“How long do you think we have?”
“I thought we swore we wouldn’t talk about that.”
“No no no, I mean until they close.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’ll be open till like nine or so.”
“Okay good, that means we’ve got plenty of time.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Jackson and Paula were sitting in the back of Henry’s pickup truck, clinging to the sides as it jumped and swerved down the long, dusty highway. They weren’t holding hands, but every sharp turn brought them a little closer together, and Jackson entertained the idea that they might suddenly embrace each other. High above them, the sun sat swollen in the sky, burning with an intense heat.
“You think anyone will bother showing up to school?” asked Jackson, turning towards Paula. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon.
“I doubt it,” she said, still looking off in a melancholy sort of way. Jackson would have rolled his eyes if anyone else had tried to pull off such a dramatic stunt, but Paula was too close to his heart to be touched by his judgement.
Paula wanted a conversation, but she couldn’t really bring herself to carry one. She liked Jackson too, but there was a heavy feeling in her stomach that kept her emotions tied down. And on top of all that, she felt a little special when people looked at her and saw someone who looked like they were wrestling with complex thoughts. After all, this was the time for complex thoughts.
Up in front, Henry’s eyes were glued to the road. Both of his hands were wrapped around the steering wheel, and his knuckles were glowing a lighter shade of white. He pressed the gas pedal ever so slowly towards the floor, watching the speedometer rise out of the corner of his eye, and occasionally reaching over for a sip from his can of energy. Overhead, Henry could see the sun pouring out its heat on to the earth, and he knew that it was the enemy. He knew that it was going to kill every last one of them. He knew that everyone he had ever met, everyone he had ever heard about or seen, would all be dead soon enough. It was only a matter of hours, really.
Next to Henry, sitting quietly in the passenger seat, was Audrey. She had been motionless throughout the ride, save for a few sneezes and a couple discreet glances at Henry. Her red hair let off a mellow glow in the scalding heat, and one of her hands tentatively held on to the door handle. Every bump in the road startled her just a little bit, but only because she felt so unusually jumpy. Why am I so jumpy?, she thought, I shouldn’t be this jumpy. This is simply no time to be jumpy.
When the pickup passed a sign warning of possible tsunamis in the area, Jackson leaned over to Paula’s ear and giggled. “Wouldn’t that be refreshing right now? A nice, big tsunami. Maybe it’d put out the sun.”
Paula turned to Jackson and flashed a courteous smile. She opened her mouth to say something profound about the whole situation, about Jackson and her and about the sun and about Henry sitting up front and about Audrey in the passenger seat and about how they were all standing on the door step of utter destruction. But instead, she yawned and nodded. Jackson flashed a smile back and turned to look at the coastline as it ran by.
Henry didn’t take his eyes off the road, but he noticed when Audrey began to breath heavy, exaggerated breaths. “You alright?” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“Yeah. No. I might be having a panic attack, but I’m not sure.”
“Should we pull over?”
“Yes please.”
“Alright, there’s a gas station coming up, we’ll stop there.”
“Okay.”
Henry reached over and pressed a button, rolling down Audrey’s window. She immediately began taking mouthfuls of the fresh air outside.
About half a mile later, the pickup turned off the freeway and made a few lefts and rights, finally stopping at a gas station. Jackson was the first to get out, speeding over to the other side in an attempt to help Paula down, only to be told that she planned on staying in the truck. He nodded and headed for the little convenience store nearby.
Audrey was second out, and after sitting on the curb for a while, she looked over and saw that Henry hadn’t moved an inch from his place at the wheel. Curious, she pulled herself up to her feet and looked in the passenger window.
“Henry.  Henry.”
“What?” his eyes remained fixed on an invisible road stretching out before the truck. His fingers were still gripping the steering wheel.
“Henry, what’s wrong?”
“What do you mean what’s wrong? You know d--- well what’s wrong.”
“No, I mean why have you been that way since we started driving?”
“What way?”
“Like not moving at all.”
“It’s my watch.”
“What about your watch.”
“It’s ticking.”
“So?”
“It doesn’t tick. My watch doesn’t tick. It’s digital, and its never ticked before, but now I can hear it ticking and I can’t hear anything else but it’s ticking.”
“Well take it off.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have to know how much time we have left.”
“No you don’t. What good does that do?”
“Well I have to make sure I know, so that I can ration my time. We haven’t got much left, I have to use it wisely.”
“You’re not rationing your time very well by sitting in the car and listening to your watch tick.”
“I guess not.”
“Well then give me it.”
Henry let out a long, deep breath, then brought a hand over to his other wrist. Before he grabbed the watch, however, his hand froze in the air, and his eyes looked forward, and his mind reeled. Suddenly, his arm rose a bit then cracked down hard on the door. The little glass on his watch went dark, and it was off his wrist a moment later. He turned to face Audrey.
