“Did you hear the news?”

Simone slowly pried her eyes away from the cans she was scanning. She had already greeted the woman, but it had been a mindless greeting, not really seeing her at all. Now she looked and noticed that the woman had gray teeth and wet hair pulled back into a bun. Her purple Grateful Dead t-shirt had dancing bears: blue, green, yellow, orange, pink.

Beep. Beep. Beep. 

“Sorry?” Simone asked as she scanned. Her voice was hoarse, her throat scratchy. Something in the air of AmeriCan Dream triggered her allergies.

“The news,” the woman said again, holding up her forearm and showing the screen on her Intra-Dermal Electronic Augmentation, or IDEA, as most people called the device for short.

“Sorry, no,” Simone said. “I’ve been working.” She held up her own forearm, which was just pale white skin. “I can’t get anything when I’m at work.”                                                                                                                                        

The woman sighed. “I guess they think that’s good for you, eh?”

“Something like that,” Simone said.

“Anyways,” the woman said. “President Stone said the earth will be done in ten years. Won’t support life after that.”

It was such a heavy statement, the president finally admitting something that scientists had been talking about for decades.

All Simone could say was “Oh.” 

Her register started dinging, something that always happened when she stopped scanning. She looked down. Her hands were suspended in mid air, chalky white and bruised from the cans pinching her fingers. Simone started scanning again. 

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Yep, people been saying it for years, but now the government finally come out and admitted it.” 

Simone kept her mouth closed and kept scanning. Cans of strawberries, green beans, beef, and pork passed from one hand to the next. The woman started putting the cans in her reusable bags. Simone liked when people helped bag. She hated when customers stared at her and waited for her to finish scanning, leaving the bagging to only her.

“You okay, Sweetie?” the woman asked as she loaded a bag into her cart. “I shouldn’t have said something to you now, not while you’re at work anyways. You would’ve found out soon enough.”

“It’s fine,” Simone managed to say. She scanned the last can, a bright orange melon on the label, and started to help the woman with bagging.

“Thanks,” the woman said when Simone handed her a bag of cans. “I feel bad for you young folks.” She paid and pushed her cart away.

Simone turned toward the next person in line, a man with a long face and milky eyes. “Welcome to AmeriCan Dream,” she said. “How are you today?”

The man barely looked at her and didn’t say a word.

Later, while taking her fifteen minute break, Simone turned on her IDEA, but there was nothing about the world ending. Simone and her coworkers didn’t have access to much outside news while working at the AmeriCan Dream, an attempt to keep them engaged while they scanned food that had been harvested and packaged at least a year ago. But she was able to see several messages from her mom.

Honey u ok? I know ur at work. Let me know when you get this.

Simone sighed. Of course she wasn’t okay—hadn’t ever been okay—but she didn’t have to tell her mom that. 

Im fine. Just busy. C u tonight.

She ate her canned peaches, something she was told people had always canned. It was a perk of the job: free food on your breaks. The sticky juice dripped down her chin and onto her navy vest.

She didn’t know if it was harder or easier to be born into a dying world, it just was. Being born into a world with no future was the only thing Simone knew. Some in her generation had stretched their wings and embraced their own impermanence, soaking up what was left of the earth as best they could. For Simone, everything had felt pointless, which was how she had ended up at the government-run grocery store that employed young directionless people such as herself. She was nineteen, and the job gave her enough money and subsidized cans to help her take care of her mom and afford a small car. Everything sold in AmeriCan Dream was canned. After a series of famines that her mom had survived as a young girl, the government had started a massive canning effort, creating grocery stores where Americans could shop for “healthy and reliable food.” The customers were nameless and forgettable, her coworkers shiftless young adults just like her. 

The news wasn’t a surprise, but something about it felt final. No scientist, no politician, no amount of recycling could prevent the end of the world now. Simone had always known this, but, still, there had been that glimmer of hope, that speck of an idea that someone, somewhere, would figure out how to save them all.

The rich might be saved. There were those who had plans to leave Earth, those who had real estate underground where colonies had been developed to survive until the earth was hospitable again. But most of them would die—maybe even those who had the means to escape. They were the last of humanity. 

Simone’s alarm rang, her forearm turning red. Her fifteen minutes were up. She kept her head down as she walked back to her register.

“Hello, welcome to AmeriCan Dream. How are you?”

“How are you today?”

“Hi.”

“Welcome.”

Simone scanned can after can, greeted customer after customer, packed bag after bag. She could do this job in her sleep, but it still felt so hard to her. The standing, the empty conversations, the cans that never stopped coming. It was always the same, and it never felt any easier.

