Happy Doomsday

by David Sosnowski

knee-jerk Christianity was, after all, the Southern way.

If he didn’t know any better, he’d say he felt excited—as opposed to the feeling he’d been expecting, namely a Pavlovian urge to vomit.

“Higgs boson,” Marcus corrected.

He’d said the word came from the Greek eyron, which was a kind of minion that kept mankind in its place. The punishment doled out by these creatures was ironic to the brink of tragedy, using their victims’ proudest qualities to bring them down.

It was like Occam’s razor meets Murphy’s Law: faced with two equally likely outcomes, the universe was biased toward the most ironic one.

If Dev was immortal, he figured, he’d prefer to find out by not dying. No need to force the point.

But his privacy had become too precious, and he’d already lost his quota of precious things. Luckily, Dev had the firepower to make sure he didn’t have to lose anything else.

She wanted to stay away from food that came in cans because she’d heard they were lined with BPA, which she figured was bad because chemicals that hide behind initials usually are

Unlike the apocalypses of fiction, in this world, their enemies wouldn’t be other people; their enemies were nature and time.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the male of the species are not really social animals,” she said. “You’re all sociopaths. You play at being sociable to the extent it might help get you laid, but . . .”

“The primordial egg. That’s what there was before the big bang. It’s the thing that went bang.”

“So you want to make up a whole new religion just so a kid will stop asking questions,” Lucy said. Dev nodded. “That’s what religion was for, wasn’t it? That, and tax exemptions.”