The world will end on a Monday evening.

It isn’t entirely unexpected, for me. Bad things usually happen on Mondays. School, work, spilt coffee, messy break-ups - Mondays attract bad events. It’s a universal thing.

My parents broke up on a Monday. They didn’t do it on a Friday like decent people would’ve, to give me a weekend to cry and binge on Oreos. Nope. Not my parents, bless their cruel hearts.

On the day they signed the divorce papers, fourteen-year-old me remained very quiet and pretended nothing was happening. Like it was just another awful Monday. Six years later, I once again pretend everything is fine as I walk alone on the streets. 

Five things await me at eleven-forty tonight: my homework, YouTube, my couch, my cat, and Oreos. Certainly not the apocalypse.

I find it weirdly funny that us humans have predicted our coming doom down to the very hour, and yet there is nothing we can do to stop it. 

“One day,” I say aloud, “aliens will arrive and see nothing but ashes floating in space.” 

I laugh to myself, quiet and ugly. 

I don’t bother checking my phone or complaining to the air or even crying. The street is empty. No one is around to hear what I want to say. 

Instead, I tip my head back and stare up, up, up. 

The sky has been burning for a long time now. Orange. Red. Yellow. At first it was just a small dot in the sky, easily hidden by clouds and rain. That was how it always was. But then the sun got bigger, and bigger, and the blue shrank, and shrank, until all we can see now when we look up is a sky on fire. 

It started nearly half a year ago. I remember the exact day and what I was doing and how I thought nothing of it. Just a mirage. Just my imagination. Everyone else thought the same, nobody bothered to question it, why the sun was suddenly a half-inch bigger than we remembered. Until it got too big and too hot and we realized that, oh god, we were going to die.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how much things can change in six months. 

My fifth grade science teacher was wrong. The world won’t end in four billion years. It’s ending today. 

The sun is getting closer, the sky is on fire, and we’re going to burn with it.

It’s January now. A Monday. I don’t wear a scarf or the woolen gloves my grandmother sent me last Christmas. I have on a hoodie and sweatpants, and goggles and a breathing mask and the sunblock that they’ve been giving out since the world got so hot it started feeling like my skin would slither off and bury itself into the earth. 

It’s probably cooler down there.

We wore full-body suits, before, ones that we lined up for hours to snatch. They sold for thousands. I hit a guy in the face to get one of the last ones in the store. Now, few people bother. Nothing can block out the heat of the sun completely, and the suits only made us feel like we would suffocate. Better to go with the new sunblock. 

There’s nothing we can do to stop the burn of the sun. 

Nothing.

The park is quiet when I get there. Most people are probably home, hugging their families or doing whatever it is that normal people do on their last day of existence.

A boy a few years younger than me is sitting on the bench by the playground. He slides to make room for me. I sit. 

“Nice goggles,” I say. Mine are plain and unmarked. The sides of his are plastered with superhero stickers. “Team Iron Man?”

The boy nods.

“Are you a high schooler?” There’s nothing else I can think of to say. 

“Who the hell cares about school these days?” he mutters, scratching his neck. “Especially today.”

“You saw the news, then?”

”The news is saying crap,” he says. “Everyone with a brain already knew this was coming. All the news stations denied everything until literally the final day. Today.” He kicks a pebble angrily. I watch it skip a few steps before rolling to a sad stop. “Made an announcement and a prediction and started a countdown and everything.”

“The news is saying crap,” I agree. 

It gets him talking. He goes on, bitter and passionate as only teenagers can be, about everything. Politics. The end of the world. Why Team Cap sucks. His friends. His dead dog. His family, who are on the other side of the dried-up ocean. 

“That’s why I’m here and not home like everyone else,” he concludes. He turns to me. “How ‘bout you?”

“My parents and I aren’t on speaking terms,” I say, crinkling my eyes at him even though my goggles and breathing apparatus ruin the expression. “No siblings.” Or many friends, for that matter.

We sit in silence for a while, the boy’s rage simmering down to quiet embers.

It hits me then, that the world is ending, and I start to cry.

The original plan was to sit at the park and laze around like I usually do after work, then go home to my homework, YouTube, my couch, my cat, and Oreos. I give up on that and sob.

The boy hugs me awkwardly. Whatever instincts to flee he might have usually had with crying girls are gone in the face of his last day on Earth. 

