“You mean kids could play outside?” The question came from five-year-old Jan.
Annie nodded to the group of children gathered in front of her. “Not only that, but you could also go outside without grapplers or a protective suit,” she said.
“No grapplers!” Lena whispered in awe to Carina who was sitting next to her on a bench.
Carina nodded with wide eyes and whispered something back.
Annie tilted her head. “What are you two whispering about back there? Would you like to share with the rest of us?”
Carina blushed. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Klinger. My mom says my grandmother used to talk all the time about how much she missed how quiet it used to be.”
Annie felt a pang of longing in her heart. She missed the quiet too. In a time long since passed, she had moved with her parents to the edge of a woods. Sixty years ago, it had been a “prime location,” as her father liked to say, with very low nitrogen oxide levels for that time. Through the gate in the fence in their backyard she could slip straight into the woods, which was a mix of sinister firs and friendly beeches. Just ten minutes by foot from their house there was a small clearing with a large boulder that looked different from all the other rocks. It was a magical spot without even a hint of civilization. She had often climbed up on that boulder, spread out a soft blanket, sat down, and listened to the sounds of the forest. The best time was in spring, when the afternoon sun bathed the boulder in golden light and warmed her face. Then Annie would close her eyes and get lost in her dreams. It had been so easy back then in the quiet of the forest. With her eyes closed, she could hear her own heartbeat. Sometimes the leaves rustled or birds chirped. Much rarer and more special were the times she heard the plaintive call of an owl.
“Yes, the quiet…” Annie sighed. “Have you all heard the old audio recordings of nature from back then? There are websites that stream soundscapes all day long: waves crashing on the beach, babbling sounds of brooks and streams, the sounds of forests.”
The kids shook their heads.
“You should ask your parents to let you listen to them sometime. If you put on those big, old headphones that cover your whole ear and block out all the other sounds, you can get a sense of what it sounded like back then.”
Annie used those soundscape streams herself sometimes, and when she did she of course preferred to immerse herself in forest sounds. Then she would immediately be transported back to the woods of her childhood, which had been so full of life with the birds and owls.
Unfortunately, there were no longer any real spaces like that anymore. There hadn’t been for a long time. Only stunted, crippled conifer trees grew outside today. And ever since the disappearance, there were never any long periods of quiet. The nearly continuous roar of storms was like a ringing in the ears that followed you from morning until night.
At that moment, a particularly violent storm cell hit the school shelter and the floors trembled. The heavy metal structure groaned, the lights flickered briefly, and the wind howled and whistled, trying to find a way inside the building. The most severe of the storms reached wind speeds of up to 300 miles per hour. Annie remembered living through a hurricane with wind gusts up to 125 miles per hour when she was a child. At the time, she had hidden under her covers in her bed and shook from fright, convinced that the world was ending. Now, scientists were at last expressing some confidence that the Earth would reach its final rotational speed within the next four years, hopefully setting an upper limit to the intensity that the storms could achieve.
Along with the faster rotational speeds came increasingly shorter days. The previous twenty-four hour day had been reduced to nine hours and forty-five minutes. Soon there would be another correction, but it was supposed to be the last, if the announcements by the politicians and astrophysicists could be trusted. The new international agreement would set the length of a day to eight hours. Some were claiming the new agreement would even be good for everyone, because three new days would now equal one old day, thus providing a frame of reference for times gone by. Most people didn’t care about any of that, however, because most people had been born after the disappearance and had never experienced the long days of old. Annie Klinger had been born sixteen years before the disappearance and was one of the last eyewitnesses to that bygone era. That was one reason she volunteered to visit schools and share her memories with the up and coming generations.
“Mrs. Klinger!”
“Yes, Paul?”
“Is it true that you could see stars at night?”
“Yes, you could. When the sky was clear, they would shine as perfect as little points of light. You could even count them, if you had a lot of time,” she said with a smile. In her mind a memory flashed of her sitting on her boulder, arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs, counting stars through the tree branches. “There were hundreds, no, thousands! Everyone learned to find the North Star, Polaris, in the Little Dipper.”
“I know that one!” Jonas called out from the back row excitedly. “I’ve seen it with our binoculars!” Then he got a long sad look on his face. “But that’s the only one.”
