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Typical
When the end of the world was announced I was stuck in traffic. Had I left the house maybe thirty minutes later I would have been able to turn the car around and head home again, instead I was surrounded on all sides by other cars like that REM video.
The radio announcer broke in halfway through Morrisey and stuttered at first.
"F... F... Folks" he started, and nobody says folks these days, "I've been handed an announcement..." he then went on to explain that this was not an Orson Welles style radio hoax, that it was being broadcast on all TV channels and posted on all news sites. Even the emergency band was reporting it. Some technobabble about a doomsday device left over from the Cold war that a trigger-happy idiot had gone and activated. We had thirty minutes. The announcer signed off saying he'd leave us with the ten best Stones songs and he was going to try and get to his wife and kids with what little time he had left.
I rolled down the passenger window and shouted across to the guy in the next car. He seemed to be listening to music from a dash-mounted iPod dock. He ignored me, so I got out of my car and lit a cigarette from the glovebox. Marcie didn't know I still kept a pack in there.
"Can I get one of those?" said a girl, she looked half my age and was wearing denim cutoffs and a baby-t that had eighties cartoon characters garishly emblazoned across her perky breasts.I handed her the pack and leaned in close to light her. She smelled of vanilla.
"You think its for real?" she asked and I nodded solemly. Somehow it felt right; the human race wiping itself out through random stupidity and obsolete defense doctrine.
I sat on the hood of my car and felt it cave in slightly, but I didn't care. She sat next to me, her fingers shaking as she took long drags on the cigarette.
"We could go fuck in the back of my car. No way I'll get home to my boyfriend in time."
I considered it for a minute and in the fraction of a second when I blinked, I saw her behind my eyes; young, vital, welcoming, with soft unblemished skin. We would be urged on by a sense of impending finality, both rushing our own bodies to climax, using one another merely as the means to an end. There would be no need to woo her or call her in the morning, no time for guilt afterwards. Everything gone in the blink of an eye.
"I think I'm just going to sit here and wait for it to happen. That guy over there won't turn you down though." I said as I jerked my thumb over to the iPod guy in the next car. Because as tempted as I was, there was always a chance that the radio had got it wrong.
Dec. 1.2006