Solar Flare

It all started with a solar flare, or so they told us. We couldn’t actually see it. “We’ll be expecting to see immaculate aurora borealis and aurora australis throughout the week,” they told us via an article. “Don’t worry, we are perfectly safe.” We were reassured by the world’s experts, a committee of the brilliantly minded. Most of us didn’t even know that this was going on. They were too busy scrolling through updates on Kim Kardashian’s latest outfit. For the few of us that cared, something felt unsettling and commercialized about the way that these “experts” reassured us that there was nothing to worry about.

It all happened so quickly, on a Friday evening, which I found ironic. The moment of relaxation and celebrating the end of another mundane week filled with accomplishments and failures. That’s when it happened. The setting sun, dimming across the sky into beautiful strokes of blood orange and red, suddenly reignited as if someone had wound back the clock. It grew to double, triple, then quadruple the size. Those who were caught off guard and instinctively decided to look at the growing wave of death blooming in the sky, were blinded instantly. Atmosphere, ozone layer, these cosmic shields had no meaning anymore.

In an instant, the Earth grew black through constant scorching. The oceans, seas, rivers, and lakes all disappeared and evaporated into a sky with no atmosphere. Scientists had claimed that this event would not happen for another five billion years, and even when it did happen, it would be a gradual thing. Not instant like this, like flipping a switch. So, I guess we died, swallowed whole like a pill. We were too busy living inside the rat maze which we’d invented for ourselves, that we’d forgotten about the real world and the rules and laws laid out by nature and physics. We were distant from nature, so distant. Celebrity chefs, celebrity scientists; the sex, swag, and coolness meters all headlined through evolved, hairless monkeys carrying torches. We could not even correctly measure the age of the true source of all life on Earth: the Sun. Though, in hindsight, even if we had gotten it right, there’s nothing we could have done about it.