Free Apocalypse for Beginners by Nicolas Dickner

already begun to fear the worst.
    As I parked the Honda, there was Hope, who, as it happened, was also on her way to buy groceries. Great minds, etc. She slipped into the front seat.
    For someone who was supposed to be down with the flu, she seemed to be in excellent shape. Actually, she had not been sick at all. She had simply been commandeered by her mother, who, without prior notice, had barricaded herself into the pantry by fastening the door with a couple of screws. Quite an unexpected reversal.
    “Before shutting herself in, she poured everything that might count as a cleaning product down the toilet: dish soap, detergent, shampoo. She nearly blocked the pipes by trying to flush down the garbage bags.”
    “What made her do that?”
    “Oh, who knows? I have trouble making out what she mumbles through the pantry door. Stuff about germs and the regeneration of the planet. I’ve given up trying to make sense of it. The upshot is I’m going to take the opportunity to give the apartment a good scrub before I let her out of the dungeon.”
    “But I thought she was getting better.”
    “You can’t take anything for granted where the Randalls are concerned.”
    The store was closing in thirty minutes. There were no customers to be seen, only deserted aisles and a long stretch of empty shelves in the Vicks VapoRub section. Clearly, this flu was taking a toll.
    We split up to carry out our respective missions. We would rendezvous by the cleaning products in five minutes.
    As I went by the refrigerators, I noted the latest Asian invasion: tofu. Out of curiosity, I examined one of the packages. For the time being, this was an exotic and unsavoury item. But in a few years it would be a perfectly ordinary part of our diet, as mundane as Nutella and the H-bomb. In the wake of the Great Tofu War, we would be slightly more Asian, but no one would notice. Another unwritten chapter in the history of the middle class.
    My eyes swept over the area as I sought to identify the items that, on the historical level, denoted something new. Which products had appeared since my birth, since my parents’ birth? Kiwis, garlic, asparagus? In which year had the first lemons been shipped north of the 47th parallel and sold in our little hinterland town, hundreds of kilometres from the Port of Montreal?
    What strange times, when a simple fruit could conjure an enigma.
    I loaded up on 50 volts’ worth of various citrus fruits—just barely enough to run a quartz watch—and grabbed a package of ground beef without slowing down on my way to the cleaning products aisle. Hope was holding a bottle of detergent in each hand as if gauging which of the two flavours would inflict the most damage. She frowned and dropped both bottles into her cart, where they joined a box of steel wool, some scouring pads, dish soap and a jug of bleach.
    Around us, an industrial silence reigned. The only sound was the swishing of the ventilation system. A post-apocalyptic stillness. But what sort of calamity could have left buildings intact, the electricity grid functioning, the products neatly arranged on the shelves?
    “Zombie invasion,” Hope suggested.
    At the far end of the aisle, an obese woman in a fur coat shuffled by, dragging her feet and pushing an empty cart. I had the fleeting conviction that, holy moly, Hope was right: the dead were abandoning the cemeteries!
    A moment later there was nothing left but the sound of the fans and a peculiar wistfulness. For a second, Hope and I had been the last people on earth. Now, we were just the last people in the cleaning products aisle.

28. DISTURBING NEWS
    Conspicuously located near the cash registers was an enormous bin of marked-down Captain Mofuku ramen—hundreds of astronauts floating in empty space, all wearing the same stupid smile, 3 for 99¢.
    Leaning over the bin, Hope very methodically examined the merchandise: (a) she picked up a package of ramen, (b) studied it carefully, (c) made a face, (d) chucked the