See, I had brought my dog with me to his house—I always do, or I get to worrying. He said it was unprofessional, leaving her in the basement with his wife and kids living there. But my dog is damn-near the closest thing I’ve got to a pure, loving friendship. She looks up to me as a father and caretaker, and because she’s just a dog, she doesn’t understand the movement of the planets or any of that. And I’m prone to worry anyway.

Anyway, we go out to lunch, and I leave my dog in his home while they’re gone. Their daughter has this play after school or something, I don’t know. But at a certain point, I’m like, okay, I want to go back and get my dog because I love her and because she doesn’t understand the movement of planets or any of that, and I’m worried that she’s worried I’m not coming back.

And this guy, nice as he was before, suddenly made it all business-like.

But, like I said, I’m only flesh and blood, and seeing my dog at that moment was worth sacrificing the $120 to me, because I was worried she was worried, you see. And the sex wasn’t that bad. But I had to drink something first.

Then we were in a store and an alarm was sounding. Why was I here? Maybe treats for that puppy, I don’t know, who can say? But the alarm was loud, and I didn’t like the sound of it, since there had been shootings lately.

So I take off across the street.

The cool thing about this store I stumbled into was that it had a big, open, garage-like door in front of the building. And they kept it open so you could see very clearly across the street, and it was on a hill so you could sort of see over the city a bit, too, which I thought was just really lovely—especially because I was still so interested in why that alarm was going off.

The man from the night before said something I thought was interesting, then. Like, why would you bring your dog in the first place if it was going to be like this? I’m still thinking of that. But I’m only flesh and blood and a mind and a mind and a mind.

And then, looking up, there was this smokestack rising from the building. And I thought, oh no, maybe this isn’t a shooting but a fire. And the woman at the register was talking to me, and I wasn’t really listening because I was so interested in everything happening.

The weight of it hit me.

There was smoke coming from behind the outlet mall, too. Not directly behind-like, all the way across the planet, behind-like. And it was sudden, there was a mushroom cloud, and a second later, the mushroom cloud was here.

And, surviving that, I saw the TV flash to an emergency report about volcanoes erupting.

And I saw lava at the base of the city from my place in line.

And I thought deeply about my dog, then. Because I loved her and she don’t understand the turning of planets, and I’m only flesh and blood, and I was worried she was worried.

I was a mind in a black vacuum looking back at Earth and I was speeding away from it at a million miles an hour and everything went black and I saw nothing until there was a flash of pure white light and the darkness was filled with things I didn’t recognize and I realized I was dying and this was death and I was pretty scared.