The first thing Cliff noticed was the quality of the light. It was not the timid, greyish pallor that normally leaked around the edges of his bedroom curtain, hinting at the slow unveiling of the eastern sky. This was a bold, brass-gold light, full and immediate, striping the floorboards from the wrong window. The window that looked west, over the backyard and the gnarled oak tree.

He sat up, his old bones complaining as they always did. He shuffled to the west-facing window and pulled back the curtain. There, cradled in the fork of the oak tree, was the sun. Not the moon, pale and apologetic in the wrong part of the sky. The sun. Full, blazing, and unequivocally risen in the west.

Cliff blinked. He went to the east-facing window. The sky there was a deep, star-dusted indigo, the color of a deep and dreamless sleep. He returned to the west window. The sun persisted.

His wife, Mildred, was still asleep. He did not wake her. What would he say? “The world has broken”? He put the kettle on instead, his movements precise, ritualistic. The blue flame of the gas stove hissed as it always had. The water bubbled in the kettle as it always did. Through the kitchen window, the wrong-way sun painted the dewy lawn in impossible, long-legged shadows that pointed accusingly towards the night-dark east.

He took his tea to the porch. The neighborhood was unnervingly quiet. No Mr. Henderson revving his truck. No school bus groaning at the corner. Just a profound, listening silence, broken only by the chirp of a confused sparrow.

Mildred joined him an hour later, tying her robe. She squinted at the western sun, then at the eastern night. She did not gasp. She simply sat beside him, her shoulder touching his, and watched a squirrel frozen mid-scurry on the fence post.

“The paper didn’t come,” she said, her voice hoarse with sleep.

“No,” Cliff agreed.

They sat for a long time. The sun, defying all cartography and cosmology, began its journey—not a climb, but a descent from its western perch, sliding down the sky towards the east.

It was the birds that broke Cliff. He was an ornithologist, retired. For forty years, he had tracked their migrations, their nesting habits, the celestial maps hardwired into their tiny brains. Now, he saw a flock of starlings whirl into the air, form a frantic knot, and then disperse in a dozen different directions, their internal compasses spinning uselessly. A lone robin sat on the power line, its head cocked, not singing, just staring at the eastern horizon as if waiting for a curtain that would never rise.

He thought of the planet, hurtling through the void. Had it stumbled? Had it, in the vast, dark ballroom of space, simply decided to turn the other way? Or was it them? Had their little world, their axis of understanding, simply sheared off?

Mildred reached over and took his hand. Her skin was papery and cool. “The lilacs are still by the fence,” she said. “And the mailman will probably still come.”

But the mailman did not come. A few people ventured out, standing in their driveways, looking up. There were no shouts. No panic. Just a deep, communal bewilderment. A woman down the street began watering her petunias, her movements robotic, as if by maintaining the routine she could staunch the haemorrhaging of reality.

As the day wore on, the wrongness seeped into everything. Cliff’s shadow, which had always been a faithful afternoon companion stretching eastward, now lay pooled at his feet in the morning, then stretched west behind him as the sun moved east. It felt like a betrayal. He kept checking his watch, a useless gesture. The hands pointed to 2 p.m., but the light was the soft, forgiving gold of a late summer evening, pouring from completely the wrong quarter of the sky.

He thought of the phrases that were now corpses. The sun also rises. But where? Go west, young man. To meet the dawn? The entire lexicon of human aspiration and metaphor was built on this one fixed point. The East, the dawn of civilization. The West, the frontier, the future. Now the future was rising in the place of the past, and setting in the place of beginnings.

In the late afternoon—or what felt like it—the sun neared the eastern horizon. It did not so much set as vanish; its light being swallowed by the very darkness from which the day should have been born. The sky in the east turned a sickly, beautiful orange, then a deep purple, while the west behind them was left in a cold, blue twilight.

The streetlights flickered on. They came on all at once, a synchronized, man-made defiance of the natural chaos.

Inside, Cliff and Mildred ate a quiet dinner. The television showed a frantic news anchor, his mouth moving soundlessly before the screen dissolved into static.

Mildred cleared the plates. “I’ll do the washing up,” she said. “You can dry.”

It was what they always did. Cliff stood beside her at the sink, a towel in his hands. She washed a plate and handed it to him. He dried it, carefully, methodically, and placed it in the cupboard. They did this with the glasses, the forks, the knives. A simple, mundane ballet of order.

When they were finished, the kitchen was clean. The world outside was black, the stars beginning to prick the velvet of the sky, though neither of them dared to look and see if they, too, were rearranged.

Mildred took his hand again. “Tomorrow,” she said, her voice steady, “we will see what the light does.”

And they went to bed, two small creatures in a house at the edge of a world that had broken its one, unbreakable rule, finding solace not in understanding, but in the warmth of a hand and the shared weight of the unimaginable. The impossible had happened, and life, stubbornly, politely, was deciding to continue.

*****

Now, here’s a bit of obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays, a very nice Christmas stocking stuffer, is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.