She would never have children, or if she did, they would never see adulthood. Simone knew that she would be alone until the earth grew too hot, too formidable for her to live any longer. Would she simply overheat and die? Would she starve? Would she die in a flood or fire, hurricane or earthquake? Her hands shook as she scanned.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Did she even have ten years left? Or was that the point in time when they would definitely all be gone?

Suddenly, Simone wanted to see the ocean. She knew it was filled with garbage, but she still wanted to see it. There were pictures of her at the ocean as a baby, but Simone didn’t remember it. Even back then the beach had been littered with trash, the water a murky brown. It wasn’t long after those pictures were taken that her mom had fallen ill, and the ocean became out of reach. Her mom became mostly bedbound and it was just too hard to travel. Simone had learned early on how to feed herself, how to keep track of her homework, how to give her mother her medication, just so they could stay together. From a young age, Simone had needed to figure things out on her own.

Her mom told Simone that her eyes were the same blue as the ocean. Neither of them had ever seen water that clean, but they had both seen pictures of an earth so blue it stood out in the darkness of space. Some nights, Simone found herself staring in the mirror, losing herself in her own eyes, her own ocean.                                                                                                                             

“You okay?” she heard from behind her. There had been a lull in customers, and Simone turned around to see Echo, her manager. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Simone said with a smile.

Echo looked at her, disbelief in her eyes. She couldn’t be much older than Simone, with black hair, honey brown skin, and hazel eyes that reminded Simone of the pictures she’d seen of forests from long ago.

There were three to five of them who worked the registers at the same time. There was one automated checkout lane, but it broke down a lot and was usually out of order. Things were less automated than they used to be, a large back-to-work effort having been implemented long before Simone was born. Humans were replacing the machines so they had a place to go, a “sense of responsibility and pride.” Echo managed this location of AmeriCan Dream, a job that she seemed proud of, but Simone imagined she was just very good at pretending she cared.

“It’s okay, if you’re not okay,” Echo said, her voice warm. “I’m sure you heard the news by now.”

Simone shrugged. “Doesn’t really feel like news.”

Echo sighed. “Yeah, but, still, there’s something about it being official.”

“Yeah.”

A woman with short brown hair and a baby stepped into her line and started loading cans on her belt.

“How ‘bout after this you take your lunch?” Echo said gently.

“Sounds good,” Simone said. She turned off her register’s light that signaled she was closed while the woman continued to unload more cans. 

“How are you today?” Simone said, flashing her fake smile, fake ogling at the baby.

“Oh, you know,” the woman said, her eyes red and watery. 

Simone nodded, both she and the woman falling silent. The baby looked at her with dark blue eyes. Her hair was a soft, wispy blonde, and her pink onesie was stained at the collar. Simone had sometimes let herself picture a daughter years from now with the same wispy hair, same blue eyes. She supposed the longing for a child was hardwired, buried deep inside of her from centuries of wanting life to move forward. She scanned and scanned and tried not to make eye contact with the baby. The staring was unsettling.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Simone finished scanning and bagging the cans before clocking out for her lunch. Today there was boiled beef and green beans in the break room, and once she opened the cans and grabbed a fork, she went outside to the picnic tables. The sun was bright, the air hot and sticky. She had heard that February used to have snow.

She sat down. Behind her, a picture of a red, white, and blue can with large teeth and bulging eyes winked at her. AmeriCan Dream’s logo was plastered over everything—outside the store, on her polo shirt, her vest, her register. She kept her back to the picture and looked at her car in the parking lot instead. She knew the car still had a full charge, could get her to the ocean if she wanted it to.

Suddenly, she craved a cigarette even though they were illegal and she’d never had one before. Lots of things were illegal that didn’t used to be: cigarettes, lead pipes, artificial food coloring, gasoline cars. The smoking ban was a Health and Safety Administration initiative, but what was the point anymore when everything around them was dying?

Before she could think or talk herself out of it, Simone stood, cans of beef and green beans left open on the picnic table, fork still standing up inside the mashed beef. Fuck AmeriCan Dream and the dying earth. She was going to the ocean.

She walked across the parking lot to her car, the pavement radiating the heat of the day. She unlocked the door and wiped sweat from her brow as she started the car. Without looking back, she left everything behind. 

As she drove, her IDEA started registering with news alerts. She was far enough from the store for the headlines to reach her:

U.S. Government Admits the End is Near

Ten Years Left

President Stone Says We Have Run Out of Time 

The Earth is Dead

There were more messages from her mom. She ignored them and typed the name of the closest beach into her car and silenced all incoming messages. Soon, she was out of the parking lot and on the highway. She would message her mom later when her shift was supposed to end. She wondered if she would be fired, wondered what Echo would think. Simone was a reliable employee. She had never done something like this before. She suspected Echo wouldn’t fire her, but even if she lost her job, did it even matter?

