How the World Ends by Joel Varty

rack the earth and the very matter that makes up the nature of life is changed forever and the noise deafens us and blood runs down our ears and someone somewhere planned this and why can’t I remember what it was like to be whoever I was before I was this?
    …
    And then I’m awake again, and, oh yes, that’s what being cold feels like, because my jacket’s gone – taken by the scoundrels who walk the streets looking for those more vulnerable than themselves. Damnit damnit damnit! Why did I go to get a drink?
    It’s almost light, like it always is from a certain point of view, and I can see faces. Some I know, some I don’t. The eyes of those faces watch me as their hands clench, ever so slightly, and re-open, over and over again. I recognize some of them. Some of the eyes go to the left, and I know that’s the direction my coat went. I’m outside now. I must have been dragged for a bit when they took my coat, because the warehouse looms behind me like a great gaping black maw in the grey light of the dawn.
    Dawn – it’s the time of day when you can feel the coldest feeling of loneliness, even knowing that the darkness is behind you. Where is the hope that the dawn is supposed to bring? I turn and walk behind the warehouse to a dumpster where I have an extra coat that I threw away a couple of days ago because it stunk so badly. I greet the day with my usual grimness as I shrug my shoulders into it.
    I look out over the city, which isn’t much to look at even on the best of days, but today is it awesome in the peculiar silence that sits over the place like a blanket. I walk, in a shamble of battered shoes and my old smelly coat, back to the doorway of the warehouse, and look in. There’re all still there – the eyes with no faces and hands wringing together with no bodies and no souls to speak of. I’m just like them: that should be what hurts, that should be what tears at my heart like no pang of hunger could ever do, but it doesn’t.
    No, I think to myself, as I turn and look at the river and new massive holes that have been blasted in the roads as far as the eye can see. I don’t hurt inside because I know my eyes peer out of the darkness with no soul behind them to see what’s actually there. I hurt because I don’t care, and I want to care, but I don’t have any hope of caring, or care of hoping, and that’s just what it’s like. It’s like being all twisted and wrong inside, with no ending or conclusion, just a wrongness, lacking passion and conviction.
    Those blast holes are in me too, and I can’t find my way across, so here I stand. As the day dawns with dull greyness in spite of the sun trying to burn through, I stand forsaken and forgotten, and alone with all of those like me.
    Waiting, and watching the edge of that blast hole for a hand to reach over the side.
    …
    Lucia
    The city sleeps a wary, restless sleep. The sun has not yet risen from the black depths of the horizon. People in dark buildings stir and roll over on their balled up coats and wet jackets that have become their only bed-clothes overnight. Some are still awake, trying keep their eyes open in the silent roar of their thoughts.
    In stairwells of apartment buildings, in the museum, in the football stadium, in churches: people struggle to find rest in the face of uncertainty. They have never had their lives turned upside down like this. In some places in the world, homelessness and displacement are a desperate fact of life. Most people in this city have never considered the mortality of their existence beyond the chance that they might not have enough money, or they might have to deal with a sick relative, or, eventually, grow old.
    Now, growing old seems a luxury that nobody can afford, let alone budget for, in the face of a world turned on its head. Yet these thoughts are reserved for only a few – most can only assume that some isolated disaster has taken place, that the authorities are on their way, that help will be