A Short History of Almost Nothing

A young male wakes up on the day the world is going to end. The rest of his day ensues.

  It was the sun that woke me up. The bright light shining through my closed eyelids was warm on my skin. It is always hard for me to wake up in the morning, but today I am lacking the motivation more than usual. Eventually I squirm out from under my blankets, pushing the sheets down off the foot of my bed in the process. The hardwood floor felt so cold and refreshing on my callused heels, something I never noticed despite walking on the very same floor, pacing around for hours, every day. I guess it is the kind of sensation you don’t really notice until you know you’re running out of time.

            I walked across the room to my kitchen. One room apartments are convenient like that, bedroom in the top left corner of the room, kitchen in the bottom right. The rest of the space was devoted to my sofa, garbage and Xbox accessories. Four years of college really paid off… I can barely afford this dump. I open the fridge and there is no food obstructing my view of its back wall and yet I’m still greeted with this overwhelming odor of rotting eggs and year old Chinese food. I guess I cleaned all that out a little too late, but at this point it doesn't really matter.

            I clicked the power button on the small plastic television on my kitchen counter, going through each of the channels, almost all commercials. I wondered why I wasted so much time on TV. I was never the type to consider television a waste of time or anything. Its just that looking back, I probably could have been getting laid or… something. I’ve never really been good with the ladies. I click to channel two, the news. On the screen is an empty news room, still, silent, and lifeless. The fake smiles of the annoying news reporters are gone. Lights, camera, nothing. I guess even the news reporters have better things to be doing. After all, this is the end of the world.

            About three months ago some scientists spotted a group of meteors hurling themselves in Earth’s general direction. No one really thought anything of it, that is, until about a month ago. It was all over the news, magazines, and periodicals of all sorts. Apparently these meteors are bigger than the one that supposedly knocked off the dinosaurs, half the size of our own sun or something… traveling towards our tiny, helpless planet. Today is the day that the scientists say the meteors are going to hit us, and everything is just really weird. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s all just really f*****g weird in a really eerie way and I don’t know how to feel about it.

            I step out of my piece of s**t apartment and it is actually a beautiful day. I expected Armageddon to be a dark stormy mess or a little cloudy at least. Today, there isn’t a white puff in the sky, the birds are chirping, there’s a crisp breeze, and we’re all about to die. At 11:11 pm to be exact. It’s kind of ironic. I wonder if every thirteen-year-old girl wished that the earth wouldn’t come to a fiery end would make a difference…

            Looking around, things are a lot calmer than you would probably expect. Earlier this month there were a lot of robberies at electronic stores and stuff but people started to realize they shouldn’t even bother, they’d only get a month of use out of whatever they stole. But now that the end is near, like, really near, the amount of rapes around this city has increased pretty much 100 percent. I guess a lot of dudes don’t want to die virgins, and they’ll only have to deal with the guilt for a day or two at this point. I thought about doing the same thing, I mean, I’m a twenty year old guy and I still haven’t done it. But I’m really not in the mood to die as a rapist… but I’m also really not in the mood to die a virgin. I’m just terrible with girls and I’m even worse with women. I stutter and I suck, so I just never really bother with them. Guess that’s just one more thing to regret.

This whole “end of the world thing” has raised a lot of rough questions in my already crowded mind. Like, what should I do during my final hours? Who should I do it with? Just walking around I’m seeing a lot of people, couples particularly. I feel like I’m the only single person in the world who decided to leave my house. I see this old a*s couple eating at some fancy-shmansy restaurant. It’s the kind of restaurant that serves portions smaller than a CD case that all taste like crap, yeah. So this old couple, they were eating there and I watched them ditch out without paying or anything. It was weird to see that. My friends and I used to pull stuff like that all the time; it’s just not every day you see senior citizens acting like children. Not soon after that I saw two kids sitting at a picnic table by this little pond under a tree with pink flower petals flying all over the place, landing in the girl’s shiny hair and the boy’s hood was full of them; it was a flowery mess. I actually went to high school with them, the girl was this huge s**t and the guy was this phony hotshot piece of crap. And strangely enough, these two were sitting there feeding ducks, holding hands acting like a couple paraplegic old folks… So, this all made me wonder, who the hell am I going to spend my last day on earth with?

            The easy answer would my “my family”. But the more I thought about spending my last hours with my parents, the more I wanted to just die right there on the spot. I spent my whole life with my parents. I hate my parents. F**k my parents. The only problem is I don’t really have any other options. I don’t have any friends. The few friends I do have are spending their last hours in strip clubs or playing Call of Duty…  But for me that just doesn’t feel right. Nothing really feels right. I used to think that choosing between McDonalds and Burger Kind was a though decision and to tell you the truth, I really don’t feel like dealing with this right now. I saw a bike barely hidden behind some shrub by a playground… so I took it. I kinda just want to get out of here and all the stupid public transportation just isn’t happening right now. I guess it would be stupid to spend your last hours driving around a bunch of losers who will just arrive at their destination and DIE momentarily, so I can’t really blame them. It’s just making my last hours a pretty inconvenient.

