You liked documentaries about heatwaves and the depletion of our planet’s natural resources. You’d put them on while running your hand up and down my thigh, your fingers tracing the curve of my spine. We’re letting the world burn, you said, and I pictured the world like a lit cigarette slowly, inevitability swallowed up by flame.
When the world—or at least the world as we knew it—ended, you were almost smug about it. About being right. And even smugger about being one of just a few survivors. You suggested we move into the airport. Plenty of snacks and travel-sized over-the-counter meds and pillows designed for sleeping in uncomfortable places. Besides, this is what they did in Station Eleven, you said. That book about the flu pandemic wiping out most of the world. They all wound up in an airport and drank all the booze at the airport bars. I was pretty sure there was more to the story but I didn’t have any other ideas. It’s life imitating art, you said when we walked all the way to the airport, wandering along the double-yellow painted lines with our arms stretched out like airplanes.
It hardly mattered that the world’s burning was more like a firefly lighting up, then dimming. Lighting up, then dimming. A series of mini endings until it was too late to do anything about it.
It hardly mattered that our marriage was on the rocks because you wanted a baby and I’d said of course you want a baby, I’m the one who’d get stuck with all the hard work and you got mad, said I never gave you enough credit. But whatever, now you’re rolling me on top of you and my knees pop and you can’t get hard. Never mind the fact that I can’t think of anything less erotic than the airport floor that a million dirty suitcase wheels have rolled across, never to roll across it again. You try to slip a finger inside me but it hurts and I ask you to stop. It’s not like there’d be pelvic floor physical therapy in the apocalypse and none of the airport shops carry lube—we checked. We stop. We laugh. Because sometimes all you can do is laugh at ridiculous situations such as this one. Maybe we could live out our days here, grow old together like we promised, eating all the candy in the Hudson News and reading all the books and magazines. Maybe traveling from airport to airport until we run out of gas, electricity, clean air. Until we get sick of the whole thing, until it stops feeling like an adventure, until we find other survivors and maybe like them better.
That’s when we see the tiny sparrows stream in through the automatic doors, opening and closing when they sense the motion, like nothing’s changed at all.
