It happened when he was sixteen. He was a few days off seventeen, not that meant anything now. They just…stopped.
Every person.
Every animal.
The sea froze mid-motion and the day never became night. He remembered crying out for several hours as he had run from his house screaming for someone, anyone to tell him why his mother wasn’t moving.
He’d cried a lot in those first few weeks. Especially when his seventeenth birthday still came around. He had moved his mother and sister into the living room, not that it mattered, there was no TV to watch, the electricity no longer worked.
He no longer needed to eat. He no longer felt hungry nor thirsty. It was like he had frozen as well. But he was not frozen, as the years waned with no days to count his hair greyed and his skin wrinkled. He had been everywhere in that time, he had walked across oceans and stayed in golden palaces. Though he soon realised what was the point of being the riches man in the world when no one was to see him in his throne.
He lost use of his voice and memories of movement became whispers. He wondered if he had just imagined it.
He returned home to die. He couldn’t remember which had been his house, nor even what his parents had looked like. All of it was gone. But it was still a sunny midday here.
Now old and frail he could no longer move. He remembered long ago, stories about people being eaten alive by wolves and bears. But there was no longer animals to eat him alive, he would not starve, only rot into dust. Perhaps then the world would start revolving again. Just this time without him.