Another piece from Percy's workshop. Currently untitled, which I hate, so feel free to make a suggestions... Inspired by a story from Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

Imagine that Greenwich Mean Time, the International Dateline moves each year, that the red line sweeps across the turning globe by small increments. Wands spinning around clock faces. A new calendar, where the sun rotates differently and the nights are never the same. Imagine the new order of continents. Imagine new time.

Imagine you could watch the sun set into the Pacific Ocean and be on Central Standard Time. Imagine watching the first sun rise over the rocky islands off the Maine harbor, the great flaming ball rising over puffin colonies. Imagine you could see it while waiting among the cornfields. Would Iowa have the best lobster? The sea lions would still swim in warm teal water but the state would be called something different. Would we need a new name for the place, or just the people? Would they still be called the Northern Lights, if that big clumsy star could bloom first in the Midwest?

Imagine November with long, sunny evenings, evenings that stretch into the next day like day-old shadows on a suburban sidewalk. The bare trees, their bark grey and cracking, would point their unburdened limbs into a summer sky, blue and bright. Could you feel a chill in the wind, would they still feel like change? The branches might look stagnant, instead of hopeful—sweaty instead of winter-knuckle chapped. The light of autumn might be less golden or summer shimmer-white. Imagine the days in July ended before five o’clock. Imagine a summer of dark purple night skies speckled with stars that you could see before dinner. Would children still play into the night, stay up late watching reruns of the Dick Van Dyke show, because they could, because there’s no school the next day? Families could sit outside in the warmth and watch the stars spinning fast and try to pinpoint the hour when the dateline passed overhead.

Imagine Montana had weather like California. Would they still love cattle and shotguns and open land? Would they be a blue state, their blood like melting mountain snow rivers? They could lay down their guns. We could all see the doctors we need. Electricity would run on the beating wings of birds, or the running of antelope hooves or the spinning of the new, fast globe. Would we still need Prozac? If Florida could endure the same climate as Vermont, would we even notice the blues and reds of the map? If the days got shorter, longer five six seven times a year, if time moved more rapidly, if the seasons cycled more frequently, would we all be the same?

Imagine the seasons didn’t last as long. Imagine you only had to bear the oppressive heat of August or the glacial frozen time of January for a month at a time. Would you move faster or slower? Would you try harder or stand still, the world revolving around your locked-in feet? Imagine the new days that could teach you to understand the other. Imagine the pace that would catch your heels and send you aloft, into orbit. Imagine an alarm sounding. Imagine waking up.