Annie knew how the boy felt. She missed the sight of a star-filled sky. It was one of so many things she missed. Sometimes she felt like she missed everything!
She continued with a sad voice, “When I was a kid, we could see them without any optical aids, just with our eyes. Sometimes meteors would shoot across the sky. Then we would make a wish and if you were lucky, it’d come true.”
The kids’ eyes grew wide. “Did you make any wishes, Mrs. Klinger?” Lena asked.
“Of course.” The memory of one stereotypically romantic summer night appeared in her mind. She and Max had been fooling around on top of a wool blanket at the base of her boulder in the woods. The leaves under their bodies crackled as they moved. The wool blanket scratched their naked skin. Later they had sat in the moonlight, leaning their naked backs against the boulder, but it had not felt cold, their body heat had been more than enough to keep each other warm. They had both noticed the shooting star at the same time.
“What did you wish for?” Lena asked.
Annie sighed. “Oh, kids, that was a long time ago.”
“So long ago that you don’t remember?”
“No, I remember it very well, Lena, but wishes must never be told if you want them to come true. You must all remember that.”
All the kids except for Lena nodded. “What would you wish for if you saw one today? I mean, we can’t see shooting stars anymore, so it’s okay to tell us, right?”
Annie smiled. “Yes, I think that’s probably true. Well, today I think I would wish for some of the little pleasures of long ago to come back. A walk in the woods in the fresh air. The stillness and the quiet I mentioned before. Sitting in the sunlight. I had a place I used to sit in the woods when the sun was shining… Or a vacation at the beach would be nice again, with the smell of real saltwater in the air, not the smell that comes from those brine nebulizers.”
“You’ve seen the ocean?”

“Oh yes. I went on a vacation with my parents to England in 2018. And we went to a beach on the Atlantic Ocean.” That had been six months before the floods. Floods that had come without warning. All the coastlines all over the planet had been inundated by global waves. The warning systems all failed to detect them because they were not triggered by earthquakes. They had simply been gigantic, silent waves. Later, scientists determined that they were caused by the sudden redistribution of the huge volumes of water that were pulled toward the Moon by its gravity and then, when the Moon’s gravity suddenly disappeared, the volumes of water were no longer held in place anymore. The change in forces caused the water to redistribute itself according to the laws of gravity. Coastlines along the oceans were particularly hit hard: the South Pacific, the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the northern Pacific. North and South America suffered enormously, closely followed by Africa, India, Australia, and Japan. Central Europe weathered the severe flooding with less of an impact. The Mediterranean was simply too small to generate a wave any larger than a standard tsunami. The flooding was not nearly as severe as in other parts of the world, but it had still killed millions of people.
Even sixty years after the floods there were still people who were officially listed as missing. Like Max, who had been on vacation in Italy at the time. His disappearance, like that of hundreds of thousands, had never been solved and probably never would be. The unleashed forces of nature had been overwhelming, devasting. Humans had once again been reminded how powerless, weak, and tiny they were compared to Mother Nature.
But who would have guessed that the disappearance of something everyone took for granted would have such repercussions? As the massive volumes of water flowed and redistributed around the world, the mass of the oceans shifted closer to the Earth’s axis of rotation, reducing its moment of inertia. Since the Earth must obey the fundamental laws of nature, including the law that total angular momentum must be conserved, its rotational speed increased as its moment of inertia decreased. At the time, a physicist on TV had used the analogy of a figure skater spinning. If she extended her arms, she spun slower. If she pulled her arms in toward her body, she spun faster. The same thing was happening to the Earth. And the faster rotation fueled more storms and the storms caused the flora and fauna to change and adapt, and…
“Mrs. Klinger!”
Paul’s voice brought her thoughts back to the one-story school shelter, which was shaped like a flattened dome for the best protection against the storms. “Yes?”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes, I think so. Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re holding your hand over your heart.”
“I am?” Annie looked down. Sure enough, her fingers, knobby with arthritis, were resting between the folds of her blouse, pressing firmly against a circular sterling silver brooch attached to a chain she was wearing around her neck. There were craters and mountains engraved in fine detail on the brooch, making it look exactly as the Moon had on the night it disappeared sixty years ago.