“What’s your name?” he asks me.

“It’s the apocalypse,” I hiccup. “Who cares, kid?” 

“Okay,” he says, part-confused and part-accepting. “Then I won’t tell you mine, either.”

“I don’t want to die,” I bawl. 

“Me neither,” says the boy.

“Like, you’re so calm,” I say. “Why are you so calm? You were pretty much ranting five minutes earlier.”

The boy only shrugs. 

“We’re probably going to be baked to death, you know,” I murmur pathetically. “It’s gonna hurt.” 

It’s definitely going to hurt. Even more than it already does. 

My skin twinges constantly with pain that we’ve all learned to ignore. Magical science-y sunblock can’t protect you from everything.

“It’s gonna hurt,” I repeat.

“Well, what are you gonna do about it?” the boy asks matter-of-factly.

There’s nothing you can do, he doesn’t say.

I stand, already having stopped crying. Part of it is dehydration and part of it is because I’m already sick of the tears sticking to my goggles and blocking my sight.

“I,” I declare, “am gonna jump off a building.”

The boy stares at me. Then he thinks it over and grins. “Good idea.”

We pick one randomly, a hotel I wouldn’t be able to afford in a million years. If the world weren't ending, maybe I’d be a little more self-conscious about casually walking in. As it is, there’s nobody in the lobby when we push through the fancy rotating glass doorway. The receptionist has left. Security is nowhere to be seen. 

The boy, my friend, stares in awe at the finery around us. The ceiling is painted with cherubs and half-naked people, like something straight from the Renaissance. There’s a useless-looking marble fountain in the middle of the lobby that probably cost more than my entire apartment building. 

“Cool,” the boy comments.

We steal a key card from the front desk and take the elevator up to the open roof. The boy is silent, thinking about things he doesn’t tell me. 

“You’re a brave kid,” I say as we step out into the open air. It’s hotter up here, but my skin is already so cracked and burnt and numb beneath the sunblock, it doesn’t make a difference. “You know that?”

I want to cry again, but he only nods, calmly accepting our fates, so I don’t. 

Brave. That’s the only word that seems to fit him.

We climb over the fence that separates us from the forty-story drop. It makes me queasy, standing on the edge of the roof, clinging to a flimsy piece of metal and staring down at death. But upwards is death, too, so I look down.

I examine the street below us. There are a few cars, small and insignificant like colorful ants. They’re abandoned in the middle of the road. It’s as if the people driving them gave up abruptly on navigating their way home and walked out, leaving their vehicles behind. 

The wind is howling, biting at my cheeks. I don’t feel anything other than the forever-present burn of the sun. 

“Are we really gonna do this?” the boy asks in a voice that’s small in the anguished cries of the wind. I turn my head and see the first signs of trepidation on his face.

There’s acne there, one particularly embarrassing pimple in the center of his forehead. His dark hair is messy and unbrushed. He looks at me with wide, young eyes.

“You ever burn yourself before?” I ask him, and don’t wait for an answer. “I have. On the stove, once, and every day for the past six months.”

It’s still there, even after you learn to ignore it enough to function normally. People have killed themselves because of the burn. Some in the first few weeks. Today is a Monday, the last day, and we will be doing the same.

I just want the burn to stop. I can’t bring myself to say it, my hands hurting from gripping the heated metal fence so tightly, my skin burning so much, so much, it hurts so much. The boy is brave, and for some reason, I can’t bring myself to say the words in front of him.

He gets it, though. “Me, too,” he says quietly. “I want it to stop hurting, too.”

I squint down at the drop one more time. The heavy glare of the world above me makes my eyes sting with unshed tears. The boy exhales and counts clearly, “One, two, three.”

We let go. 

When I fall, I see the sky. Orange. Red. Yellow. So big and so vast, stretching out forever and ever, an endless sea of fire. It seems to whisper down at me as it gets farther away, asking, why, why, don’t you want to touch the sky?

For once, I’m glad that my goggles are clear and transparent, that I can see the burning world above me. I’m not afraid of the sky anymore. 

I turn my head, and there is no more fear on the boy’s face as he whoops, arms and legs spread out like a shooting star. 

Brave kid, I think.

We fall, and there is no one to witness us hit the concrete. 

I die with a stranger. Hours later, at eleven-forty in the evening, everyone else burns to death.