'Atlantic City, 2028', by C.E. Giugno

It’s the end of the world and I’m going to break up with my girlfriend.
The thought comes to me at 3 a.m. as I lie flat on my back atop the stiff, cheap mattress we had bought two years ago, back when we still lived in the same city. In the same apartment. The glare of my phone throws a harsh shadow across my face, and I imagine, to someone there in the darkness, I would appear a sort of ghost, a skeleton woman with holes for eyes and pale tapering bones for a face. In a week or so, perhaps that is what I will be.
If it wasn’t the end of the world, would I be breaking up with my girlfriend? I wonder, although I had made up my mind only seconds earlier. The thought hangs at the back of my mind, dim and blurry compared to the sharp images on the screen before me: the ground opens up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a thick black line of smoke rising from its unfathomed depths; the Dead Sea in Jordan roils and boils, turning to blood; a nine-breasted dragon-riding lady surfaces from the murky waters off the coast of New Jersey to scream garbled obscenities at beachgoers. My girlfriend, currently a resident of Atlantic City, had been one of those beachgoers. I have proof of that, a shaky video posted to her Instagram page of her and another woman, scraggly blonde hair fading at the roots and an “end is nigh” shirt, sticking their middle fingers up at the intruder, as their arms loop around each other. She claimed that she had travelled to Atlantic City to visit family. This woman was not her family.
I was not going to jump to conclusions, and so I asked her as much. She did not respond, but that was not shocking as she had stopped reading my texts three days after the world started to end. The following day, she posted two more short videos with the other woman, both apparently taken at an end of the world rave. They were playing a drinking game where they took shots for every new apocalyptic event they could spot on their socials. Even just looking at my feed now, I can’t imagine it would take that long to get drunk.
Jackson Hole earthquakes, take a shot.
Blood rain, take a shot.
Strange being from a scripture you’re only vaguely aware of, down the whole bottle.
I stare at the last of the clips for a moment longer. Each had passed swiftly before my eyes, appearing, playing their part, only to have their place taken by another in an endless cycle. Small universes that blink into existence and die before they can even become something real. It’s not their fault though, so I give them each a like emote before I switch off my phone and roll out of bed. My footing is unsteady. I cannot tell if this is evidence of another earthquake or simply my night-tired limbs refusing to cooperate with my brain. 
The flooring of my bedroom is a misshapen jigsaw, what you’d expect from an apartment paid for on two independent contractors’ salary, and the walls are somehow sticky as I brace against them. I stagger into the hallway, where at last I hear the clack of a keyboard from the heavy door across from my room. Evidence that Jade, my roommate (and source of contractor salary number two), has not yet fallen prey to the languor of a month-long apocalypse. Good for her, I think with a lack of annoyance that startles me.
I rap my knuckles hard against the scratched wood—twice, our code for something immediate. The clacking stops, then there is a hard scrape as a chair is shoved across another hardwood floor, followed by footsteps. My roommate opens the door, curly black hair poking out from a plaid sleep bonnet to dangle across her forehead.
“Hey. It’s 3 a.m., but we’re both up, I guess? What’s going on? Also, maybe make this quick because I’m on a good streak with chapter eighteen and I don’t know how long it’s going to last.”
Her voice is raw, as if she hadn’t used it in several hours. That’s also how long it’s been since I last checked in on her, so she probably hadn’t.
“Ohhh, good to hear it’s going well! Break a leg. Or a finger? I don’t know how that saying goes for writing actually, but good vibes all the same.” I attempt, with debatable success, to make myself sound less like a skeleton woman up at 3 a.m. “Just wanted to know if you were going to be using the car or if I could drive it down to New Jersey for the day.”
“New Jersey? Why would you want to go to New Jersey?”
She raises an eyebrow. Like me, she was born and raised in the general periphery of New York City and considers the adjoining state something of an embarrassing cousin.
“Girlfriend,” I say.
Her expression softens a little.
“What? You and Quinn want to be together at the end of the world? That’s pretty damn romantic, actually. Fuck, can I use that? I think there’s going to be an apocalypse in my story too.”
“Um, yeah, but that is…not exactly what’s happening? I’m breaking up with her. Just saw a post on her social, and I think she maybe…got together with someone else.”
“Ohhh, that sucks. I mean, you know, she sucks.”
Jade’s voice trails off and I can tell that’s not all she’s thinking.
She sighs and adds, “Look, you can use the car, I’m obviously not going to be needing it until my book is done which isn’t going to be for a while. But—and I don’t mean to deny the fact that what Quinn’s doing hurts—but do you really need to go to Jersey to do this? Text breakups are shitty etiquette, yeah, but it’s the end of the fucking world. No one expects you to drive five hours to say, ‘shove off’ to someone who ghosted you.”
“I guess so, yeah. But we were together for two years, you know? I want closure. I want to see her face when I say—how did you put it?—shove off.”
I don’t want her to ignore me again.
“And it’s not like I don’t have the time,” I add. “Not everyone has an ongoing novel draft they need to finish before they kick the bucket, y’know?”
“Ha, fair. Alright, then—go on, take the car, and live your dreams,” Jade says, motioning with one hand to the world outside our apartment and also, assumedly, my dreams.
I give her a look and she snickers. I tend to fall in with people who like to mess with me, which has led to good relationships, like the one with Jade, and also those that are rather more questionable. 
“Alright then, on that note…”
I take a couple awkward steps down the hallway, then pause, glancing over my shoulder to where Jade has started to retreat into her room.
“Actually, you know what? I’ve been meaning to ask this for the past couple days and now may be my last chance. Does it bother you at all? That you’re putting all that work into your story, and it could be that no one even has the chance to read it? Not before…” 
Before the world ends. I don’t say this. The end of everything you know is one of those things that are easier to talk about when joking, rather than dead serious (ha!).
“To that, I reply: ‘never underestimate the dedication of Wattpad readers.’” Jade laughs. “But yeah, it is more than that. I need…what was it you said, closure? I don’t want to let the world end without saying what I need to say.”
She leans her head back against the doorframe, her expression suddenly pensive, then adds, “Yeah, that’s good. Thanks Sammie, that’s going in chapter eighteen. Anyways, keys are on the counter, next to the takeout boxes you haven’t cleaned up yet.”
“Nor will I ever,” I say, backing away down the hallway. “The kitchen will die as it lived, an unwashed ramen-smelling mess.”
“You’re an unwashed ramen-smelling mess.”
“Thank you. I hope that’s how you remember me when I’m gone.”
This is the sort of thing I meant when I said it was a bad idea to reference the apocalypse when you’re serious (or mostly serious at least). About two minutes fall away, as both of us try to work out how to say goodbye without actually acknowledging that this could be goodbye.
“Well then. See you around,” I say at last. It’s awkward.
“Yeah. See you around,” Jade says back, also awkward, then adds—“Good luck with the breakup!”—before heading back to her room and the draft of her novel. As I leave the apartment, I wonder if I’d just seen her face for the last time.

