One Minute From Midnight
There was little else suggesting that the world’s end hadn’t been a memorable occasion, just that the receptionist couldn’t remember any of it.
With a thorough ache coming from places up in the depths of her head down to where the dress didn’t reach her shins , the receptionist woke in her usual spot at the foyer of Massey’s Lone Star Beer and Wine Ltd., sore and very much crushed beneath her upended desk. After a fair minute of maneuvering beneath the creaking wood, the receptionist managed to shift her head her head from plumb up to parallel with the scorching ground beneath her.
The bottom foot or so of everything in sight was covered with jagged, baby blue wallpaper, reaching up in stumpy fences bordering various office pastures, crumbling fingers shedding drywall like a nasty sunburn. All the space above the desks was hidden from view by the makeshift roof of an open drawer, wedging her head between itself and the floor (the second of which felt little like her lobby’s usual carpet). But still, the other desks weren’t totally hidden, and she could glimpse through her rectangular window clusters of them lying on their sides in a state of common upturned disrepair just like her own.
Her ribs ceased their long straining beneath the wood as she gripped and heaved up her own desk an elbow’s-length from her chest. The desk rolled off her chest inch by inch, each bone flexing back to its usual, steady arch. Rolling and shuffling out from beneath the brute, she moved her mightily sore but otherwise unbroken limbs out from under the desk, tripped over an upturned lamp, and stood to rise to the new American landscape.
It was very red, she thought. Other than that solitary detail, her brain had suddenly evicted all the other reasoning it would have otherwise contained to analyze such a moment. Very red and very flat, she thought, as she viewed the new city from this angle.
Across the empty space where the identical homes had sat cozy in their identical rows, in the open air where papers of all kinds—receipts, tags, posters, spiral-bound and thrice hole-punched sheets—now fluttered and smoldered about, lay the flushed skeleton of society where it had been apparently blown off its haunches.
The receptionist cut an extraordinary, wheezing laugh through the calm. Offended by herself, she brought a palm to cover her mouth and rapped her knuckles full force half a foot before her lips. Before she could think, her hands both flew to the sides of her aching head. Reaching across every inch from jaw to crown, a new face of leather ran beneath her fingertips. She felt it too from beneath—a tightly-bound cage pressing upon her cheeks, nape, and brow. The receptionist’s vision shuttered out of focus and retreated far back into her head, her view taking in the lenses poised millimeters from her lids. She rubbed these into streaks with her groping palms as she sank.
Kneeling upon the fizzing ground, the receptionist brought her hands down as she stared down into one of the many puddles before her, the contents of which shone a bright red to mirror the sky above. Upon its surface, a dog-shaped shadow showed back in her reflection, all drooping nose and craggy scalp. The receptionist found her hand dashing through it, scattering the top film of the mirror across the flossy shreds of tattered carpet. The vague image stayed in the rippling puddle. The receptionist rubbed her eyes into further streaks, but still, the desperate animal silhouette hadn’t changed before her.
The receptionist blinked through the rosy smears and saw that the puddle was blood.
Where she held her seizing hands before her new face, the wet tips of her fingers blended perfectly with the bleeding crimson of the sky.
The receptionist caught herself pitching backwards mid-faint with her other hand and stamped it behind to catch herself into a different sort of puddle. This one, fortunately, wasn’t blood, but instead a deep rut of smoldering gasoline. The noise of shock and pain was distorted out of the end of her new snout—a puck-shaped circle of hissing metal before her chin—and her mind broke under a flare of white.
When she vaulted back and struck the remains of her desk, everything was suddenly much clearer than she’d ever wished.
The quickly keen vision, the sharpness of the world’s smell melted the utter numbness away somewhere on the edge of her consciousness, and the receptionist suddenly felt an urge to cry. She felt strong in her understanding of the world’s bleeding end around her, but sat there, forcing it deep out of her consciousness, somewhere far beneath the surface of both the new mask on her head and the blouse on her breast—both of which she clutched as she rocked upon her raised heels.
Staring out across the rubble, the receptionist scanned through the sights all around her, clear all around for the viewer from its recent leveling, anything hopeful.
And yet the world was all just more red: overhead, deep and atmospheric, hazy and pinkish on the passing waves of mist, or wet and underfoot.
She stared deeper through the lens before her. Besides the spot of lucky vegetation, the city was sanded down to an astounding evenness.
Except…there.
A white, domed beacon of power and hope seemed to shine as finely as a dusty, cracked pearl. It lay across the new, impossible wasteland what she knew by heart was a two-mile drive away, though the roads had all been blown to scattered pieces. The receptionist rose anyway, stumbling forth from the wreckage upon a pair of unharmed and barely sore legs.
Holding tight the bloody fabric at her elbows, she began the egg-shell walk to the faraway building like any bloused moth until a last creaking tree a quarter mile along the way finally uprooted itself and squished her dead.
