The Clock
A short story about doomsday.
Author’s note: [i]In this story I offer a speculative, pessimistic refraction of modern life. I hope it brings catharsis, though it may also bring distress. In this note I offer an alternative: at times it may feel like surrender is the only choice, but that is a comforting lie told to justify giving in. The fight for justice never ends, even when it seems every battle is lost, tomorrow remains—and always shall remain—unwritten.[/i]
In the final days of a dying Earth I reach out and cling to you. We sit side by side out front of the ramshackle café run by underpaid and overworked staff who each tackle two people’s jobs and get paid for half of one. The air is acrid with the fumes of exhausts, simmering sewage and nicotine, vape juice, weed. It is the hottest summer’s day on record. I pull at my sweaty vest, tugging the flimsy fabric free from the matted fur of my belly, feeling anything but sexy.
“They’ve been saying it’s one minute to midnight all my life, but I think they need to update the clock.” You say. “We’re one second away.”
Across the street a jackal in a hijab is being heckled by a roving pack of spaniels in shorts. Down the road a tall and glamorous trans vixen attracts cutting stares from sneering parents for no reason beside proximity. Each of these women’s public existences is an act of rebellion, one that is beautiful, but failed.
I serve my judgment from a place of privilege: sitting here, passing male, making myself invisible. Such power doesn’t spark joy; it doesn’t spark at all.
“That, or one second past. I think it’s less that we’re about to welcome doomsday and more that it has been and gone,” I say.
You laugh, because what the hell else are you gonna do? And, god, when you show off those crow’s feet you are irresistible. I kiss you and take your paw in mine, speckled as it is in silver furs, weighted as it is in the years we have spent together in quiet understanding and private, fruitless defiance. You squeeze. I squeeze too.
The coffee we sip comes from the same brand of machine as every other coffee available in a fifteen block radius. It tastes as bitter and disappointing as ever. Somehow I keep hoping it might surprise me, it never does. Our sandwiches are simulacra of pre-packaged ingredients thawed specially for us and assembled on sourdough bread, served with a complimentary smattering of store brand chips. Romantic as anything.
Still, the sandwich tastes better than what we muster up at home. This qualifies as a treat, [i]going out in style[/i] so to speak. Usually we shop at discount grocers where every third apple is half rotten, every other salad leaf browning. Our weekly shop costs triple what it did four years ago, our pay has gone up five percent. We gave up on the delusion of ‘property ownership’ around the time we learned the words.
I gave up on social media six months back too, but you show me the first thing that pisses you off on X anyway. My argument is that I can already watch the world collapsing in real time around me as is. I don’t need up-to-the-second updates on my phone phrased in the least informed, least productive way by the most ignorant and least empathetic people on the planet about exactly how fucked we really are, or about nothing, but a nothing so disgustingly blown out of proportion that it amounts to the same thing.
“That shit is rotting your brain.”
“At least it’s a distraction.”
I think, but don’t say, that that’s half the problem right there. But I know that you know that. And I know you would counter: [i]What does it matter? You’re right anyway, we’re one second past midnight. Doomsday has come and gone, we’re living out the end of the world, why not embrace it?[/i]
And I know that you know I would have no response. I live now for little else but you, and if I had to answer why—in all honesty—I may have no better justification than your own: [i]At least it’s a distraction.[/i]
I would look to nature for salvation if all the fish in the rivers weren’t already dying, dead, if much of our wilderness weren’t paved over or converted into endless fields of the same crop, sprayed with pesticides and spread with the toxic waste of battery farmed hens. I would move somewhere with an environment still mostly, miraculously, intact except I don’t have the money to leave and never will. And there would be microplastics there anyway, and background radiation, and yet another hottest day on record.
There is no escape for me but you.
All these people passing by don’t seem to know what we do.
“The world is ending and they don’t care.”
A shrug. “Sure, but do we?”
I have to listen, really listen, to hear you. The air is heavy with sirens and alarms, engines and planes, crying children born into noxious smog, bigoted men bantering about who hates the most the best, churlish women criticizing each other almost as viciously as they criticize themselves. This city is nothing but another voice in the cacophonous cry of a dying planet screaming out for help and receiving nothing but another round of punishment, and another, and another. I put down my napkin and watch you eat. You cover your muzzle as you laugh, as if I’ve never seen your tongue, or a chewed up slurry of half-digested food. You make fun of me for my intensity, I make fun of you for lacking it.
The world has been in a depressive slump for decades, she’s borderline suicidal. And why shouldn’t Mother Nature want out, having endured our ceaseless campaign of abuse? Even now—on her deathbed—she marks us with scars, seeing no reason to cease her self-harming, no reason to stop crying her ice-cap tears ever further up the coast, and the new coast, and the new, new coast.
The billionaires who set naive sights on Mars instead of fixing their own damn planet sit pretty in their skyscrapers—the ones that crawl ever higher up the skyline in some failed attempt to reach god—ready at any given moment to descend into their bunkers. It offers some twisted satisfaction to know they are every bit as miserable as the rest of us, and even if they weather Nature’s wrath or an oncoming nuclear winter it won’t matter, there will be no world left for them to return to and toy with, their incredible greed will have nowhere to turn but inwards. They will tear apart themselves in the end.
I walk you home after spending half a day’s pay on one shoddy meal, smiling because you’re squeezing my paw again, because it’s the rare day off in which we don’t actually need to do anything specific and so we choose each other. You used to write, I used to paint, but we gave it up for love and haven’t looked back. Maybe that’s toxic, but there’s little left not laced with venom, I’ll take whatever nectar I can.
I decide that they were right after all, about the clock. We are one minute away. But what’s the point of leaving a mark on a world that will be consumed by nuclear fire in t-minus sixty? Fifty-nine?
At home, the flat whose rent and bills costs eighty percent of our combined income and barely has three rooms, the one decorated by the constant screeching of the streets, the stubborn stench of age and mold that emanates from the cracks in the walls, the one with a duct taped kitchen faucet, cracked windows, barely space to breathe... At home we will disrobe and count down from fifty-eight. We will tangle tails, make love until the count hits ten.
Then we will sit naked by the window and watch the blazing sunset of falling missiles, of fascism, of post-modern, murderous, oligarchic capitalism, of climate disaster, of every kind of hatred under the sun, of war, of imperialism, greed and genocide, of a dying world, shoulder to shoulder and we will count, nine, eight, seven, and we will hope and dream and pray that when we hit six, five, four, all the pain will be over, all the suffering, and that three, two, one, if we are lucky death will reveal itself to be only a gateway to somewhere, anywhere better than this, though not really believing it. Never really believing it.
Zero.
Our eyes go wide as expanding stars. When the missiles strike we are too close to appreciate how the clouds they produce approximate the shape of fungi, blanketing the earth, finally, in the life we so thoughtlessly scoured from it.