#

It was not raining blood as I opened the door of my apartment building. Nor did the ground open up to swallow me whole, or any other manner of apocalyptic disaster occur, which I took as a good omen for my trip. In fact, the night appeared reasonably normal. If not for the absence of twenty-somethings stumbling back to their apartment high or dogs barking at the occasional UberEats driver, I’d be half-inclined to think that there was no apocalypse after all.
I find Jade’s and my car, a scratched-up Honda Prius parked in the back of the lot near an oak tree that drops as many acorns as leaves in the fall. A small flock of sparrows cooperatively ransack an empty Aunt Annie’s bag, then scatter as I pass. Quinn used to feed them back when we lived together in the apartment, and, once I realized she wouldn’t stop, I did research on what she could give them without fucking up their digestive systems.
Good times, I guess. I cram all of my stuff in the back seat of the car—one raincoat (in case it does start raining blood), a first aid kit, and half the granola bars we had left in the cupboard. The other half I left outside of Jade’s room, along with a lukewarm bottle of tea and a note that said don’t forget to fucking eat, you literary genius, you <3. Even before the end of the world Jade and I would correspond in fake passive-aggressive notes, something that Quinn said made us “big fucking weirdos—like not in a bad way, but you are.”
I think, despite the fact that she was the one moving away, she wanted us to remain just Quinn-and-Sam, two against the world. Which, fair—after all, I’m the one travelling to another state to say how mad I am that she chose to be with someone else.
I slip into the car and stick my keys in the ignition. My plan feels real now, in a way it didn’t when I was lying in bed at 3 a.m., and I ask myself: am I actually going to do this? The pressure of the choice is almost paralyzing, so I choose to put it off for a moment and look at my phone. It doesn’t help. More disasters parade across the glowing screen: a massive snake has slithered out of the sands of the Sahara and opened its great needle-toothed maw to swallow the sun; people across the world are dissolving into blinding golden light in the first widespread epidemic of spontaneous combustion; a four-story man carrying a flaming sword roams the world on a white horse, speaking the truth of these last days to all who dare to ask it of him. He was last sighted in Brixton and, before that, Kanpur, both times speaking to children. After looking at this last story, I switch off my phone, and, in a blind sort of panic, turn the key in the ignition. The world is ending. It is ending everywhere, in places that I have never been, to people I have never met, and I cannot understand it. The decision is simple then. I’m going to break up with Quinn.
I maneuver the car out of the apartment parking lot, paying no attention to the red light that stands guard above the crossroads—no one’s coming. If I imagine for a moment that I had not just spoken to Jade, then I become the only person left in the world, a skeleton woman beneath an empty sky. The idea is bleak and poetic until it becomes bleak and horribly lonely. Halfway to the interstate highway, I stop in the parking lot of a boarded-up Walmart to find something to play on my phone: a song, a podcast, whatever—I just want sound. Scrolling through Spotify, I can see that, against all odds, there are playlists for the end of the world. Apocalypse Jams. Armageddon Starter Pack (Sponsored by Taco Bell: This Hour May be Your Last…Live Màs). I feel somewhat vindicated by the fact that at least my cross-state road trip is not the most absurd thing people are doing at the end of the world, and choose one at random. 
The acoustic version of a song by R.E.M. (you know the one) comes on and I sing along under my breath as I head towards the highway. 

#

Quinn and I went on a road trip like this once. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it sure had felt like it at the time. 
We came up the I-30 from Albany, yawping the lyrics to Mitski songs as we took the mountain bends far too fast for what was the end of a wet and cold NY state March. We felt alive. It was my last year in college. Quinn had just gotten a Real, Honest-to-Goodness Job with Benefits. The sky was as clear and wide above us as the ice across Great Sacandaga Lake, and nothing could go wrong.
“So,” I said to her, “you ready to finally meet my family?”
Quinn shrugged.
“Uhhhh, hard maybe. Do they already know that you’re…?”
She didn’t have to complete the sentence; we both knew what she was talking about.
“They know,” I told her, and felt a burst of affection toward my unexpectedly open-minded small-town parents. “They said they love me. They’ll love you too. Just… be the same amazing self you’ve been with me.”
Quinn’s laugh sounded like the hailstones that hammered the top of the car in Schenectady.
“Whoa, let’s not go too far here. Maybe wait a couple of years and then, if things are already going well, I can start to put my amazingness on full blast. But not yet. It’s only our first dinner, after all.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was going to be our last dinner too. 
We pulled into an uneven gravel driveway which my parents had been meaning to pave since before I had even left for college, then headed across the slushy walkway to the door. We knocked. They answered. It was Sunday, so my uncle was also there, in a sweat-stained flannel that smelled of Old Spice and diesel. But he had learned of my ascension to lesbianism months ago and gave me a gruff smile as I walked in. Quinn introduced herself to him, and to my parents, who had never seen her in person before. Then, after the obligatory small talk, we sat down at a dinner of pasta and red sauce. The room was silent. The sauce had meat in it, chunks of beef that swam around in the leathery noodles and tasted of onion and blood.
“How was school, Samantha?” my father asked.
“Good,” I told him, attempting to ignore Quinn’s incredulous face across the table as she mouthed Samantha. “Hard but good.”
“And how has the job search been going?” my mother asked.
“Alright. I sent out applications to a couple places in NYC, but if they aren’t hiring, my backup plan is still to do freelancing. Oh! And Quinn, “ I pointed at her, “actually just got a job, so that’s good news. It’s remote, with a marketing company based out of Atlantic City. You know, very similar to what you used to do for a while.”
“Oh, right—back when you were still in elementary school! Hard to believe so much time has passed.”
My mother gave a short laugh that sounded like the fork scraping against the side of her bowl and said nothing else. A moment later, my father turned toward Quinn and me, clearing his throat in a way that I knew always preceded the first syllables of a question . 
“Samantha, honey,” he said. “Could you please pass the red sauce?”
And so it was for the rest of the conversation. Any reference to Quinn was patently avoided, as if she weren’t even there at all. Maybe that’s how they had wanted it to be the whole time: gay daughter at college, straight daughter at home. As if it worked that way. They’d be thrilled to know what I’m doing now, I guess. After dinner was done and our red-stained bowls drowned in the murky waters of our kitchen sink, my father said that the two of us were welcome to stay the night. My mother added that I could have my old bed and they could blow up a mattress for Quinn in the spare room downstairs. It would be easier and cheaper than going to a motel and I couldn’t find it in myself to say no to them.
Later that evening, I crept out to the back porch, breath steaming in the cold Adirondack air. I wanted to wallow in the misery of the evening. I wanted to be alone. This was fruitless on both accounts. Quinn followed me out, I think assuming that we were going to make out in the light of my mom’s anti-mosquito lamp. My uncle, too, was seated outside on the concrete stoop, smoking as he stared at the flickering stars. He glanced over his shoulder at us, then took a long drag of his cigarette and told me: “I’m sorry, they’ve always been that way.”
I learned he had a partner over in Mayfield, that he’d been with since I was little, and he laughed when Quinn called him the quintessential gay uncle.
When I asked him to tell my parents that some sudden catastrophe had happened at our apartment and we couldn’t stay the night, he blew out a ring of smoke and said, “Alright, just so you don’t get in the habit of running away from your problems, kid.”
I promised him I wouldn’t, then Quinn and I sprinted across the gathering snowfall to the Prius and drove away.
I made it ten minutes without losing the few shreds of composure I had left. Then, with shaking hands, I turned into a gravel lot next to a crappy bait shop, and started to cry, with great heaving sobs that sounded like ice cracking. Quinn took my hand and stroked it as I told myself over and over again that it could be worse, that this was fine. No, it isn’t, she whispered to me, tickling my ear with her breath, but it will be. I asked her afterwards how she did it, how she made it through the god-awful dinner and then my breakdown afterward. She said nothing at first then gave me a strange, very un-Quinn-like smile.
“What can I say? In this big, wide, scary world of ours, I like to feel needed.”
“I do need you, Quinn,” I said to her, and it was true. If I knew then what I was going to be doing now, I would have put a nail through my tires, and slammed a desk drawer on both of my hands, so intense had the feeling been.

