The Cabin at the End of the World

by Paul Tremblay

Within the opened side panel is his handgun safe. Less than a year old and not much bigger than an eight-hundred-page hardcover book, it’s a the-future-is-now, aluminum alloy silver gadget with a sleek, edgeless design. Eric joked that it looked like a panini maker and asked if it could make him a tuna melt.

The cabin, even with the benefit of the morning’s wholesome sunlight, appears worn, tired, and bereft.

The cabin is now a haunted

house, baptized by yesterday’s violence, and its passive accumulation of similarly vicious and desperate acts is as inevitable as dust gathering on the windowsills.

She exaggeratedly opens her hands and the knives clatter against the hardwood floor.

No matter how bleak or dire, end-of-the-world scenarios appeal to us because we take meaning from the end. Aside from the obvious and well-discussed idea that our narcissism is served when imagining we, out of all the billions who perish, might survive, Andrew has argued there’s also undeniable allure to witnessing the beginning of the end and perishing along with everyone and everything else. He has impishly said to a classroom, to the scowl of more than a few students, “Within the kernel of end-times awe and ecstasy is the seed of all organized religions.” Of

“Think about the psychological stress and state they put us in. They break in, terrorize us, tie us up, and you seriously injure your head. Then they tell us pseudo-Christian-biblical-end-of-times vagaries knowing that at

any moment they can turn on the news and in our fried and frazzled brains something will very likely stick.”