“This is really stupid, isn’t it?” he said, his voice a lot cooler. “I hate this, I hate how dramatic and high strung all of this is. I’m usually such a fun guy. I really am. And if you’d have asked me how I’d be spending my time during the end of the world, I would have told you something funny. Like, I’d be dirt biking off the grand canyon or skydiving and ‘forgetting’ my parachute or something along those lines. No, I wouldn’t have bragged about practically tearing my hair out on some spontaneous road trip with a few friends of mine. No, I wouldn’t have said that.”
Audrey was quiet for a moment. She wanted to say something meaningful, something that would put his mind at rest, but she drew nothing but empty words. What she eventually came up with was “Yeah, I suppose so.” followed by a “Hey, you want anything from the store?” Henry shook his head. Audrey turned and strolled over to the double glass doors of the little market, kicking herself along the way for such an idiotic response.
Once inside, she found the place to be very much empty and abandoned. The shelves were only stocked halfway, and the refrigerators lining the back wall were lifeless. On the far end, Jackson was digging through the pastry case.
Audrey walked straight through to the bathroom. As her cold hands met the cold door handle, she found herself quietly praying for it to be unlocked. It was. The door opened with a click, and within seconds she was on the toilet. Also to her luck was the fact that the bathroom lights worked, revealing a manifesto of boredom scribbled all across the walls in varying handwritings and pen colors. One particular quote that caught her eye was this: “The seagulls walk on the beach. Yes, they walk. They walk with the intention of walking, and for no other purpose but to walk do they walk”.
Following her initial what the h---? reaction, she began to read the sentence over and over again, reciting it in her head. She sort of liked it, in a way. By the time she was washing her hands, she had it committed to memory. “The seagulls walk on the beach,” she hummed, “Yes, they walk. They walk with the intention of walking, and for no other purpose but to walk do they walk.” It was catchy. It was strange. It made sense, she supposed.
Jackson returned to the truck with two armfuls of snacks and a back pocket stuffed with cash. When he unleashed his stockpile onto the backseat, Henry turned to admire the newly gained supplies. After running it over with his eyes, he noticed the cash. “Dude,” he questioned, “what’s with the cash?”
Jackson thought for a moment, confused, before making sense of the question. “Oh,” he said, pulling the wad out of his jeans. “Yeah, I took it from the cash register.”
“And you don’t think they’re gonna miss it?”
“I don’t think they’re comin back.”
Henry responded with a shrug. A moment later, Audrey was back in the car and Jackson was sitting snug in the back. The key turned. The engine was up and ready.
“Yeah, but you’ll like this restaurant,” started Jackson, grabbing Paula’s attention.
“What kind of food is it?” Her left hand was gripping the side of the truck again, bracing for the turns.
“Don’t worry, you’ll like it.”
“But I’ve never had it before.”
“Trust me when I say its impossible not to like it. Enjoying the food there is simply a part of human nature.”
A slight smile made its way around her lips, before fading away as the truck hit a bump.
“Oh, and worst case scenario,” added Jackson, “there’s chips in the middle if you forgot your taste buds at home or something.”
Up front, both Henry and Audrey were watching the road as the hood of the truck sucked it up like one long strand of spaghetti. Henry’s window was down just a crack, and the wind seeping in through the windows tossed his hair all around his head. His shoulders were low, and his back was resting nicely against his seat. Audrey took this overtly calm moment as an opportunity to share the phrase she had been repeating over and over in her head for the last five or so minutes. Henry listened. “The seagulls walk on the beach,” she started, with at first a reluctant fear of coming off as too weird, but she continued nevertheless. “Yes, they walk. They walk with the intention of walking, and for no other purpose but to walk do they walk.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“I’ve got no idea.”
“So what was the point of memorizing it?”
“I’m not sure, it just seemed like it had to be concealing some sort of deeper meaning of some sort. Like, maybe it would turn out to be some cryptic wisdom about the universe, or some sage advice that will come in handy some day.”
“Some day?”
“Oh shut up. You’re really good at bringing that up by the way.”
“Well, its rather hard not to. It is, after all, a pretty big deal.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to talk about it though. Our thoughts would most likely be spent on better things than worrying ourselves down into the grave.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Audrey turned to look out the window, and her eyes fixated on the sun. Under the dull tint of her sunglasses, she could look at it without squinting. To her, it seemed as though a hole had been punched in the sky, and all this white light was pouring in. She thought about patching up that hole with a nice little square of solid blue, and how nice and tidy it would all look.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious though,” declared Audrey, still staring down the sun.
“Curios about what’s gonna happen?”
“Yeah.”
Henry bit his lip and thought for a moment, compiling all the information he had on the subject. There wasn’t much. “Well, it’s essentially a new phenomenon known as a ‘solar projection’, or at least that’s what a lot of people have been calling it. No one’s exactly sure what it is, or why it is, but the whole situation looks pretty bleak. I think the analogy I heard for it was ‘the sun taking in a deep breath and blowing out a birthday candle named Earth.’ Kinda dark, right?”