#

I don’t sing any longer after I remember that. Instead, I fill my ears with a bland pop song that I recall hearing constantly on the radio eight years B.A. (a new dating system I developed in the bored hours before the New Jersey state line: Before the Apocalypse). That song is now the only thing that stands between me and total silence, because, other than the Prius, the interstate is nearly abandoned. The only cars that I see are empty, squatting in breakdown lanes or in ditches, where they had assumedly rolled to a stop after their driver had spontaneously combusted. It takes another hour before I encounter my first inhabited car, a Camry that turns onto the Freehold entrance to the I-9 just as I’m driving past. I take a look into the window as it veers into the lane next to me. Every surface is covered with IKEA cartons of clothes and books and camping equipment, save for the driver’s seat and a small area in the back where a dog is curled up on a ragged blanket. The driver looks at me and we exchange an uncertain glance. Do he or I want to trust a stranger in the middle of the apocalypse? Then he raises a sheepish hand in a wave, and I notice he’s young, probably still a teenager. That is all it takes for us to make an unspoken agreement to ride alongside each other—and we do, at least, until we pass Toms River and come to the enormous man on a horse.
He’s seated atop a Speedway gas station as though it were a footstool, his armor-clad knees bent to the height of his lower chest. His horse is standing in an empty lot behind him, white flanks blending into the fog. Last time he had been sighted, he was in Brixton, England. I wonder how he managed to make it all the way across the Atlantic.
As we near the gas station, my companion starts to swerve across the empty highway toward the exit. I guess he wants to hear whatever the man on the horse has to say. I hesitate a second, then yank my steering wheel toward his accelerating Camry. I’m never going to get another chance in my rapidly-dwindling lifespan to meet a four-story apocalyptic warrior. Also, it occurs to me that I only have a passing idea of where Quinn is in Atlantic City and that, if anyone would know, it would probably be the one who knows “the truth of these last days.”
The kid and I pull into the gas station lot three parking spaces apart. We’ve ended up toward the back of the horseman, so I can only make out his armored torso, half-covered by tresses of long black hair, as he looms above the abandoned Speedway. Half of the time though, that’s not what I’m looking at. It startles me, actually, to realize how little I register the horseman. Staring at him does make me feel small—both literally and metaphysically. And yet when I keep him in the corner of my eye, it’s almost as if he were flat, an image instead of a person. A news clip flashing across the screen of my phone to be reacted to and then forgotten. The realization unsettles me a little.
Meanwhile, the kid gets out of his car, hefting what looks to be an expensive camera tripod, then heads around to the back door and opens it for his dog. She darts out, sleek grey haunches bobbing over the edge of the car, and barrels around the whole lot once before returning to his side. I wave at the two of them as I get out of the Prius.
“Hey kid, I, uh, like your dog.”
This is starting to get far more social than I’m used to with strangers, but there’s something about driving alongside another person during the apocalypse that makes you feel like you know them. The kid watches me carefully, as his dog comes bounding over to sniff my legs. I lean down to pet her, then stop myself. Quinn was all about petting every dog she saw, but she still has a scar on her wrist from when one of them got startled and bit her.
“Don’t worry, she’s friendly, ” the guy calls to me at last, as if the hesitation with his dog had passed some sort of test.
As he approaches me, I finally get a good look at him. He’s definitely as young—or younger than—I thought he was and has a sort of punk Harry Potter look to him, with wire glasses, chunky metal stud earrings and bright yellow eyeliner that pops against his dark tan skin. No idea how he managed to keep it looking so crisp during the car ride, though I wish I did.
I hold out my hand.
“Thanks for riding with me, dude. Name’s Sam.”
“Ro.”
He stops a beat as the dog hops on me. She’s tall enough that her front paws barely touch my stomach.
“That’s Lizard.”
I raise an eyebrow, but don’t ask. He continues, words spilling out of his mouth faster than before.
“Perhaps you’ve heard of us. We’re on YouTube. Rozilla. Strange Phenomena and Urban Legends. And now, uh, actual gods.” 
He’s so eager that I almost feel bad shaking my head.
“Nope, sorry. I go more for the gaming channels myself. My girlfriend—” Ex-girlfriend? How do you refer to someone you’re only planning to break up with? “—probably would have seen them though. She was the Mulder of our relationship—into paranormal mysteries, and local legends and all that sort of stuff.”
“And you’re the Scully?”
Ro’s eyes dart to the four-story man seated on the gas station behind us. He hasn’t noticed us so far—I guess we’re too small. I shrug.
“Operant word being ‘was.’ Sort of hard to be too much of a Scully when you’re standing next to a 50-foot-tall warrior dude. Though I guess we could all be hallucinating due to a massive gas leak or something.” As I talk, I too find my eyes drawn to the man behind us, and all of a sudden, I regret saying anything about a gas leak. There’s a grandeur, a beauty to him, that’s impossible to explain with any hallucination. “So, I’m guessing that he’s why you’re here then? This is all…everything about the apocalypse has been very unexplained.”
“Yeah.”