            I decide to take that hunk-of-junk bike a couple miles outside the city. Theres this little hill with a bunch of old power lines and electric generators and a really good view of the sunset. A lot of people don’t like it here though because the field is sorta a septic field, but that never really bothered me. It smells better than my apartment to be honest. I watched the sun go down and it reminded me of that episode of SpongeBob when Squidward thinks that he accidently fed SpongeBob a bomb and they’re watching the sunset… I thought about Nickelodeon until it was pretty dark out. I could literally see the giant fire ball coming towards me, three small dots moving slower than shooting stars but faster than satellites. Then I saw two more lights that pretty much scared the hell out of me, but they weren’t in the sky.

They were two beaming headlights coming from across the field. With nothing better to do I got up to investigate. As I got closer I saw this really old pickup truck, the hand painted puke-green paint was peeling off in little coiled up rolls with rust and mold scattered across its hood. To my surprise there was a girl in the driver’s seat; not like some lesbian with short hair and armpit stubble, I mean like, a HOT girl. She had choppy blonde hair outlining her small pale face, a loose-fitting tank top and ripped up jeans with all sorts of flower embroidery around the small pockets on her hips… She motioned to her passenger seat, inviting me to get in, and I did.

“What cha’ doing sitting out there all by yourself?” she asked with a friendly sweet tone.

“Just sitting out there by my self, you know, just chillin’” I answered nonchalantly.

“Well I hope you know you’re sitting in a field of s**t. They stopped maintaining the septic tank a few weeks back and…” she stopped there. I knew where she was going with it; she knew I knew so she just shut up. I liked this girl. She was pretty charming sitting there with about one and a half inches on cleavage and the slightest bit of skin showing where her shirt didn’t quite meet the waistline of her jeans. The light from the three meteors reflected in her bright eyes, I could barely tell what color they were but her lips were this beautiful shade of pink I’ve never seen before… They looked really soft. Se looked really soft. This girl is gorgeous and I don’t know what to do about it.

“Hey,” she interrupted my thoughts “you want some Italian ice? I stole em’ from this cute convenience store… I don’t consider myself a thief; I don’t think anyone really cared they were melting anyway… Its watermelon”

“I guess that explains your pink lips…” I blurted out.

“What?” she chuckled

 “Well, it’s just that the first thing I noticed about you other than your choice in automobiles was your lips. You have really nice lips. They might just be pink from the Italian ices, but they’re still really nice.” I said.

I was kind of shaking for whatever reason. It could be fear of the three meteors racing toward the windshield. Could be the fact that is friggin’ freezing outside or maybe I got some horrible bacterial ailment from sitting in s**t for two hours that’s manifests its self with Parkinson’s Disease-like symptoms. Or maybe it’s this hot girl with her perfect lips and patches of exposed skin in my peripheral vision.

“Oh… Well that’s very sweet of you” She smiled and her lips looked even more perfect, curling ever so slightly against her large white teeth. She scraped at her Italian ice with her little wooden stick thing. I watched as she put it in her mouth and licked the flavored snow off her lips… and that’s when I just thought… “F**k it”

I leaned across the stick shift and the empty cups of Italian ices and kissed her like a mad man. I tasted the watermelon on her lips and it was actually really good so I thought I’d just stick my tongue in her mouth. We were really getting into it now. I had her back against the driver’s side window and my knee in a puddle of condensation from the cups of ice.

“It’s really good right?” she asked between kisses.

“…What??” I asked, rather confused by her question.

“The Italian ices. I can tell you like it. You really should have had one” She asked, still kissing me, pulling my body closer to her.

“It is really good. You’re right. You taste fantastic. I mean… You have fantastic taste in frozen Italian sweet… I’m not really hungry though.”

It was hard to form sentences with coherent thoughts. I was half choking on this hot girl’s tongue while trying to unhinge her bra while she’s undoing my Nintendo belt buckle. There’s a lot of multitasking going on. This is a lot to handle. I barely peek over her perfectly sculpted shoulder and see the three dots about quadruple the size getting closer and closer… Once again, a lot was going through my mind. I wasn’t sure what to do next with this complete stranger. I mean, I didn’t have any condoms… but I was about to die and NOT about to die a virgin. I positioned myself the same way I saw countless times on my cheap Windows 98 computer monitor. The image was always pixely, but I pretty much got the idea, and it was awesome.

It was getting pretty hot in that crappy old truck, literally. The three dots were now just one huge ball of light taking up half the sky. I swear that truck was like an oven. I tried to lift her back away from the window when I saw the glass starting to melt into her hair. We were beyond sweating at this point and I was starting to wish this truck wasn’t in the middle of a septic field. That’s when it really hit me that I was about to die. This was all real and for the first time I felt pretty scared. I looked down at her and looked really deep into her eyes. She sorta half smiled up at me, we were both pretty light headed I think and my vision was getting pretty messed up. We were being cooked by this crazy blaming ball that was now probably a mere amount of miles away. She looked up at me, he face blistering from the heat, her burnt lips splitting as she smiled up at me. I didn't even want to know what I looked like from her point of view, but it was kind of hard to care... We were both about to die but we were still able laugh. I’m pretty happy that’s how the end of the world went down.

 It could have been a lot worse.