The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

an almost unbelievable thought comes to my mind: There was a time when those two people—that man hunched at the table and that woman shouting in a bathrobe—were young. The proof was in the pictures that hung on the living room walls, a pretty girl and a bookish guy, a studio apartment in a crumbling Hollywood building overlooking a courtyard and a kidney-shaped pool. This was the mythical period before I was born, when my mother was not a mother and was instead an actress who might make it someday, any day, maybe soon, a serious girl with a lovely face. How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible. I like to think about how my parents’ lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold. Back then the future was whatever they imagined—and they never imagined this.
    But doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone? After a while, certain vestigial sayings are all that remain. Decades after the invention of the automobile, for instance, we continue to warn each other not to
put the cart before the horse.
So, too, we do still have
day
dreams and
night
mares, and the early-morning clock hours are still known colloquially (if increasingly mysteriously) as
the crack of dawn.
Similarly, even as they grew apart, my parents never stopped calling each other
sweetheart.
    My parents avoided each other all afternoon. My mother graded papers in the guest bedroom. My father went to see my grandfather. He didn’t ask me to come along the way he usually did. And I didn’t offer. A muggy quiet settled over the house.
    I’ll tell you one thing about that first Sunday on the clock: Time flew. We’d grown quite accustomed to those long, lazy days. But now the morning zoomed. Midday zipped by at an inhumane speed. The hours tumbled quickly after one another, as if sliding downhill—and there were suddenly so few!
    On any other Sunday, I would have escaped to Hanna’s house.
    Instead, I walked over to my old friend Gabby’s. Her house was three houses down from mine, and we’d grown up together, but I hadn’t seen her much since she started getting into trouble.
    “I think clock time’s gonna be cool,” Gabby said once we were upstairs in her bedroom. She was sitting on her unmade bed, painting a second coat of black polish on her fingernails. She waved the bottle at me, but I shook my head. It was a glossy, grim black. A few drops had landed on the plush cream-colored carpet. “I like going out in the dark,” she said.
    Her dyed black hair kept falling into her face. Charcoal eyeliner ringed her eyes. Silver studs shaped like human skulls glinted from her ears. I hardly recognized her anymore.
    “I wish I still went to your school,” she said.
    “You hated our school,” I said. When she started smoking and skipping classes, her parents had transferred her to a strict Catholic school.
    “Yeah, but all the girls at my school are anorexic bitches,” she said.
    We used to swim in her pool every summer and eat potato chips on lawn chairs while our ponytails drip-dried on our backs. But now Gabby never wore a swimsuit; she’d gained a lot of weight. She was always in trouble these days. Hanna hadn’t been allowed to come to her house.
    “My mom’s afraid we’re all going to die,” I said.
    The room smelled like nail-polish remover and vanilla; a fat white candle was burning on the desk. Two pleated plaid skirts, Gabby’s school uniform, hung over the edge of a chair.
    “We
are
going to die,” said Gabby. “Eventually.”
    She was playing music I didn’t know: The thin crystal voice of a woman, enraged, shot through the room from two big black speakers.
    “But she thinks we’re going to die from this,” I said. “And soon.”
    Gabby blew on her fingernails and held up one hand for inspection. A can of diet soda popped and fizzed on the