What Survives.

I should have known… the end of the world wouldn’t actually stop anything. Not the spinning. Not the walking. Not me.

I was so confident that I had witnessed the end of the world. I had not; I had witnessed the end of civilization and most forms of life. But surprise, the world kept turning, and somehow I’m still walking.

I don’t understand it, but somehow I’m starting to feel better.

I shouldn’t.

A flurry of wind just carried away the last few hairs still attached to my scalp.

Yesterday, my arm finished detaching itself and landed beside a pothole in the road. It had been hanging by a few tendons since I had, quite literally, been blasted into this new reality. Now it’s just another trail marker on this stretch I’m calling “Dead End.”

But I do feel better…

“I’ve left the worst of me behind.” LOL! And I am, I’m actually laughing out loud as I plod down this roadway.

When was the last time I actually laughed? What had stopped me?

It feels so good to laugh. Damn good medicine.

Having just survived the apocalypse and the obligatory stages of grief that follow something like that, I’ve found myself on the other side of acceptance, laughing out loud for all the times I had typed it and never actually meant it.

I was sad to lose that arm. It was my favorite. I am, or was, right-handed. I sat there for a moment, pondering a question I had never considered: when is part of your body no longer part of your body?

I contemplated picking it up and carrying it along with me until my mind replayed that scene from Stephen King's "It" where the clown waved a severed arm to one of his victims, and decided that grotesque as I now was: I was not a clown!

I couldn’t just leave it there. It was, had been, a part of me. So I decided to leave with it another part of me that had also died.

My phone.

I tried placing it into the rigid fingers that had once been so good at texting, scrolling, and swiping. My new dominant hand lacked finesse, and the old one seemed to mock me with a final act of defiance, refusing to unclench.

I should have known it wouldn’t let go.

Finally, I slammed the phone down on the pavement.

Then I smashed it under my heel.

And again.

For good measure.

Looking back, I think that was the moment I started to feel better. I had carried that phone in the hope that it would light up and tell me everything was fine, that this had been a test, a simulation, a prank. That even my severed arm was just an actor, ready to reattach itself, laughing along with the rest of us.

I should have known better.

Leaving them like fallen lovers in death’s embrace, that was the moment I accepted what had happened and the part, however small, I had played in it.

My response?

Unbridled, hysterical laughter.

What a terrifying sight I must be! A howling one armed creature. Gollum comes to mind, emerging from Mount Doom, except: It's a crater, not a mountain. And I had left my precious behind, not because I had heroically found the will to cast it away, it had just stopped being precious.

I should have known magic doesn’t survive the end of the world.

That’s what I’ll miss the most. The magic that had powered my mundane life. I never understood electricity, or radio waves. 5G might as well have been wizardry, and I wasted it on epic fails, funny cats, and celebrity drama.

The road finally ended. Or maybe I lost it. It’s so dark now it’s hard to tell night from day, let alone where I’m going.

How long have I been walking?

It’s the strangest thing, but I am definitely feeling better. Not just my morale. I was certain I was a goner, yet my irradiated body seems to be finding new strength. There’s a rhythm to the way I move now… something primal.

The stump where my arm had been doesn’t hurt.

It should feel worse.

It doesn’t.

It tingles, like the strange shock you get when you hit your elbow. Except I don’t have that elbow. Or that arm.

And my sense of smell has changed. Everything has a scent now. Everything wants to introduce itself: “hello I’m dirt” “I’m ash” “and I’m flesh”

Now I’m hungry. Really hungry!

Am I going to have to sneak, swim, and dig for something raw and wriggling? Gollum.

Yeah. That tracks.

Disgusting.

…but also delicious?

What in the hell is happening to me?

Before all this, I had been a vegan. I’d spend hours planning my meals for the week. Researching recipes, products, and producers. Nothing got past me. My food was pure, and therefore I had been pure. I’d spent just as much time staging it for photos, presenting it as proof that not only was I doing my part, I was doing it with style.

I should have known purity was a luxury.

There doesn’t seem to be many plants left. Definitely nothing edible. What remains is black and withered.

The world had been my cornucopia.

This is another part of me that is dying: my self-affirmed superiority.

What a laugh.

I’m an irradiated, mutilated, mutating, former vegan, driven to survive as the last representation of man, the apex predator. Well… destroying all other life was one way to guarantee your continued spot at the top of the food chain.

I should have known nature would find a way. We fought our way to the top, then mistook our height for separation. Yet here I am, one part of a whole new system.

This wasteland doesn’t care what I do to survive. It won’t leave a like or a comment on my next meal.

But it may offer a few suggestions.

There is, after all, a way to reunite my arm with my body.

If only I could remember where I left it.

I should have known I’d want it back.

Maybe my new nose will tell me.