He sighs and looks all too weary for a probably-17-year-old. It suddenly hits me—I’ve heard people in their forties saying how horrible the apocalypse is for people my age but, god, how much worse has it got to be for people who haven’t even gone to college? Whose brains aren’t fully developed yet? I get the feeling Ro doesn’t want to talk about it though, because he immediately dodges my stare and starts to loop around to the other side of the gas station. I trail behind him, doing my best to wrest my expression back to neutral. This is easier said than done given that I’m standing in the shadow of a giant man who is both the only source of information on my girlfriend’s location, and also probably a deity.
Ro and I walk in silence for about a minute, then he starts to talk again, as if the conversation had never lapsed at all. YouTuber instincts, I guess.
“Actually though, if you look closer at the apocalypse, I don’t really think it’s that unexplained at all. Everything is some sort of eschatology come to life. The spontaneous combustions are from Christianity, a fire appearing out of Yemen—that’s from Sunni Islam, and scientists are saying global warming is speeding up for some impossible reason—I guess that’s for the atheists? And this…” He motions at the back of the four-story horseman, more of whom’s torso has started to appear as we circle the gas station. “…is Kalki, Avatar of Vishnu, who’s supposed to end the Kali Yuga—that’s the worst age in Hinduism which, yeah, is absolutely the one we’ve been living in—and start everything over again. They’re all here. It’s as if humanity all decided collectively that the world was crap and not worth living in, so it just…stopped.”
“Can we do that?” I ask, my Scully instincts kicking in. I’ve spent too long arguing against Quinn’s crack theories to not question the validity of this universal consciousness thing.
The YouTuber shrugs, flipping the tripod down from his shoulder and handing it to me.
“Uhhh, lemme think on that for a sec. Could you set this up? I’ve got to change the settings on my video recorder.”
It’s been a long time since I handled any camera equipment—stage crew in high school if you’re wondering—but the motions come back to me easily. As Ro fiddles with his camera, he elaborates on his shrug.
“Okay so, disclaimer: the only philosophy education I’ve ever had is that ten-minute YouTube series with the MS Paint illustrations. But I’m going to stand by what I said earlier. Technically, if you think about it, the ‘physical world’ is just an inference that humanity makes, because there’s consistency in the stuff that we see. Like you look at a table from two separate angles, and it’s still the same table, you know? But we can absolutely fuck that inference up and see stuff that’s not in that ‘physical world,’ like the Kanizsa triangle. So, it’s not that out there, in my opinion anyways, to say that reality could be a big pattern formed by our collective consciousness, and then, if we start thinking something else, it could start changing.” 
He looks up from the camcorder to find me staring at him. Because you know.
“Fuck,” he says, “sorry if that all sounds batshit. I only halfway believe it to be honest, but I haven’t found a better theory yet.”
I have to laugh because he looks so embarrassed.
“It’s okay, dude. For 90% of my childhood, I thought the phone tower near my house was an alien radar device, because my dad saw shiny lights coming from it once. At least this actually makes sense. Is there anything I could do to help?”
“Oh! Uh, yeah actually. I guess you could keep the video camera on me while I’m talking with Kalki Avatar. I was just going to point it in the direction of where he is and hope for the best, but an actual person filming would be better.”
“No, not that. I mean, I will do that.” I switch on the video camera, and aim it at him, causing him to immediately fiddle self-consciously with the collar of his jacket. “But if, in your theory, the world is ending because people decided it should end, if we all thought something else…would that change things?”
“Oh. Oh damn, that’s a deep question. I don’t know? That feels way too simple, and I doubt it comes down to only thinking about it, but maybe it would help?”
“That’s okay,” I sigh. “It was just a question. Honestly, who actually knows what’s going on at the end of the world? Besides Kalki Avatar, I guess. But I do like your theory better than most—at least it means that…I don’t know, this wasn’t something that just happened to us.”
“In my theory, we caused it. We literally summoned beings from every theology to end the world.”
“Better than they just came by themselves.” I laugh because the world is ending and I’m standing in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station that is currently being used as a stool for a god, chatting about philosophy with a 17-year-old YouTuber. Meanwhile, said YouTuber attaches something that looks like a mic on his collar and uses the camera on his phone to check his makeup. “I look okay?”
 “Frustratingly so. I am jealous of your makeup.” As he turns toward the road stop and the four-story god that towers above it, I add, “One more thing. I, uh, heard that Kalki Avatar has a lot of information about the end of the world and everything and if it isn’t too disrespectful, would you mind asking him where my girlfriend is? She’s close to Atlantic City, and I’ve been out of contact with her, and, um…”
My voice trails off, and I feel my face burning at the intimacy of what it feels I’m revealing. Ro’s far less weird about it though than earlier when I realized how young he is. He nods and gives me a corny thumbs-up that looks out of place with the stud earrings and jean jacket.
“Yup, no problem. Us gay peeps gotta stick together, right?”
I had no idea what his sexuality was before this moment (though I guess teenage YouTuber covering cryptids should have been a strong hint) but hearing him say that makes this abandoned road stop in rural New Jersey feel like the friendliest place in the world. I stammer, words barely coming to me.
“Yeah. Thank you.”
Then he gives me a lopsided grin and turns away to approach the avatar of a god.

