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The World was Ending by Andrew Kozma
It was Tuesday, the world was ending, and John’s cat was dying. The vet was a mile away. He had no car and couldn’t get a ride service app to answer. All his friends were otherwise occupied.
John put Leopard in her pet carrier and took her outside to the sidewalk where, for a moment, he stood there breathing in the warm, humid air. The dark sky was crinkled like paper. Leopard started yowling, a quick, mournful, desperate cry. The only way to quiet her was to keep moving, so John began the long walk to the vet.
The air tasted of rain. No, it tasted like the end of a battery which had spoiled, caustic insides leaking out, the kind that John had put on his tongue as a child. Though the doctor and his parents assured him that he’d healed completely, he still suspected he didn’t taste the same things other people did, his taste buds permanently deranged. Stopping by a rogue rosemary planted on the city-side of the sidewalk, he broke a small twig off and stuck it whole inside his mouth.
It tasted like rosemary, of course. Old raspberries brined in seawater.
Leopard yowled. John began moving again.
“Everything’s okay, Leopard.,” he said, petting her nose through the wire door without looking at her. He didn’t want to get her hopes up thinking he was about to let her out. “Everything’s fine.”
Leopard rubbed angrily against John’s fingertips.
Everything was not fine, but there was no way to explain that to Leopard. John even had trouble explaining it to himself. The streets were empty, yes, but that wasn’t unusual, not a particular result of the atmosphere thinning or Antarctica collapsing into the ocean. John often walked in late evening and early morning when the streets were clean as if newly unwrapped. On every block there’d be a window lit up, but no movement or silhouette. Sometimes John would stand across the street from those windows and wait. He’d imagine the rest of the room from the features he could see. The edge of a giant computer screen meant that person was a graphic designer. A series of masks on the wall marked them as a frequent traveler. Too many bookshelves outed them as a misanthrope. And there was a time when John was younger [John the Younger] that he climbed a tree to visit his girlfriend, the closest tree still ten feet away from her window, and he caught her unawares. They hadn’t set up a meeting in advance. He’d wanted to surprise her. She was under her covers and moving, he was sure, like she was masturbating. John was embarrassed and shocked and afraid to climb back down because her bed faced the window and he was terrified any further movement might draw her attention. This is what he told himself at the time. And that person [John the Younger] wasn’t him, not anymore.
*
It was Tuesday, the world was ending, and John’s cat was dying. He was on one side of Montrose and the four-lane street was barren. Far down the block to the south he saw a construction crew ripping up the asphalt. A yellow dog of a machine pawed at the ground while a cluster of men and women in hardhats drank coffee.
John wasn’t sure what time it was. The sky often looked like dusk or dawn or rain when the clouds were low and all the lights in the city were on.
Two of the construction crew began dancing. Were the construction crew drinking coffee or something stronger from their flasks? They shouldn’t be doing that, but John couldn’t blame them. The world was ending. His cat was dying. His cat was yowling.
To stop his cat from yowling, John stepped off the sidewalk and crossed to the wide, green, wild-weeded median, because as long as he kept moving his cat would keep from yowling. He wondered if this is why babies stopped crying in cars and why marsupials had pouches. John knew very little about cars or biology.
What he knew was that crossing streets made him nervous, especially crossing them like he was doing now, not at a crosswalk. It was like cutting wood against the grain, or rubbing your hand the wrong way along a shark’s skin. This time it wasn’t embarrassment from his youth [John the Younger] to blame for his hesitation, his fear, or his guilt. A friend—well, a roommate—no, a person who lived in his house-turned-apartments who John had found sprawled across the street in front of their apartments, blood pooling around an ankle right-angled to their leg, wide open eyes staring blankly like a fish. The ambulance came and the body was removed and the street held onto the memory for as long as it could.
Every week John read of another hit-and-run in the city. People were in a hurry. The world was ending, so he couldn’t blame them for hurrying, but what John blamed was the culture that prized effectively avoiding responsibility instead of working to solve problems you yourself, [John the Younger], had caused.
John had his own narrow misses. A truck nosing forward as he rolled in front of it, the driver not noticing even as the bike’s wheels were crushed beneath the heavy tires. A car racing down a one-way street the wrong way, ignoring the designated bike lane entirely. Some days he felt like there was nowhere safe to be except in his bed, under his covers, with Leopard crouched atop him like he was a fresh kill.
Leopard yowled. The weeds bounced up around John’s feet, and John thought that was alright. They should be left alone to enjoy what they could because the world was ending. He was talking about weeds. He was talking to the weeds.
John stepped off the median, setting his foot firmly on the asphalt, and Leopard, for the moment, stopped her yowling. No car hit John as he crossed. There were no vehicles on the road as far as he could see in either direction. As a child with a skateboard, an empty street had been his easy version of heaven.
*
It was Tuesday, the world was ending, and John’s cat was dying. It was obvious from the way that Leopard yowled whenever he stopped walking that she was dying. There was a raggedness to her voice. Her vocal cords were fraying. It was terror of the empty abyss and the knowledge of all those foods never to be eaten again.
John had cats before Leopard. Those cats, too, had died. He was familiar with death, familiar enough to pass it on the street and nod with recognition. One cat had died in the closet, snuggled into a pile of shirts which had fallen to the floor and John had never picked up. One escaped through the front door and John had no idea of its eventual fate but noticed blood on the window panes two days later, the blood painted with a delicate paw. He went outside to search around the house but found nothing. It was simply goodbye.
