Street Atlas

The watch ticked backward the way it usually did when the world was suspended upside down. Hard going for a sphere with a gravity well, but sometimes physics flowed strangely around Dot. It had always been like this and never like this, because time was irrelevant, and the happening was on the far side of reality.

These were all notions Dot had, but as of the here and now, as tenuous as it was, Dot had a watch, a Seiko Presage on a black leather wristband, going plik, plik and arcing along counterclockwise, with all 5.97219 × 1024 kilograms of Earth suspended behind him. Sweat slicked down toward the Earth on his back from shoulders that folded together like the wings of a bat.

Dot counted, breathed, and wondered how long the Earth would be upside down, its entire weight a hair’s breadth from crushing him like a soda can as he held it aloft. It turned out to be around eighty-three and a half seconds. Resuming uprightness, Dot was tugged along like a leaf in a flooding gutter until he hit the pavement with a yelp.

Overhead, like the bang of a bullet being released from a cylinder, the Earth settled back in gravity-wise, and Dot was left there, lying winded and supine, staring up at an orange sky crazed with the magenta underbellies of sunset clouds. Sometimes he wondered if everyone felt the Earth shift the way he did, or if it was the agitated gyri in the back of his brain working overtime. His mother said that this is why sometimes he grew yeti crab setae on his arms, and why they were full of green-yellow bioluminescence. It was why the black hole formed under his sock drawer, and why all the governments spoke in hushed voices in operating theaters while sitting at school desks made of Masonite. They spoke of Dot in awe of his unique set of abilities.

‘Spare a penny for the end of the world?’ read his sign. He’d written it this morning, and it sat on the pebbled concrete next to him. He tasted something warm and red-meat in his mouth, figured it was blood from his cheek or his ears from slamming into the pavement, and swallowed it back. Sang to the stars for a while, in his sad, lonely voice, and the loneliness ate at the world as Dot wrestled with emotions.

Somewhere, Dot knew, there was an earthquake, and somewhere, too, Dot understood, there would be a tsunami, and it was on him.

He covered his face and stained his hands with tears the blue-black of bruises.