“Yeah. And they know it’s gonna kill us all?”
“Would be pretty remarkable if it didn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.
It was late in the afternoon when the truck turned for the last time. The vehicle, carrying the burden of all four of its passengers, rolled into the hot asphalt parking lot that was it’s final destination. Once there, the engine fell into silence, along with Henry, Audrey, Jackson, and Paula. A long minute passed before any of them spoke, and when Henry finally did, his words were frantic. “No! No! No! No! No!”. His eyes were locked on the dark windows of the building only a few feet away. “No, it can’t be closed, no, no, it can’t be that’s absurd, it isn’t!”
Paula didn’t meet Jackson’s eyes when she spoke. “Is the restaurant closed?” She could hear Henry through the back window.
“I think so.”
Henry jumped out of the car and broke into a wild sprint towards the restaurant. He was almost unable to stop, and when he reached the two double doors at the entrance he hit them with a thud that echoed far off into the distance. Upon hearing this, Jackson turned and stood up, looking over the top of the car to see if Henry was okay. Audrey was already jogging over to him, in the hopes that she could get him to stop tugging at the door handles. Paula, meanwhile, fell into a stoic gaze that matched up perfectly with her newly held silence.
Audrey grabbed Henry by the shoulders and pried him from his sudden rage. “Henry! Henry, stop! Henry! Calm down!” After some effort, she managed to sit him down on the curb. He was shaking. “Henry, you’re making far too big a deal about some stupid restaurant.”
“But we wasted it all.”
“No we didn’t.”
“Yes we did, we wasted all the time we had left. We wasted all of it.”
“We can always head back. We still have plenty of time.” Audrey spoke in a reserved tone, as if she were trying to comfort both Henry and herself.
“No, we can’t, we don’t. We can’t head back and we’ve got no time left.”
“You don’t know that.”
Henry glanced at his bare wrist, and his tone began to mellow. “You’re right, I don’t. But it’s a long way back.”
“I guess it is.”
It was then that Jackson joined them, plopping down on the curb beside Henry and letting out a long-winded sigh. Audrey leaned forward and turned to look at Jackson. “How you feelin?” she asked.
“Not half bad.”
“How’s Paula?”
“Oh, I’ve got less than no idea. I just asked her if she’d do me the honors of spending her last moments with me. I tried to hold her hand, too.”
“What happened? What’d she say?” Both Henry and Audrey were turned towards Jackson.
“Nothing. Just sat there, staring at something too far off for me to see, I suppose.”
“Can’t blame,” chimed Henry.
“Yeah, I guess not.”
“Aw, I’m sorry Jackson,” Audrey cooed, “She just isn’t taking it well, that’s all.”
“I know, and it’s alright.” Jackson got back up to his feet and strolled around to the back of the restaurant, where the land stretched off into a wide, burning desert.
Audrey had fallen back into repeating that phrase over and over again in her head. The seagulls walk on the beach. Yes, they walk. They walk with the intention of walking, and for no other purpose but to walk do they walk. For a short while, she had wrestled with the question of why exactly was this statement written on the bathroom wall, but after a few unsuccessful attempts at explaining such a phenomenon, she had arrived at the conclusion that there simply was no reason for its existence. It was the brainchild of some random visitors stream of consciousness, and it was written just for the sake of being written. It held no meaning beyond its literal translation, and it accomplished absolutely nothing.
This all made a lot of sense to Audrey, and it made it far easier for her to accept the idea of everything disappearing in an instant. She felt somehow more secure believing the difference between is and isn’t to be merely two letters and an apostrophe.
On the other side of the building, Jackson was standing with his hands at his hips and his eyes squinting at the long desert before him. The heat seemed to hang just above the ground, like a low fog of dry air, and the sun poured all it had into the cracked earth. Between the scattered weeds that sprouted like dandelions out of the grass, there were hundreds and hundreds of miles composed of nothing but dirt, sometimes piling up high enough to form the mountains that sat swollen on the curving horizon line. To perhaps any other man, this view would seem desolate and maybe even disheartening. To Jackson, however, for some reason, at this very moment, as he stood below the sun peering forward at what would widely be considered to be nothing of interest, he saw only beauty. His heart was heavy in his chest, and a few tears slid down his cheeks, and suddenly, rising in his throat, there was an outburst of just how happy he was with the world. He had decided that this was the perfect place, this was the perfect day, for both his life and his death.
Later that day, the world erupted into a sea of flames, and everything under the bright white sky was reduced to a uniform nothingness. Jackson, Audrey, Henry, and Paula had all shared a few last words, but each and every syllable was inevitably lost, dissolved forever into the atmosphere.