Photo by ArtHouse Studio
When the end of the world comes, it will not be a big deal.
Actually, no, let me rephrase that.
When the end of the world comes, it will be the biggest deal anyone has ever seen, and everything will be awful and terrible and — probably — on fire.
But people are infinitely adaptable, and things can only go on like that for so long. We’d get used to it soon enough, and the terror would fade into boredom. We will be born under skies that have never been blue, and grow up under them, never knowing anything different. Time will smooth over the apocalypse like a river polishing a stone, and we will exist happily in half-gone buildings, like we never wanted anything more.
Eventually, years and decades later, nobody will care anymore — about the air or the water or the never-ceasing glow of fire on the horizon. We will grow nostalgic about the fire. We will remember how, when we were children, we laid our heads on the windowsill and watched it from the bedroom window on those nights we couldn’t sleep.
In that time, when the Great Cause of Death has subsided, we will find our petty squabbles in other things — sugar, perhaps, or alcohol. Humans love sugar and alcohol and things that are soft, and those penchants don’t disappear just because the land is too hot to touch. Maybe it will rain blood, but when it does that, we will know to stay under cover. And besides, Mariella from two-places-over has made a cake, and we will also know how good she is at cake.
This is not to say the end of the world won’t be bad. That would be a very stupid thing to say. The end of the world will be the worst thing you’ve ever seen and ever will see.
And then it will be fine — not because it is over, just because nobody can be bothered anymore.
There will be a child, living in the husk of a supermarket, and his clothes will be made of tarps and plastic. He will not be able to run around for very long before the toxins he is breathing make him lightheaded and he faints.
He will grow up to be a wholly average teenager, except he’s taller than he ought to be, and his hair is thin. He will have hobbies and hopes and dreams. Sometimes, he will dream of a world with clean air, abundant freshwater — all those things us pre-apocalypse sorts take for granted. More often, he will dream of working up the courage to approach the girl who lives in the husk of a laundromat and ask her out. He will dream of one day making his father proud. A pre-apocalyptic world would be nice, but it’s pointless to dwell on what you can never have. Besides, he’s awfully nostalgic for that horizon-fire, and if the earth’s core never started leaking into the mantle, there would be nothing to sustain that fire, now would there?
Of course, the laundromat-girl will love him back, and they’ll climb the warped and twisted rebar to sit together atop jagged hunks of concrete. They will swing their feet in the hazy air above the city, and when he works up the courage, he’ll place his hand over hers and twist their fingers together. Because really, even in the middle of disaster, that’s the stuff that matters.
We will make art and we will make stories. We will fall in love and we will dance in the moonlight. The world will end, and it will be the worst thing you have ever seen, and it will be the worst thing anyone has ever known.
And then we will keep going.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Ember Best is an eighteen-year-old hobbyist writer from the Tri-Cities who enjoys fiction and art.