#

I watch the scene unfold through the lens of a 2013 Sony camcorder, the already grainy image quality made somehow worse by the fog and the smears of holy light that extend from the avatar.
A small blotty shape that I assume is Ro moves across the parking lot, hesitates, then stops at the foot of the apocalyptic god. From my position at the camcorder, it seems to me that the top of his head reaches the god’s ankle. Or maybe just a toe? Every so often the image seems to shift before my eyes, and what was once the tan of his flesh becomes the core of the world, the ageless heart, throbbing in time to all the lives that begin and end in this second of our universe. In its seething depths, I can see a child slide free of its mother’s womb, a man hurl his brother, screaming, into a pillar of fire, two lovers swallow a handful of pills and sink into each other’s arms. Whether these are scenes that manifest to Ro, I cannot say. Yet I watch as he takes a halting step forward, and falls to his knees, grasping at his head and wailing something like a song. The dog stops racing in circles around her owner and pricks her ears, glancing from him to the avatar. I bend my head, half-believing that if I do, the images will cease. They don’t. Instead, Ro’s song resolves itself into words. I don’t understand them, though I can’t tell if that’s because they are too far away, or in a language that I do not know or in a language that humanity was never meant to know.
Whatever they are, Ro’s words somehow earn a reply from the avatar above us. The voice that emanates from him is a crack in the earth, so deep and low that I can feel it in my very bones. Even from my place thirty feet away and tucked safely behind a camcorder, its immensity consumes me. It’s as if I were a child again—my neck aching as I leaned back to stare at the night sky; as if I had just realized that all I ever saw above me was only shadows on a cave wall, the suggestion of something vaster and more complex than I could possibly comprehend. There were stars born and died thousands of light years away, continents and storms as large as continents on the planets that orbited them. And all I would ever see of them was a small, dim point slightly to the right of the phone line pole next to my house. I want to collapse onto the broken concrete of the parking lot, so strong is the sensation. I want to scream. I want to cry.
In the end, ironically, it is the thought of Quinn that allows me to remain at the camcorder barely keeping my eyes on the scene that unfolds before me. I remember the night that she moved out, six months after the failed dinner with my parents and three weeks before I would sign a lease with Jade. When at last we had packed all of her things into boxes, the two of us clambered wordlessly to the top of the monkey bars in the complex’s small playground, and sat there for a while, feet dangling through the metal rails. We didn’t say anything to each other. It wasn’t one of those nights when we felt the need to reassert our relationship, to act like it wasn’t the beginning of the end by repeating the same words over and over again. 
Hey, don’t worry, I’m sure things will stay the same, even if you are in another city. 
It’s not far, right? I can just drive down on the weekends. Or you take the bus up here, whatever works.
And, you know, I’ll always need you, Quinn.
Neither of us needed each other that night, but we did still believe we were better together.
I had wound up stargazing on that night too but, unlike when I was a child, the vastness of the universe did not scare me. I can’t exactly say why. Maybe I realized just how vast other human beings could be as well. How wide the hole was that they could leave in your life. I hold on to the thought, to how comfortable the world felt when my hand was in Quinn’s, in the ages that seem to pass before Kalki ends his conversation with Ro. At last, the young man clambers to his feet, dog prancing around him in a circle and yapping for joy. He pays her no attention, save a short pat on the head—only staggers toward me, his face almost literally aglow with a smile.
The first words he speaks to me are incomprehensible—not another language but wonder itself unmoderated by language. I knew, then, that he must have felt the same thing I did—but who knows how much more strongly. What happens to you, after all, when the avatar of a god turns their attention to your small mortal frame? When they speak to you in a language that predates time itself?
The second words that he speaks to me, though, I can understand: “Are you religious?”
I shake my head. As much as I feel bad saying this next to a real deity, making something up would be worse. And yeah, maybe the physical incarnation of every theology in the world should be all the evidence that I need to believe in something. But it isn’t. Instead, it raises more questions than it provides answers: the first among them being, where have they all been the past thousand years?
All the same, it also feels wrong to act as if what I had just watched wasn’t sort of, well…divine, so I add, “There’s something out there though, I think. Just don’t know what it is. What about you?”
Ro flashes me a wide grin that suddenly makes him seem like the teenager he is. His eyeliner smeared sometime during his encounter with Kalki, and he no longer appears to mind. He no longer appears to mind much at all.
“I’m with you. There’s something—or someone?—out there and…I think I just met part of it.”
“That’s…that’s fantastic, man.”
I grin back, less jealous than I was expecting. Damn, is the end of the world making me into an okay person?
“I got most of it on the camcorder by the way—well, not the sound but definitely everything else.”
He shakes his head.
“Doesn’t matter. There’s so little time left and—and—I’ve made up my mind. Lizard and I are going with Kalki. That’s how I want to spend my last hours, Sam, doing something transcendent.”
“Ah.” Jade’s answer slips into my mind, unbidden: I have things I need to say before we all die. “Why did you come back down here then?”
“I asked your question—or I didn’t really ask, Kalki just knew which was—” He stops, realizing he had gotten off-track, “…But anyways, Quinn is at Pork Island near Atlantic City. Something is happening there. Don’t know what though—I hope it means something to you.”
“Not in the slightest, but I’m sure it will to Google Maps,” I say, glancing over my shoulder to the car. 
“Okay, good. Well—” Ro also looks over his shoulder. “I guess we should part ways, then. There’s not much time left, and you, uh, probably should make the most of it. If you want, you can take the camcorder too. To remember this by. I won’t need it anymore.”
“Cool, I appreciate it. It was good to meet you, Ro. I hope that whatever is out there—whoever you met a part of, I guess—you’re the one who finds them.” I raise my hand in an awkward farewell, and throw the camcorder over my shoulder, turning toward the car. Then stop dead. “Uh, one thing though, you kept saying that there isn’t much time. Did Kalki tell you…how long we have left?”
He nods, hesitantly, then says, “Two hours and seventeen minutes.”
I don’t walk back to the car. I run.

