Vignettes from an End

The sun is dripping again, a cracked yolk running down the sky to pool along the crumbling horizon. Burning yellow mingles with chilly red clouds, and magenta steam bubbles up from the boiling ocean. It smells like burnt fish and salty rot, so I close my window and turn the air purifier up. Can’t risk getting vomit on the rug again.

I read on the news that this is normal. It’s part of a cycle. For the world to be renewed, first it must die, but only the parts that don’t matter. The unimportant parts. But the news said that I was in one of the important parts, a part that will become a seed to fill the new world with new life, so that’s probably okay.

It still stinks, and the air purifier doesn’t help, and there’s fresh vomit to clean up. It looks like the sun, red and runny and full of squirming yarn.

The rug crunches beneath my bare feet as I walk from my desk to the fridge. Even that little exertion sends sweat flooding down my body, more sweat than I’ve ever seen before, viscous and sticky and smelling faintly of rose water. The AC says my entire apartment is freezing, but it must be wrong, I can’t see my breath and it’s still far too hot.

The fridge is the same temperature as everything else, dripping with a sheen of oily condensation. It’s still empty, just like it was the last six times, and I slump defeated on the burning tiles puddled around its feet. There’s something wrong with me. None of the apps are working, haven’t been for days, just angry error messages and incoherent warnings. Sometimes my fingers stick to the screen and it peels away like flaking ash, but I think that’s okay. The old skin must be shed for the new skin to emerge.

I know I need to go outside to get food, but getting dressed is going to be so hard. Do I even have any clean clothing? The sweat gets everywhere, oozing, staining … does it even matter?

I’ll try just as soon as my head stops spinning. Just another few minutes.

It’s perfect outside. Half the city is on fire, slowly dissolving as the sun’s gooey leavings eat their way through skyscrapers and streets and down into the screaming foundations, and the wind rushing away from it takes all the heat, all the moisture, leaves my skin crispy and dry. And sure, it crackles a bit as I move and my sundress is already starting to smoulder, but it feels too nice to complain!

The rest of the city is so ungrateful. There are people everywhere, shrieking in pain and trampling each other as they try to run and lying on the ground, their bodies bubbling with new life where the sun touched them. Behind me my apartment building’s smart red bricks start to melt, each one running down its collapsing walls in its own shade of crimson. I’d like to turn back to have a taste, I can already imagine how meaty and salty it must be, but getting groceries is more important.

Part of me hurts, but I’ll never need to clean vomit out of my rug again.

All of my clothing has burnt away by the time I reach the supermarket, but the streets have emptied too and the handful of people I pass are in no condition to comment or stare. It’s not like they have eyes any more, you know? And I’m just feeling too good to care about who sees the bits of my skin that haven’t peeled off.

That changes as soon as I’m inside. It shouldn’t be able to change, but it’s sweltering inside—I can hardly breath, the air is filthy, rotting, wrong. In seconds my skin, my new skin, is covered with slick sweat, oozing out in spasmodic bursts, glowing in the too-dim light. My stomach clenches, convulses, and it’s all I can do not to vomit all over the polished floor.

It’s probably still okay, though. There’s no one here to see, just me and the produce department’s sightless eyes. Oranges never spill secrets. Potatoes do, though, so I pick them up and squeeze them until their eyes bulge out and their grey-white innards start to dribble out through the cracks in their skin and my sweat dribbles in to fix their thoughts.

It takes a long time. There are a lot of potatoes.

I’m not sure what to get. Something easy, that doesn’t require much preparation, but not meat. The roasts at the butcher’s counter look wrong, where they’re standing swaying behind it, their surfaces dotted with little yellow orbs. I can’t bear to look at them for too long. I don’t want to see what they’re becoming.

Not junk food, though. None of that processed stuff. But all the fresh fruit has spoiled, I’ve been standing around thinking for too long, and the things growing in it don’t look tasty …

Fuck it. Ice cream.

It’s been a bad month, I don’t need to justify myself.

Luckily there are still a few cartons tucked away in the back of the freezers. I coax them out before the compressors fail and start spurting toxic coolant down the walls, but only just; a few of them don’t make it. Their burbling pleas for help follow the rest of us outside.