Day One

Day 1

It took me a minute to realize where i was. The first thing my eyes adjusted to was the brightness. It was daylight. The sun was high up in the sky. It was a clear day. But, the serene blue sky did not reveal the destruction it had been witness to. As i slowly adjusted to my surroundings and realized i was out asleep in the open, everything came rushing back. I took in the scene around me. There were people asleep on the bare ground at a few paces from each other. Families clustered together. The horror of the past few days was finally over but a new ordeal had just begun.

What had a few months ago been deemed as an impossibility by scientists had finally happened. We were unwilling witnesses to it. The Earth had completely shifted its axis. Remarkably The North Pole had now become the South Pole and the South Pole the North Pole. The direction of the rotation had taken a complete u turn. The Earth now rotated from East to West just like the furthermost planet in our solar system Pluto. The world had certainly turned upside down with the Sun rising now from the West and with it turning our worlds topsy turvy too.

It had initially started as mere rumours and superstition. The rumourmongers of the world namely the news channels had had a field day when the slim possibility of such a fast shift in the poles had come to life. But anyone with a slight sense of reality had dismissed these reports based on flimsy evidence as figments of hyper active imaginations and nothing to be taken seriously.

We were too arrogant and had forgotten there for a moment who the real master was. And that moment had brought our undoing. We just unmindfully went about our lives like always, lost in the chaos and unwilling to accept that the Earth was far stronger than us and could throw our lives off balance with the slightest of  jerks. But , it had a way of reminding us that we are mere mortals and even with our highest technological advancements, there was absolutely no way on earth at least, that we had the power yet to stop an event of such cataclysmic proportions like that of the shifting of the poles. It had started slowly at first with respected geological experts giving us no reason to worry and estimating the average time period for a pole shift to be stretched out over a hundred years or so. But, the Earth does not function according to the prediction of the scientists . It has a mind of its own. The activity at the poles began heating up and advancing at a rapid rate. It didn’t take us long to realize that we were certainly headed for doom. The large proportion of seismic activity that takes place due to an event of such a massive scale in the geological history of the earth caused thousands of earthquakes all over the world that started off as small jerks here and there and then escalated to frightening proportions and causing  tsunamis on all major coastlines of the world. New York was consumed in a matter of days and San Francisco destroyed too. The ocean water filled up and the coastlines submerged. The Earth s landmass started to reshape and that is where the problems for us humans began. Everyday was a struggle to survive. You didn’t know which part of land in which area of the world would suddenly erupt with lava or develop cracks leading to an earthquake shattering many lives and the concrete jungles that our cities had become. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this was it. The end of the Earth as we knew it.

Life had come to a complete standstill.I still remember that day on the 2nd of December when a clear blue day had suddenly turned cloudy and we were greeted by an eerie silence.Then it had started.A wind storm had erupted. All the cars , machines and anything and everything that runs on battery had stopped to work. This is because all batteries operated according to the direction of the current. But now, with a complete reversal in the earth s electromagnetic field  itself, there had to be a complete change in the working of these batteries too for them to work. All our science books called for a re writing.Everything on the Internet , all the data base ranging from new discoveries and important theories to the the latest fashion blooper of some celeb had been completely wiped out with no hope of ever retrieving it. Only the knowledge on paper now existed.All our progress and all our battery operated inventions, even electricity ceased to work. So much for our advancements that had now been brought to a nought. It was like the Stone Age all over again.



Day 1

I was born and brought up in Sparrowdale and had always been happy to live here. Sparrowdale, a small town in New Hawking, a small country in Europe, that  till a year ago was landlocked had now become a coastal town with a major portion of the land surrounding it now flooded with ocean water.

Sparrowdale enjoyed pleasant weather all year round with a mild summer and an equally mild winter. I lived with my aunt and uncle and two cousins Sally and Peter, having lost both my parents when I was very little. People sympathised with me when they found out but I really couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about as I remembered almost nothing of my parents. What little I knew of them was from the stories that Aunt Martha recounted to me. For me, my aunt and uncle who had brought me up as their own son had always been my parents. The fact that they were not my birth parents was just a minor glitch.

We passed our time by playing in the woods for woods were aplenty here or hiking over the small rocky hills over which the town was set. I was all set to begin a new chapter in my life and enter high school when this disaster had occurred. The hills no longer existed as they too were completely submerged with little hill tops visible as islands in the water. And one of these large islands was Sparrowdale. The hill top town had now changed into an island.These hills were a major reason that we still existed. For there was really no chance for survival down below in other parts of the country. The water had come with a crushing speed and destroyed all concrete structures. People who had not drowned in the water had died at the hands of the debris collapsing on them. They had really had no time to plan an escape. Everything had happened so fast.

Although we counted ourselves lucky for having survived. What we didn’t know at that time was that our real struggle for survival had only just begun.



Day 1

The low grumbling in my stomach made me realize how hungry i really was. I tried to remember the last time I’d eaten. It had been the afternoon the day before.  Uncle Eddie had managed to locate some mouldy brown coloured mushrooms that I had pointed out as non- poisonous. For I remembered  random facts from watching umpteen documentaries on the Discovery Channel that the brighter anything in nature is, the more poisonous it would be. And I had thought these shows would never be of any use except passing those really boring and long stretched out Sunday afternoons. But, it was only because of these life-saving facts that we were still alive.For many families had already succumbed to the everyday pressures of survival and given up on life, only praying for a peaceful death.

The rest of the day yesterday had gone without any of us managing to find anything else to eat. With nothing much to do for the rest of the evening, we turned in early for the night all huddled together to beat the cool winds that blew across the landscape at night.

“Honey, are you up?” Aunt Martha asked me “Yes, and I am really hungry. Reckon we should try to look for something to eat?” I answered

“I think we should wait for everyone to get up and then go on together. It’ll be safer that way” Aunt Sally had reason to be cautious about us venturing off alone. Although all was peace and quiet on the Earth’s surface but this was not the case with the people left alive in Sparrowdale. It hadn’t taken long for us to realize that with the food supplies in the area dwindling and no connection to the outside world, being able to nourish ourselves was going to pose a great problem. People had started to quarrel amongst themselves for food. If somebody succeeded in finding something to eat, it was important to be very careful and wiser to just gobble it up before anyone had a chance to take it away. The worst side of human nature was at display here. In the beginning, it hadn’t been so bad. People had managed from what they found from the rubble of their homes and from the leftovers from what remained of the supermarkets. It had seemed enough for the time being. Everyone thought that all they had to do was make do with what they had till such time as somebody from the government or the United Nations or some other such authority got in touch and provided relief. But as the days passed by with no sign of anyone coming, the inhabitants got more and more restless. Now, the situation had come to robbing and even brutal killings. There was no means of communication with anyone else. The electric wiring had all broken down. The radio did not work and neither were the cell phones receiving any signals. It seemed like we were the only ones alive in this world. There was a general feeling of being lost with no one really sure what to do next.