#

I’m usually a safe driver. I remember on the road trip a year ago, Quinn asked me at least ten times to speed up, so that we could drive the highways “the way they were meant to be driven” at a bracing ten miles above the speed limit. She would even laugh about this sometimes, saying that if we put her and I together we’d make one normal driver, and wasn’t that the point of relationships, to balance each other out?
Yet tonight is no time to be balanced and I’m pushing 70 on rain-slick roads, trying to outrun the fear that I’m not going to make it to Pork Island by the end of the world. 
That will be in one hour, 40 minutes, and 37 seconds. I know because I set a countdown, after I had closed the car door, and managed to stop my hands from shaking. If I take the shortest route on Google Maps, I should make it there with maybe an hour to spare. But all of the roads are closed in Atlantic City, courtesy of the nine-breasted dragon-riding lady, so I have to go the long way around, past places with names like Pleasantville and Linwood. Even there though, when the clouds part and I’m staring out to sea, I think I can see her, snatching the gales from the sky and braiding them into reins for her beast. Somehow, from that far away, she looks human. She has a mole on her left cheek and her hands are spotted with age as I guess they should be, given that she’s about two thousand years old. 
The other parts of her change though and at each moment she could be anyone: a stranger you pass on the sidewalk, your parent, your roommate, your lover. But with a vacant stare, milk-eyed and distracted. Sometimes, she is even you. At that, you go still, hands taut on the steering wheel, because what could it mean that the beast-lady at the end of the world has your face? Then the rain falls harder, and she disappears from sight, and now you are slamming down on the accelerator, because some horror has rooted within you, so that you cannot chance what you will see when she manifests again.
The visitors to Pork Island, in that way, are tempting fate. When Ro said something is happening, he meant something is happening. The half-mile stretch of (apparently) a combination dog-park-and-beach has been overwhelmed with cars, dented e-bikes, even a couple of roller blades tossed to the shattered concrete. Along the bounds of the parking lot, trash cans smolder with a barely visible flame, warm and inviting on this rainy night at the end of the world. 
There are people too, dark shapes against the sheets of rain—some hop the railing into the park, others gather around the firelight to tell stories or smoke joints or make out. They remind me of Quinn, which reminds me of what I’ll have to do, which steals my attention long enough that I keep my foot on the accelerator as the road starts to bend, and the car swerves toward the guardrail.
“Shit!”
I snatch at the steering wheel—are you supposed to turn into the swerve or out of it? But it’s already too late and I hear a crack, louder than I had expected, as the headlights go out and the bumper collapses, like that road in Jackson Hole the quakes had hit. Then my world goes black, and I can see nothing.
I can think though, and what I think is that it would be really fucked up if I got myself killed right before the end of the whole fucking world. I consider screaming, but don’t, or maybe can’t. 
And then I open my eyes. Yes, my face is pressed up against a rapidly deflating airbag, and my eyes are not really focusing, but mostly I feel alive. I kick the side door of the car a couple of times, until it creaks open and take a shaky step outside. Then, I survey the damages. Well, no one’s dead. That’s probably about the best I could say for it.
“Jade’s going to kill me,” I say aloud, still half-conscious. “God, I wrecked the car. As soon as she’s done with her book, she’s going to fucking kill me.”
“Who’s Jade?” drawls a voice to my right.
I look over my shoulder to see a goth-looking girl clambering unsteadily over the guardrail I just scraped with my car. She’s got heavy eyeliner and a dark smear of hair that hangs about her shoulders—or maybe that’s my vision still blurring. I shake my head at her.
“I…Doesn’t matter. She’s not going to have the time to kick my figurative ass anyways.”
The goth girl lays a hand on my shoulder, apparently not bothered by the fact that I got here by crashing my actual car into the side of her party.
“You’ve got the right idea, darling. It’s the end of the fucking world; nothing matters anymore.”
Something about the way she says that doesn’t sit right, but I don’t really have the time to argue about it so I shrug, “Hey, do you know where I can find someone?” I realize too late how stupidly vague that is. “My girlfriend. She’s six inches taller than me, really pretty, badass-looking undercut—”
“Look—” the girl starts, and her boots scrape awkwardly against the concrete as she staggers toward the guardrail. I realize she’s probably drunk or high. Or both, it is the end of the world. “Look, darling, if you want to find anyone, they’re probably going to be over where the water isn’t. Staring into the Abyss.” 
“The…Abyss?” 
“Uh-huh. It sort of makes sense if you think about it. Hospitality Creek, right there to greet the end of the world.”
This doesn’t help me much, but I can see that the people still leaving their cars are all headed in the same general direction.
“Right, thanks,” I say to the girl, and maybe because my head’s screwed-up and my good judgment’s still out of commission, I add, “You heading over there yourself? Need an arm to lean on?”
She shakes her head, and gives me a big, almost too-big smile.
“Not at all. The Abyss may be over there now, but I’ll see it later. We’ll all see it later.”
“Oh. Alright then, I guess. Thanks for your help.”
“It’s no big deal.”
She cackles like this is the funniest joke she’s ever heard, then leaps back over the guardrail, her smear of dark hair the last thing I see before she is swallowed by the rain. I stare at the place where she had stood. Probably too long. Then, I kick open the back door to grab the camcorder (the thing somehow made it out of the crash in better shape than me—probably divine intervention), and stagger away from my wrecked car toward the crowd at the far side of the beach. 
I blame the crash that it takes me until I’m halfway there to wonder exactly what the goth girl meant when she said “we’ll all see the Abyss later.”

