The sky pressed down from above, a heavy blue palm like the hand of God. The sun was still there, its light weak and timorous, but it was in flight. It fled across the fabric of the sky; I watched it go. The shadows pooled and formed and chased each other across our lawn like in a time-lapse photograph. No one noticed except for me, and I kept silent.

The day the world ended, my parents were arguing.

It was my brother's twelfth birthday and we were half-heartedly cleaning up the backyard after his party. There wasn't much to do. Only two people had come. My mother had bought enough chips and soda to fortify an army, had baked brownies and ordered a dozen pizzas. She imagined a swarm of locusts descending on our house, a legion of boys of which Sean would be the unquestioned general. My brother was fat and unpopular; in her mind she made him otherwise with the ease of a writer striking out an offending line of prose.

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