One Day
23 August dawned on the eastern rim of the world, and the cogs of commerce ground into action, prompted by hundreds of people in tall buildings, shouting at each other from early in the day. As they argued over numbers on a screen, the dawn danced across the waves of the pacific, unveiling islands to the sky. On those islands people watched the sunlight through leaves for hours, and one man took longer climbing a tree to reach a coconut than it took those Japanese to lose the equivalent of a small countries annual income. And to him it made no difference, because the coconut was still beyond his grasp. The sun sped on, waking the hotels of Hawaii. People stood on rented balconies and watched for perhaps the last time in lives the dawn over the ocean, and to them it lasted for hours. To the fisherman on the wharf the dawn was an alarm clock, short and sharp. Couples wandering slowly along the white sands of the beach, like hundreds of couples before them, leaving footprints in the sand just long enough for the sea to wash them away. The world turned, and America woke with oatmeal and pancakes, shouted into routine by garish cartoons. In Peru, a boy stood on a duty road high in the mountains, leaning on a stick. He was looking down at the sprawling city which he had been walking for days to reach, and he stood on that mountain for an eternity, watching his new home light up with the milky sunlight of altitude. Turning his hazel face once more to the sun he walked down the mountain. Far north of him an Inuit sat at a chequered kitchen table, earnestly ticking off jobs that he couldn’t get. The cracked clock on the wall read eight fifty, slicing time for the dissected society. While a jogger traced her route through Central Park a boat in the Caribbean was sunk by an inexperienced captain and a reef, with the loss of all hands. One of those was a management analyst who would have watched her from his high office window, as he had done for years without her knowledge. She looked at the ground and paid no attention to the empty window. The Atlantic passed under the eye of dawn, and a few ships ploughed on, unmoved but he world they floated on. Europe buzzed with people, here a Spaniard lost his job at the market, there an Irish man waited for a call which would never come. A man watched a plane fly away, before turning back and making a beast with three heads. In the clinical yellow flats of Moscow disgruntled Russians watched the cold, hard world light up slightly. An Iranian decided to have a lie in, and a boy in Africa set off on the five mile walk to find water. Buddhist monks welcomed the sun as they had done every day for hundreds of years and set about becoming closer to perfection. Japan dawned. The world turned again, different for the passage, but the same.
