The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

practicing now more than ever,” said Sylvia, gently pressing her palm to my lower back to make it straight. My posture always melted as the lesson wore on. “Art thrives in times of uncertainty.”
    Piano lessons had been my mother’s idea. I didn’t like the piano much, but I liked Sylvia and I liked her house, which was the same model as ours but unrecognizable to me on the inside. Hardwood floors instead of carpet fanned out across the rooms. Leafy houseplants thrived in every corner. Sylvia didn’t believe in chemicals or air-conditioning. Her house smelled like tea and birdseed and incense.
    “I’m going to play it through once,” she said. “And I want you to close your eyes while I’m playing, and memorize how it’s supposed to sound.”
    She set the metronome to a certain speed, releasing a smooth stream of tick-tocks. I could never learn to properly knit my notes to those clean, steady beats.
    She began to play.
    I tried to listen, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was worried about the finches. They seemed quieter than usual, and they looked a little less fat. They were named for musical terms, and the one called Forte seemed to be teetering on his perch, his corny orange feet unstable and unsure. The smaller one, Adagio, was hanging around on the newspaper on the floor of the cage.
    Doomsdayers were reading the bird die-off as one more harbinger of doom. I’d seen a heavyset televangelist discussing it that morning on a talk show. To his mind, the bird pestilence was a warning from God, and it was only a matter of time before the disease would spread to humans.
    “Your eyes are open,” said Sylvia. She was always genuinely surprised when I failed her. This was part of her charm.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    She caught me staring at the birdcage.
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not affecting domesticated birds, just wild ones.”
    At the time, this was true, though the nation’s poultry farmers had been advised to watch their flocks for strange symptoms.
    Experts disagreed about what was causing the syndrome. Some blamed the slight alteration in gravity. Perhaps it was interfering with balance and thus hampering flight and navigation. Or else it was a problem with circadian rhythms; the birds’ sense of day and night had been disrupted by the change, sending metabolisms awry. They’d lost track of when to sleep and when to eat. They were starving or they were sleep-deprived, confused and less alert.
    But the real bird experts, the ornithologists, kept quiet. It was too soon to say.
    “They’re fine,” said Sylvia. “Right, guys?”
    The finches were silent. The only sound was the faint tapping of a tiny talon poking through a layer of newspaper.
    Something similar had happened once to the bees. This was only a few years before the slowing began. Millions of honeybees had died. Hives were found abandoned, inexplicably empty. Whole colonies had vanished in the breeze. No one ever did conclusively pinpoint the cause of that collapse.
    “Do you want to know what I think?” said Sylvia.
    She had dark, serious eyes, and she never wore makeup. Her skin was smooth and tanned, her limbs dotted with freckles, the kind that seem submerged beneath skin, like crumbs sinking into milk.
    “I think the slowing of the earth is just the last straw for the birds. We’ve been poisoning the planet and its creatures for years. And now we’re finally paying for it.”
    I’d heard this argument on television, that the causes of the bird die-off were multiple, long-standing, and our fault: pesticides and pollution, climate change and acid rain, the radiation emanating from cell phone towers. The slowing, some said, had simply tipped the balance in exactly the wrong way, leaving the birds more vulnerable to all the man-made threats they’d been battling for years.
    “I believe the planet has been out of balance for a long time, and this whole thing is its way of correcting itself,” continued Sylvia. She was a