger.

She had been undecided all week. But when it felt like dusk, she closed her front door softly, stepping out onto the street with her pack, considerably bulkier than that day one week ago. She met the stranger down by the port. She did not know his name or who he was. She did not know if his life was worth any more than that of the fisherman in her peripheral vision, the old woman holding a bag of groceries or anyone else in the city that would soon be sucked of life and youth. For a year she had made meticulous notes on her observations and predictions in a small black leather-bound notebook. She had nervously thumbed its cover so thoroughly that its exterior had become soft and worn and shiny in parts. The spine was contending with the added pressure of innumerable clippings, photographs and notes scrawled in urgency on random bits of paper. An elastic band held the book together and stopped the tired spine from spitting out the additional contents.

Squeezing its soft leather one last time, Indra handed the book over to the man. He held it in both hands, seeming to appreciate its fullness and the unexpected weight of it. He reached into his bag, retrieved an A4 sized envelope with the money and handed it her as casually as if it were filled with office paper and not 20,000 dollars. She hesitated only for a moment before taking the envelope.

Indra knew that the money would mean nothing in a few months. She knew that once the veil of time that encased the earth’s atmosphere started to peel away, there would be total anarchy. Once the earth was divided into ‘thick’ places – where the veil doubled over on itself, where people aged slowly and lived almost as immortals, and into ‘thin’ places – where the veil tore or was pulled tight and thin, where time slipped past like a rushing stream and youth escaped like sand through open fingers – she knew that money would mean nothing. But until then, while the rest of the world lived in denial of the dark happenings in the sky, she knew that this money would get her on the planes and trains she needed to board to get to the place she believed would be safe and thick and sheltered from the desperate millions who would want to seek refuge amongst the newly rich – those who had time. She knew that if she acted with enough haste, this money would buy her what she needed to make a refuge, stock her supplies, and hopefully – to convince Ben to join her before it was too late.

If her predictions were accurate, she had about 3 months to get as far south as possible.

***

After the rain comes sun

After the sun comes rain

After the rain we’ll run

After the sun comes pain

***

Ben

[May 2027]

Ben was en route to Patagonia. His sister Indra had been asking (and more recently begging) him to meet her there. Indra had always been the book smart sibling; he had always been the street smart one. Indra had studied plants and insects in their childhood home where mangroves met the sea, since she had the dexterity to hold a magnifying glass. But her most obstinate obsession was the sky. Their father had often joked that seeds would fall into her mouth and she would grow a mangrove on her tongue from all the open-mouthed gaping at the clouds. Now, their father long dead, and Indra a no-less unusual adult, had developed some hare-brained, fatalistic theory about what was happening in the sky. She was vague about the details in her emails and phone calls. It wasn’t until he had received her letter a few weeks ago that he had decided to travel across the world to meet his big sister. Even if she was being a little crazy, she had always looked after him. Maybe it was time for him to look after her. The letter only said “Ben, I need you not to think, just come.” But the envelope contained a plane ticket and a map.

He had planned on leaving earlier but flights were delayed for a few weeks while scientists umed and ahed over what was happening in the sky. In December of 2026 it had shown up on satellite images as a darkish seam. By January it had grown longer and wider and darker. By February it could be seen by the naked eye in some parts of the southern hemisphere, an oily greyish streak across the sky. Environmentalists, scientists, politicians, and radio hosts theorised and speculated but no one could provide a definite answer. Some people became completely hysterical, boarding themselves up, inflating the price of baked beans in their manic pre-apocalyptic stockpiling, while others went about their daily lives as though the grey smudge was no more than a rain cloud.

Convincing himself, as many others had, that the thing was a benign meteorological anomaly, despite his sister’s theories, Ben boarded the first available flight out of Sydney. When Ben’s plane soared and plateaued above the flat low cloud cover, every passenger aboard held their breath as the now enormous pulsing, grey mass became visible. Looking less like a static stain on the sky, the mass looked very much alive as dark, almost black tendrils unfurled from its centre, releasing spores of grey and expanding the aura of the mysterious form.

As they drew closer, it became clear that they would be passing beneath it. A violent stillness gripped the cabin as the plane made its way steadily beneath the mass. The cabin grew darker as they passed beneath the dense black centre. In futile efforts to get a better look at the thing, people craned and baulked open-mouthed out windows and across laps. Ben’s skin started to feel tight. His hands felt very dry. His tongue felt rough in his mouth. He felt unwell. As he observed his hands, which did suddenly look very dry indeed, a woman’s scream cut through the silence. She had apparently been nervously running hands through her hair and had pulled away a significant handful of it. Murmurs broke out through the rows and Ben scratched at an odd little yellow patch on his knuckle that would not rub off. As suddenly has it had disappeared, the light returned and the passengers started to speak amongst themselves, breaking the stiff silence of a moment ago. His insides twisted painfully as he realised the implication of what had just occurred. His sister was right. Indra had predicted this from the beginning.

Indra and Ben

December [After Turn] 2038 (OST) objective standardised time

Indra had been right, as she dreaded she would. The black stain across the sky and spread and spawn and writhed until it ripped the veil apart. Ben had met her just in time. They had made it to a safe place… for now.

At their camp they tried to keep busy. Indra writing in her little black notebook, the same style as the one she once sold to the man in the coat. Ben would walk for miles and miles through the alien Patagonian landscape, both enchanted and disturbed by how foreign the forms and colours were to him.

Sitting in front of the open fire, Indra held a shell so perfect it made Ben’s chest ache as she thumbed the creamy exterior that spiralled out from a peach-coloured centre point. She had brought it with her. There weren’t any shells to be found in these parts.

Indra read aloud from her little black notebook, as Ben often asked her to do when he felt restless. It comforted him, to know what went on in that mysterious mind of hers;

“I return to the house each night in my mind. I feel my way through, the familiar chip in the doorframe, the cool smooth boards under my feet. A window is open, I can smell the heavy bruised sweetness of the date palms outside. Twilight throbs with the rhythmic hysteria of a thousand cicadas. Before the Turn, it was unchanging outside of the ancient cycles of spawning and rotting. 20 years and the rocks never moved, the ghost crabs scuttled in and out of the moonlight like wisps of smoke, swift and lithe and barely touching the sand. The house may have sagged some and the boat bleached by sun. But these things happened in a time so thick and slow you could stand a spoon up in it. Before the veil shifted and broke and melted away. Before it curled in on itself, doubling in parts and peeling away in others… leaving the earth below completely exposed .”

***

Now the crabs are just ghosts

And the rocks became sand

The sea swallowed the house

When it chewed up the land

***