#

Following a brackish slough that I tentatively label “Hospitality Creek,” all of us recent arrivals to Pork Island set out from the parking lot. As we slog along the sodden banks, I hear someone next to me mutter that he feels like a zombie. Another person laughs. I lean over and add that I already felt like a skeleton today, which makes this the second time I’ve compared myself to the undead—not a lot… “but it’s strange that it happened twice,” the other two say at the same time. We glance at each other in startled appreciation before they’re forced onward by the people behind them and swallowed up by the crowd. The longer I walk, the less I see of the group I started with, and my progress stalls, each step closer to the creek and retaining wall than the inner island.
At last, the path has grown crowded enough that I can no longer get any closer without shoving someone over. I kick the ground, then groan as my boot sinks at least an inch downward, earning a stain I know will still be there when the world ends.
“Fuck.”
I’m not even a mile from the Abyss (whatever the hell that is) and this is where I have to stop? I mean, I guess that had always been a way that this could end, but god, it feels like crap to have it actually happen. I look down at my phone lock screen. 00:30:07. Half an hour until I’m dead. That knowledge comes with a strange clarity. There’s no point in turning back now because this is the last chance that I get. 
And so, to shouts and the occasional snarled obscenity from those around me, I make for the retaining wall. Back where Hospitality Creek had drained into the ocean, it was so low that I had almost overlooked it, but now it stands three meters high and at least half as thick—assumedly to keep the waters of the Hospitality from flooding the road in spring. I notice some people have already clambered to the top, but there aren’t a lot. Though the wall itself isn’t that high, its sides are slick from the rain—and really, who wants to risk cracking their skull open twenty minutes before the end of the world?
But I’ve driven four hours, videotaped the avatar of a god, gazed upon the nine-breasted dragon-riding lady at the end of the world and I sure as hell am not going to be stopped by a wall. I shove the (apparently indestructible) camcorder into a crack two feet up the embankment and brace my boot against it. Somehow it bears weight, so I cram my fingers into the mortar between bricks, where cheap municipal cement has been worn down by the salt air. And then I climb. And then I climb some more. Quinn would like this, I think. There’s something melodramatic and a little absurd about doing anything this hard to see an Abyss at the end of the world.
And yet, after four minutes of the most agonizing physical exertion I’ve had in years, I haul myself over the top of the wall. My lungs heave. My arms throb. My eyes drop to the screen of my phone. 16:47. Goddamn. Better find Quinn fast. I start along the top of the wall, stepping over those huddled humans who have apparently found where they want to be at the end of the world. None of them are her.
“Quinn, Quinn, where the fuck art thou, Quinn?” I mutter, eyes raking over the crowd.
It’s no use—the Hospitality’s banks are heavy with fog, and my head isn’t much better after the crash. Then I hear a voice from somewhere below me.
“Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love. And I'll no longer be a Capulet.” I look down. “Hey babe.”
And there she is: legs folded, phone cradled in a hand atop her calf (I knew she hadn’t remembered those Shakespeare verses by heart), staring up at me with that crooked red-lipstick smile slashed across her face. And for the life of me, I can’t tell if I’m falling in love all over again or about to shove her off the wall. Fuck.
I don’t do any of those things. Instead, I lower myself down beside her.
“‘Babe?’ Really? After what you were doing two nights ago? You realize I came here to break up with you, right?”
I give her a hard stare, and she looks away, fingering her ratty undercut. 
“Okay, yeah. When I saw you coming, I assumed it was either that or you were here to kick my ass.”
She has the decency to look a little less Quinn and a little more apologetic.
“I know, I know, I absolutely deserve it. Still trying to understand why you would travel across one-and-a-half states though.”
“Yeah. Well. I’m still trying to understand why you would cheat on me,” I say, maybe too loud, and Quinn goes still.
Her eyes are wide and liquid black in the waning light. It makes me think of skeletons. Somewhere behind her, a strange darkness starts to bleed into my vision, and I think maybe it’s a side effect from the crash, right up until I hear the crowd shouting, scrambling past each other backwards towards the shore. Quinn’s mouth opens like she’s about to speak.
“Really? I thought you…I mean, I’m sure you didn’t assume that I would kiss someone else, but you had to know things weren’t going well.”
She’s right. I did know. I mean, hell, we hadn’t talked to each other since three days after the apocalypse began. But I had always thought that the relationship was, I don’t know, like the earth itself; it would always exist even after we didn’t believe in it anymore. After we were dead and gone. We say nothing for a moment, and I kick my heels back against the side of the retaining wall.
“Okay. You aren’t wrong. I mean, you shouldn’t have cheated on me—”
“No, I shouldn’t have—”
“—but, yeah, I could’ve seen things weren’t going great. I had seen things weren’t going great. It was just…fuck, I didn’t know what our lives would look like together, but I sure as hell couldn’t imagine them apart. I mean, I still can’t imagine them apart.”
“Well, we do have like, half an hour left so…” Quinn does something that sounds almost like a laugh but isn’t. “I do know what you’re talking about though. It took—uh, sorry for bringing this up again—being with someone else for me to realize we weren’t really that good for each other anymore.”
“Right,” I mutter, smearing dark trails of mascara across my cheeks as I rub my eyes.
I can’t really explain why I resent a stranger in a relationship I know I can’t want anymore, but since when have any of my feelings for Quinn made sense anyways? That’s when I notice that catchphrase blonde from the Instagram photos is nowhere in sight.
“Where is she by the way?”
I guess I look sort of angry because, the next thing I know, Quinn is grabbing hold of my shoulder.
“Whoa, easy there, tiger.”
I remove her hand.
“Easy there, yourself. Do I look like the sort of person who’s going to end my time on this earth with attempted murder? No, don’t answer that actually. I have no faith in your sense of humor.”
“What? Hey, there’s real gods running around, and you won’t have faith in that?”
“No,” I say, and the two of us fall silent.
We have finally done it. In less than ten minutes, we’ve managed to obliterate everything between us but the past. We are now just two humans who know each other sitting on top of a wall. And soon, the universe will finish what we began. We will be nothing, not to each other or to anyone else.
Quinn is the first to break the silence.
“She’s gone. I…I was there when it happened. We were holed up in her apartment, watching some stupid TikTok about how this whole thing had been done by aliens when she….she burst into flames. Spontaneous combustion. TikTok video probably would have said it was death rays or something. I…couldn’t stop it. She was too hot to touch, lit up from the inside like a human sun. I couldn’t even look at her directly. But she didn’t seem afraid either. Just…still. And then she wasn’t there anymore. Her clothes were gone too—I don’t know if they went with her, or if they just burnt up. The apartment smelled really bad afterward, like… cigarette ashes.”
She stops there, though her mouth is open like she wants to say something else. There’s a new scar along her cheekbone—how did she get that, I wonder—and dark circles under her eyes. I let out a breath, then place my hand over hers.
“Fuck. I mean, I’m still angry but that sounds terrible to watch.”
“It was… It was, yeah.”
Quinn presses her lips into a knife-thin line.
“When I looked it up afterward, I learned it was another religion thing. The Rapture.”
“Oh. Damn. Like that bit in Good Omens?”
“Exactly. Just your average Christian apocalypse shenanigans, I guess. Apparently, you only spontaneously combust if you’re a good person, as stupid as that sounds when you say it aloud. It takes you somewhere else before everything gets really bad here on Earth. So, if you think about it, she’s probably doing better than either of us.”
“Probably.” I pull my knees up to my chest. “Though it is a little fucked given that she helped you cheat on me.”
