The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.

I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.

This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.