The Last Two Hours Flash Fiction Don’t ask why but the world is ending. My parents and I said our goodbyes, and they asked me where I was going. “[Name],” I said, his name registering with them both. They'd always known I loved him. I drove. The sky had gone the color of a bruise, purple black bleeding into orange, like something enormous was pressing down on the horizon. The radio was static now, every station gone quiet or screaming the same warning until even that cut out. The streets were chaos, cars abandoned at angles, doors flung open, engines still running like their owners had given up mid thought. I swerved around a stalled minivan, clipped a trash can, didn't stop. People ran in every direction and no direction; some didn't run at all, just stood in the road, looking up. I almost killed myself twice. Once when a truck blew a red light and missed me by inches. Once when I looked up and the sky rippled wrong, the road bending for one long heartbeat before I wrenched it straight again. The barricades came up fast, orange sawhorses, flashing lights, nobody left to man them. I left the car running in the street, door hanging open, and I ran. I hit the first barricade at a sprint and went over more than through it. The second I climbed, fingers scrabbling, and fell hard on the other side, then kept moving, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant realizing how little time was left. His street. I knew it before I could read the sign, the slant of his porch light, the tree that always dropped its leaves too early. I ran up the walkway with my chest on fire, my hand already raised to knock before I'd reached the door. He answered before I finished. Tears in his eyes, like some part of him already knew I'd come. The world went dark, but quietly, peacefully. Our embrace the last thing to happen in billions of years of life.