Leopard’s yowling had stopped long enough that John risked a rest. He stood in front of a mega-mansion sitting on a normal-sized block in the middle of Houston. He swayed the pet carrier hoping the motion would fool Leopard into staying quiet.
This was a rich neighborhood, which in Houston meant a block of prosperity wedged between buildings a half-century old and a shopping center with a rotating cast of failing businesses. The mega-mansion was under construction or in the midst of repair. Scaffolding masked the true shape of the building, but couldn’t hide rotting stucco or bricks so black with mold they looked burned. Or maybe they had been burned. There was something smoky in the air, and though the vet was in the opposite direction of the city-run funeral pyres, there was no way for John to be sure.
John imagined what it would be like to live in such a home. How if you lost something, it would be impossible to find. What was it like to have ceilings so pointlessly high? Walls mostly decorated with your family’s own white bodies? This mega-mansion didn’t even have a balcony except, wait, through an upper window he saw a balcony inside, looking down on a lower floor. All the windows were high up in the walls to let in only light and distance. As if to imagine there was no city around them. As if the world had already ended. At some point he [John the Younger] would have killed to live in such a place. John couldn’t imagine what it was like to want that, now.
Leopard’s yowl had been growing and was now full-throated. It grated on his ears only because he wanted to make it stop. Not just make it stop, but to stop Leopard from hurting.
As he walked, he kicked an empty energy drink can out of the way, stomped on the flyers of the missing fallen from telephone poles and now half-pasted to the sidewalk. The faces there were torn and stained from foot traffic and the weather. John recognized none of them. He did not look very carefully. He focused on Leopard and the vet. He passed no other people. He saw no other pets.
*
It was Tuesday, the world was ending, and John’s cat was dying. And yet planes still flew overhead. Not in the usual patterns, not in the usual approaches, and not to the usual airports. The last time John had checked ticket prices for a flight out of Houston, they had all read N/A. Not that he had the money anyway, and credit cards had stopped working long ago.
This stretch of houses had signs littering their front yards. STAY AWAY. YOU ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED. WE WILL KILL YOU. THE DOG IS NOT FRIENDLY DESPITE ITS LOLLING TONGUE. Windows covered in particle board or blocked with taped-up junk mail. Doors barred with fence boards or metal bars. People watched too many zombie movies.
John didn’t understand people’s desire to be alone at a time like this. He could blame them, and he did blame them. There was a responsibility, that’s what it was. People avoided responsibility. No one had checked on John in almost two weeks, and when he knocked on the doors of his friends, no one answered. There was a responsibility. He felt its weight like a stomach full of stones.
The world was ending. No one really knew what that meant. John certainly didn’t. But he knew that he didn’t want to be alone. If the world was ending, he wanted a party. He wanted to go out dancing. Go out as in die. John wanted to hear people laugh. He wanted to bump up against other, friendly bodies. He’d accept even just the basic, unavoidable humanity of coughs and sneezes. There didn’t have to be any alcohol, either. No snacks. No chairs, even. Just other people, hopefully those he knew, but he would be okay with those he didn’t.
John stopped long enough for Leopard to yowl. The sound of another living thing made him feel less alone. But this sound was pure pain, so as soon as she started yowling, he walked, and it stopped.
*
It was Tuesday, the world was ending, and John’s cat was dying. The vet was open, which was a miracle. He hadn’t been sure. He had only hoped. The blinds were drawn on every window, but figures walked solemnly back and forth behind them.
The air carried the acrid sting of burnt fur. John did not knock on the glass. He didn’t try the handle. Leopard was yowling again. He stuck fingers through the wire door and petted whatever fur he could find, but she did not stop yowling.
One of the figures behind the blinds came up to the door and stood just as quiet and still as he was. Through a gap in the blinds he saw eyes, but without the skin around them to provide context, they were just eyes. Not sad eyes or questioning eyes or judgmental eyes. Just eyes. Just a witness.
John knocked on the door. He noticed his hand was a mess of blood-lined scratches. They did not hurt. In a few days they would fade.
The door cracked open.
“Can I help you?” Linda, the vet assistant, asked him. Her eyes were suspicious. She didn’t recognize John or she didn’t want to recognize him.
“My cat is dying.”
“We’ll take care of it.” Linda held out a latex gloved hand.
“Her.”
Linda’s eyes grew warm and liquid. Her voice softened. “We’ll take care of her.” She gently grabbed the pet carrier, her hand touching his and lingering for a brief moment.
John stepped back so she’d feel safe opening the door wide enough to pull the pet carrier inside. “Her name is Leopard,” he said.
But the door had already closed.
John sat on the concrete steps leading up to the vet’s door. He could still feel the touch of Leopard’s fur on his fingertips. As a child, he [John the Younger] dreamed of an empty world without responsibilities where he could do anything and everything he wanted. In that way, this world was a dream come true. He had no responsibilities. His ears ached with silence.
Andrew Kozma’s fiction appears in Apex, ergot., and Seize the Press, while his poems appear in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Contemporary Verse 2. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. You can find him on Bluesky at @andrewkozma.net and visit his website at www.andrewkozma.net.