The end of the world was scheduled for 7:15.

It wasn’t a surprise, we knew it was coming. There simply just wasn’t anything we could do about it.

The news played a countdown, but I had the radio on instead. It was playing old timey tunes, and I was fixing up my lawnmower. It was jammed, again, like always. The rain is so steady up in Northern California that the grass never stops growing. If you let it grow long enough, it jams up even the most horse-powered of mowers, and unjamming it becomes a continuous activity. Mow a little bit, trying the shave slices thin enough on one side to not jam up, you jam anyway, and then you stop mowing so you can fix the mower, which allows the grass to continue growing…and the cycle continues.

Did you know that if you put a mouse into a glass container filled with water, it will scramble and scramble to try and get out, crawling desperately against the glass, keeping it’s above water, fighting and fighting, sometimes for hours…until eventually, when it realizes that there is nothing it can possibly do to escape, it will stop. It will stop fighting to escape, and it will surrender to what it knows is a hopeless situation. Scientists say that there’s something in the brain they can measure, some hormone or gene, that determines how long a mouse will fight to survive – some fight longer than others – but in the end, they all give up.

Everyone thinks that when the end of the world is scheduled, there will be mayhem in the streets, chaos, running, and screaming. That’s not what happened. Everything went quiet.

I stopped what I was doing to the lawnmower to listen to the silence. The wind was rustling the grass, and the crickets were starting to wake up in the twilight. They couldn’t hear the news. They didn’t know the end was coming.

I needed oil for the crankshaft, and so I went down into the basement. I could hear my wife moving about up above me as I fumbled for the single light we had down there. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, talking on the phone, cleaning. I knew she wasn’t crying; she’d have done that with me. She always did that with me. The light didn’t turn on, which was nothing new. I’m pretty sure I’d forgotten to change it out the last time I came down here.

I fumbled around through boxes in the dark, searching for the cardboard palette of two-in-one I knew I’d stashed somewhere. It was so easy to get lost down there in the darkness, moving around by feel alone, toes stubbing on tool boxes and fingers running along old wooden shelves.

I realized I could no longer hear my radio coming from my work shed, nor could I hear any movement above me, and then I realized I wasn’t sure how long I’d been down there in the dark. My chest tightened, and I stopped breathing. I didn’t know how much time was left on the countdown. What if it was right about to happen? I didn’t want it to happen with me down in the darkness. I wanted to see it.

They said it would appear as a red line in the sky, moving what would seem slowly at first from the bottom of the horizon. It would get closer and closer, growing and stretching, and then it would seem to flash by and everything would be on fire. A fire so hot, they said, that no one would feel any pain, or ever see the fire, but down in the darkness I saw it. I saw my house on fire with my wife inside, I saw my field on fire and the hills beyond it on fire too. Everything was orange and red, roaring and twisted.

I ran up the steps from the basement a little too fast and banged my head, which brought my wife out from the back of the house. She looked me in the eyes with both hands on my cheeks and I told her I was okay, but she shook her head and hugged me anyway.

The radio stopped playing its old timey music. They said that would happen close to the end.

It was 7:12.

We looked up and saw the red line in the sky. I’d pictured it solid and straight, like taking a red marker across a map…but in real life, it was messy. I squinted and saw tiny tendrils and sparks, and parts of the line snapped forward or behind other parts, and streamers trailed from the back edge. It glowed, too, in the blues and violets of the half-dark sky. The sun was darkening quickly now. That was also something they said would happen. It was beautiful.

The red line grew as it got closer, the optics of the sky stretching it. I held my wife. I didn’t look away.

The world flashed in bright white as it rushed overhead with a sudden roar. It sounded like a thunderclap.

I blinked in the brilliance, and slowly my eyes adjusted. I looked down at my wife, her face bathed in blue and white, and she looked up at me. She was squinting, and I realized I must have been, too.

The house was still there. So was my workshop, and the field, and hills, all washed out like a movie. They weren’t on fire. I didn’t understand. I walked out into the field and I touched the grass. The wind wafted through them, knocking their seeded tops together, and they felt real. I felt real.

I kept expecting my eyes to adjust to this new light, whatever it was, but they never did. Everything stayed bright white. I wondered if this was the afterlife, and if it was, why it looked just like life, but much brighter in a blue-white way.

I was convinced it was the afterlife by the time I woke up.

True story. What a weird fucking dream, right?