The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

I was born from an apocalypse and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.

By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place.

Another episode of the present tense, and I can’t stop thinking about the time line where the asteroid misses, Earth ruled eternally by the car-hearted and walnut-brained. Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging on the butterfly effects of ashes, ashes;

Sixty-six million years after the last great extinction, six to eight business days before the next one, I whispered Speak to a fucking agent into the hold music to trigger the system into connecting me with a “real person.”

I avoided coughing in public, though it was too late. I applied for a BIPOC farming intensive, though it was too late for the earth to yield anything but more corpses. New species of horror sequence were already evolving: election bot; cluster bio-bomb; driverless wife.

The good news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is also the bad news.

Try not to time travel, says the voice in my meditation app, as I fast-forward to everything I haven’t yet remembered to be afraid of—

I sit on the train toward Chicago and mourn the avocado softening in my kitchen. This, too, is practice, avocado being the smallest unit of grief.

This sense of impending catastrophe is an illusion, however, because the trauma never quite arrives. It never arrives because it has already happened. —Grace M. Cho

Depending on when and through which education system you learned about so-called world history, you may understand the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to represent two things: one, the end of World War II, and two, the end of the world itself—by which I mean not only the destruction of two full cities with their many thousands of individual worlds within them,

you might consider whether the United States would have done this to a blonde country, or consider the way a horror like that might burrow into the stuff of a people, not just its genes, but its jokes, the shapes of its crosswalks, the lines of its art.

as the terrible line appears—not drawn by anything like righteousness, or grim duty, or God, or even causation, really; just the flat time signature of sequence; terrible, indifferent sequence,

Somewhere in a world that didn’t quite end, a woman like me is foraging for that which failed to kill her.

Every day of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

Once upon a time, the people whose nightmares I inherited were safe; then, they weren’t. Hence, they were never safe.

I’ve been, undoubtedly, an American and done practically nothing to stop it.

Scrambled by need, I say, I want to give you my bones, all my language rendered useless at your feet. I’m useless, here, too—I thrust my uselessness at you. I say and say it: I want to be scraped across the bed like a salt-slick meal. I want to be torn from my frame, steamed clean. I want to be nothing, said the man in the story before he nearly got his wish, wrecked and reddened in the alley—and it’s like catching my face in a car window, dusk-addled negative mouthing along to my neediest self. I want to be nothing, as you push your knuckles into my mouth. I want to be nothing, a wordless evening opening around you. I want no memory before or after, just this—my hips lifting off the mattress, cracked and spilling, wingless, my certain brain spread across time’s horror-lines, so I can lift each memory from its sour bath, hold it up to the lamp in your mouth.

the as-yet- unbuilt museum of what we had to survive to make paradise from its ruins.