Free How the World Ends by Joel Varty Page B

anymore. I think I was a good guy, before all this, back when I knew how warm-and-fed felt different to cold-and-hungry. I think I was good, but how could I have ended up like this if I was?
    I thought I wouldn’t have cared, but earlier today when I found a paper bag full of half-eaten french-fries and part of a chicken sandwich, I nearly cried out in joy. Oh yes, that’s what hunger is, I think to myself, remembering how the salt felt against my tongue when I tasted that first little morsel. That’s what real hunger feels like – because you know you’ll never be full again – and you eat it really slow to try and forget again.
    And for a few moments, the darkness is nice – almost a comfort – and there isn’t anything to worry about. And I am curled up here, the bottles in my coat pocket reminding me of how thirsty I was. Am. How thirsty I am. Damn it, I need a drink – not a drink-drink – just a bit of something wet to wash my mouth out with, and I make the mistake of stumbling out of my little corner and tottering across the floor and tripping over some old boards and finding myself slipping and falling and hitting my head and then… and then… and then…
    Remembering.
    …
    In the dream, there is always a brief moment before I fall, when I remember: my name is Herb Wiseman, and I wasn’t always like this.
    I was once an accountant. I was good and I was sought after. I had job retention – I was needed, and in demand. I worked all the time, taking the train into the city from my house in the suburbs, leaving the little people there to wait for me in their little beds where I might kiss them in passing, late at night or early in the morning, but always too late or too early.
    The skies were a real blue in those days, and the water of the lake reflected the sun into a sparkling array of hopefulness that anyone could have felt, if only they had looked. I knew how to see that, once. I would sit on the train or drive in my car and the world was mine – a place to deliver my needs to me, like a servant of my desires. I had control back then, and I revelled in its magnificence, for I felt like a king among a forest of kings and queens.
    We were all gliding easily, back then in our cars and trains, over the pavement that protected us from the roughness of the ground beneath. We floated within the haze of our short-sightedness that reminded us of our superiority just by allowing us to glimpse the stars that we could reach out and touch and snatch from the very dome of the sky.
    But the time passed by and the days grew into years and the years grew old and into a long, longer day which slowly sloped silently into a longer night, and my dazzling fire grew dim in the face of all that pressure. The young kids fresh out of school, smarter than me, working harder, working faster. The strain building, mounting, pushing me, holding me, sapping my strength of mind, and then… and then… and then…
    Forgetting.
    I must have forgotten what it was like to see that sky and that sun and be dazzled by the beauty of the day. For I slipped, not all at once, but little by little, inch by sacred inch, inexorably into the dull greyness. I was trapped then, locked in the time before the day begins and the night is over and we wander through it aimlessly hoping for the time to pass onto something else. And then, when that happens, you don’t care anyways, because you don’t even know what cold-and-hungry is, or at least that’s what I was told.
    Somebody told me that, once. Or was it just me, talking to myself without speaking?
    Something about falling and hitting my head… something about bottles in my coat pocket that held the last of my whisky, for tomorrow morning, when I’d really need it. But there isn’t anything in there; I drank that bottle ages ago, and I don’t know why they’d want it.
    “Leave me alone!”
    And then the crashing, smashing blasting of rockets as jets streak through the skies and explosions