As she drove, the anger seeped in. Anger at those who never did anything. Anger at the generations before her who had lived and died and ruined everything for those that came after them. She was their daughter, their granddaughter, their great-granddaughter. It didn’t matter if their cars were electric or they recycled or composted, that was never going to be enough to fix things. But those people didn’t care, not really. The earth had been theirs to use and destroy slowly enough that it wouldn’t affect them. They got to go to the ocean and eat fresh produce and have babies. They got to die because of old age or some disease or a bad choice, not because the world was ending.

She passed by towns on the highway, but she didn’t really see them at all. Her shift ended, and time kept stretching on and on. She knew her mom must be worried by now and wondered if Echo was mad at her, but with her IDEA only programmed to tell her when to turn left or right, her thoughts were all hers. 

When the ocean came into view, Simone held her breath. There was still something beautiful about the dark, grayish-brown mass of sludge: the expanse, not being able to see the other side. This was still the ocean, still the origin of all life. The tides were still connected to the moon. She should’ve picked her mom up, she thought to herself. She was selfish for keeping this moment to herself.

Simone got out of the car and walked toward the beach. There were still mansions along the water, people who still wanted a piece of the ocean for themselves. The beach was littered with needles and tampon applicators and other plastic, but Simone slipped off her socks and sneakers anyway. She found a slice of beach that was relatively clear of debris and buried her feet in the rough and gritty sand. She closed her eyes. The sun was warm on her face, and the sound of the crashing waves filled her ears. For a moment, she was back in time—fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago—when the sand was white, and the water was blue like her eyes. People brought towels to the beach back then, laid out in the sand all day. There were buckets for sandcastles and surfboards for catching waves. Simone had read about it all in books.

Her AmeriCan Dream uniform was hot. She hiked up her khakis and took off her vest, but this didn’t help cool her down. People didn’t swim in the ocean anymore, but what did it matter now? Simone slid off her pants, then her shirt, unclasped her bra, and removed her underwear. She would get sunburned, but she didn’t care. She would cut her feet on all of the garbage but she didn’t care. She would expose herself to all kinds of chemicals, maybe even drown, but she didn’t care. She ran toward the water, leaping over needles and trash, her fair skin luminescent in the sunlight. 

The water was warm, a putrid smell filling her nostrils. It smelled like the pickled eggs they sold at AmeriCan Dream, like the open cans of fish in the break room after sitting out too long. It was sour and salty, the water brown and thick. Each wave made her wince but she was in the water, in the ocean. Simone tried not to breathe through her nose.

She waded deeper and soon she was drifting, floating with the waves, careful not to get any water in her mouth. She closed her eyes and was once again someone from another time, another era, another life just swimming. Maybe she should let herself be carried out to sea.

The smell eventually got to her and she knew she had to get out of the water. She made her way back to shore, her arms wading through plastic, her legs kicking unknown objects underwater. Once out, she put her clothes back on, sand and garbage clinging to her everywhere. Her hair was oily and smelled like the water. 

She messaged her mom that she was okay, ignored the messages from Echo, and just sat on the beach. The sun was setting, leaving behind a bright orange sky. Simone had never seen anything so beautiful before.

They were their own asteroid. They had done this to themselves. She wondered if the sun would miss them, wondered if the earth would be lonely without them. But the earth had said goodbye to so many before: the early single-celled organisms, the dinosaurs, the woolly mammoths, the elephants. Humans were just a blip in the long history of Earth, and they would disappear silently just like all of the others. The sun and earth had seen this before, would still do their interconnected space dance that would last until the earth was swallowed by flames. There would be no one to remember her.

She had been born into a dying world. It was something she had always known. But she had thought that maybe they would fix it, somehow find a way to keep going. Before today there had been a flicker of hope.

There would be no more daughters or sons or mothers or fathers. She was among the last of them. The little girl at the AmeriCan Dream would be one of the last to toddle through this world. Would she ever see the ocean? It had taken Simone this long and the little girl would never reach Simone’s age. They were the end.

If only Simone could stop longing for the ocean to be blue again. If only she could stop longing for some future where she would take her daughter with wispy blonde hair to the beach. They would splash in the cold waves, sunsets just like this one happening more times than they could count. She had been born into a dying world, but she still felt so alive. If only the orange and pink streaks that now filled the sky didn’t make her feel so very connected to the trees that still tried to grow, the flowers that still sometimes bloomed, and the stars that still shone at night; faraway glimmers that could not save them.