Quinn coughs.
“Unknowingly.”
“You mean you didn’t tell her?”
“The place where we met was really loud and…” She does another not-laugh. “I mean, there is a reason that I didn’t get spontaneously combusted to heaven. I break my promises. And I fuck with people who don’t deserve it.”
“Yeah, you do,” I sigh. “But I’m down here as well, so...good for us, I guess. Assigned Bastard by the Apocalypse. Now I’ll have to spend the rest of my short life wondering which game I pirated that pushed me over the edge.”
“Nahh, I doubt that’s it.”
I raise my eyebrows at Quinn.
“Are you offering to tell me why I’m a bad person?”
“Not a bad person,” she backpedals, which I guess I appreciate. “It’s more like…You sort of live in your own little world. Which, I mean, that’s fine—you mostly just do it because the life is short and bad, and you want it to be better. Most people are like that. There are far worse things to be.”
This is what it feels like to be intimate around Quinn. Like having your insides torn out of your body so that they can be gently stroked, exposed as they are to the hands of a brutally honest ex-girlfriend. And wanting it. As she stops talking, I can feel the dark thing in the distance coming closer, accompanied by a sort of pounding that seems to sound from all around me. 
“You know I didn’t really come here to break up with you,” I say, before I can stop myself. “Or at least that wasn’t all of it.”
Quinn glances over at me. The shadows on her face dance as she nods.
“I figured. I don’t think you were wrong, though. To do it. We wouldn’t have worked out.”
I look away from her, and toward the watchful host of humanity below. The dark thing is closer now than it was before. The pounding is louder.
“We could have ended it earlier though. We could have learned what…what happened next.” 
And then it’s here. And at last, I realize what the girl in the parking lot had meant by the Abyss. Try to imagine nothingness. Try to imagine the space between stars, a space without breath, without heat, without even the smallest atom of matter. Then imagine that space writhing like a snake through the earth, swallowing gallons of water as if there was no end to its thirst. Because that’s what I saw in in the ground before me. Hospitality Creek, greeting the end of the world. Hundreds of people stand beside what had once been its banks and is now the edge of a yawning chasm. They are worshipers of nothing. Some, the tearstained, the elated, leap from the collapsing ground into its expanse, screaming lines of Jay-Z or Ginsberg or The Office. Others take one look at it and flee, clawing through their fellow observers, only to be swallowed up regardless. And there are others still that haul the fearful and gasping back to solid ground or shove each other in with laughed obscenities or sing for the Abyss as they fall.
And then there is us.
Two human beings sitting along the edge of a collapsing wall and thinking about what it will be like when we don’t exist. Like falling asleep, that’s what I’ve always heard. Like falling asleep, except without the wandering thoughts of tomorrow and the eulogies for today and the fraught moments of dreaming. So not really like falling asleep at all. My limbs are stiffening with dread, my lungs heaving, and my heart leaps into my throat. My body readies me for a fight to the death that will never come.
“I can’t—” I say, my voice drowned out by the clamoring of the crowd.
I realize now the pounding comes from deep within the Abyss, and there is some beat to it that I can’t place.
“I want more. Why is this it? Why is this all we get?”
“I don’t know,” Quinn says quietly. 
I feel my breath tightening within my chest, my words becoming shorter.
“I don’t want to go out like this.”
Quinn says nothing, but then there is a sharp tone from my coat pocket. My phone. I pull it out, hands shaking, not daring to glance at the time. There is a single text from Jade, “I am officially a goddamn novelist.” and a link to a Wattpad page for “Finally finished piece (this time for real), Version2.3.1.2.pdf” As I scan the first lines of the story preview, another text appears. “Thanks for the stir fry and the coffee, Sammie, you get a mention in the author’s note for that. <3”
And, god help me, I laugh. I laugh until there are tears in my eyes and Quinn is staring at me, confused, before slowly starting to laugh too and the end of the world is closer by a hundred yards. 
“What is it?” she asks when we finally find the breath to speak. 
“I just realized—it doesn’t matter. It never really did.”
“What?” She draws back as though frightened by the change in my demeanor. “Like none of it matters because you just realized we’re all going to die anyways?”
Her voice is bitter. This is what Quinn has always thought, at the bottom of everything. It’s there beneath the devil-may-care attitude and the reckless driving and the desperate longing to be needed. But that isn’t what I think.
“You’ve got the wrong ‘it.’ What we’re doing now isn’t the part that doesn’t matter.”
I start to stand, eyes not leaving the Abyss before me.
As I reach my feet, a man leaps in, screaming “I love all of you.”
Someone beside him reaches out to touch his hand as he is swallowed by the void. All the while, the pounding in the background grows louder, more rhythmic, like the beating of an ancient heart. I turn to Quinn. As I reach out my hand, I think of Jade, lying flat on her bed, a small smile on her face as she realizes that she’s done it, risen her voice above the despair to make something sublime. I think of Ro clinging to the cape of a four-story tall avatar as he sees the world from above for the first time. And I think of the woman before me, wide eyes staring out from her scarred, beautiful face, as if she can’t quite believe what I’m saying to her.
“So, yeah. I know this is going to sound like I’ve lost it but…hell, we’ve got like four minutes left. Do you want to dance with me, Quinn?”
“We—You know we aren’t dating anymore,” she says, then does the not-laugh again. “Fuck, Sam. It’s the end of the world.”
“Yeah. That’s what I said,” I say. “Do you want to face it down there or, on your feet, dancing?”
She stares at me for another long moment, and I can see her start to get it, part of what I was trying to say to her. Her hand wraps around mine and she pulls herself to her feet.
“Fine. But only if I get to choose the music.”
“Knock yourself out,” I say and hand her my phone.
By now the Abyss is almost upon us. And with its coming, the tone of the crowd has changed too. There is no longer any defiance, any attempt to escape the inevitable. The people who fled have either fallen or already made it back to their cars, keys in the ignition, scrambling to get away with the couple of seconds they’ve stolen for themselves. 00:3:04. The shouting has mostly stopped too, as though people had said their last words when they saw the Abyss on the horizon and are now simply waiting for the end. Even so, there remains an echo of the beat I had heard before, not quite drowned out by the roar of Hospitality Creek racing past a thousand human feet toward oblivion. Those left in the crowd have formed a chain, arm looped tightly through arm, so that when they fall into the Abyss they will do so together. 
Quinn grabs my wrist with one hand and holds up the phone with the other.
“The music,” she says, lips twisting into one last smirk then adds, “I thought it seemed appropriate.”
It’s All the Single Ladies, by Beyonce, because of course it is.
“I guess that’s what I get,” I say, “for spending the end of the world with you.”
And then we dance. There’s not much room on the wall so we sway back and forth as though we were college kids again. It feels sort of awkward at first, then we start to grow used to each other’s bodies, how each other wants to move. I remember the last time we danced like this—in the apartment parking lot, the night that Quinn moved out—and yet it doesn’t feel the same. To my surprise, I’m okay with that. 
“Hey, Quinn.” I lean in, the close-shorn hair around her ear pricking my lips. “Is it weird that after everything, I’m just happy that you and I got to happen?”
“Not that weird,” she says. “I feel the same way. Even with the crappy parts.”
The pounding of the Abyss becomes louder, blurring together with the warm notes of Beyonce’s voice. I close my eyes and imagine it’s the sound of the whole world moving along with us. That for one short moment, we’re all happy that we happened. And then there is nothing at all.

C. E. Giugno is a writer from the snowy wastelands surrounding Rochester, NY. She does often dream of the apocalypse, but luckily so far none of those dreams have been prophetic.

Collage by C.E. Giugno