He opened the window and the morning breeze came in cool like every other morning. He saw dew on the grass glistening as the early morning clouds lit wine and orange as the orb neared topping the eastern hills. He saw the spider in the windowsill had moved on leaving a geometry of silk abandoned in a corner. Part of him wanted to leave it like a little gallery, part wanted to wash it clean away. His morning coffee was steaming little storms in his hand.
It was so hard to believe that this was the last day on earth.
He buttered his toast. He fried up some eggs. He drank some reduced sugar orange juice as he ate those eggs. The toast was good. Sourdough from that new store up the street. His cat curled up against his leg and looked at him as he put some egg on the last bites of toast.
It was the end. The news had even said so.
He fed his cat, petting its head lovingly as it consumed canned food in little spirals. The sun was beginning to spill across the valley now. He debated about one more round of toast. His cat curled up on his couch in the next room and fell asleep, soft purr like a sort of music. He cleaned the dishes. No more toast this time around. He cleaned the floor while playing the best of that band he first fell in love to back in high school, the music filling the rooms like a kind of gentle aural floodwater. It caressed even his aging microwave, the piles of books so long unread, the couch and sleeping cat, the laptop, the walls even to the bathroom , splashing up and back around as the guitar moved along that chord progression so soft and gentle and drums coming in just so.
He would check his social media but he had been binging on it all night when it became clear. He posted poems and stories and photos to little response. He chatted late in the night to one young writer he had never actually met. They were cleaning all night. Had no idea why. Some comfort she said. The memes had ceased a day before. The sharing of data invasive quizzes had too. Even the celebrity channels of click bait had closed up, digital sutures of once running rivulets of jokes and old news stories repacked.
Social media had become near empty as he chatted with the young writer. The number of dystopic plots of old comic books page even had a quiet note before it was deleted. Twitter had become a stream of identical shared posts then had frozen around that time. You tube had no new comments but a few trolls spinning out shards of last anger and panic. It was all so surreal.
The world was ending. It was not war or disaster.
It simply had grown tired, weary, could not take it all anymore.
Humans were a kind of virus it turned out, a mutation some scientists agreed.
He held his cat as it slept, caressing the loving little creature’s head as it cooed like a bird.
Then nothing.
