This Thing of Darkness

by Nissa Harlow

7 days to go:

Smoothing down the lush, black dirt with a flat hand, I try to think about the seeds I’ve just planted. They won’t come up for weeks. Which means that they won’t come up at all. When I move the heavy pot to the windowsill above the kitchen sink, the hard clay bottom makes a noise like a skull hitting concrete. I rinse my hands before turning to the cupboard to grab a bottle of ibuprofen.

“Want one?” I ask as I shake out a couple of tablets. Case doesn’t say anything, but when I look up, he’s staring at me. “What?”

“You can’t ignore it.”

“I’m not going to obsess about it,” I say, biting back the “like you” that wants to tack itself on the end of the sentence.

“You’re going to have to come to terms with it.”

“Says who?”

He shrugs. “Do you really want to die without being okay with it?”

“It doesn’t matter what I do before it happens. I won’t care afterward.”

His lips tighten into an argumentative line, but he doesn’t say anything. I suspect he’s made some sort of pact with himself. No fighting with the fiancée in the last days of existence. Or something like that.

“Want to get pizza for dinner?” I ask.

“We’re going to Rubio’s tomorrow with my parents. Remember? I’ll be having pizza then.”

“You could order something else.”

“But Rubio’s makes the best pizza. I’m going to miss that.”

“You’re not going to miss anything,” I mutter, wishing the effect of the tablets in my hand would be more immediate. As it is, they’re starting to melt their coating all over my palm. I toss them into my mouth, then cup my stained hand under the tap to get a bit of liquid to wash them down.

“Use a glass.”

“I’m not dirtying a glass for that.” Turning off the water, I frown at him. “Do you really want to spend your last week doing dishes?”

“Why not just let them pile up in the sink?”

I grunt. “We still have to live here.”

6 days to go:

The street bustles with a strange energy. Half the businesses are closed. The other half stand with their doors open, letting a medley of various musics drift out into the summer evening. That only adds to the weird vibe. The sidewalks are more crowded than usual as people try to force some normalcy back into the totally abnormal situation.

Case’s mother peers into the darkened establishment to our left. “We probably should’ve called first. They might not even be open.”

“Rubio’s has been open since the Hellbank appeared,” Case says, sidestepping a stroller that a distraught-looking mom nearly ploughs into his legs. “Why would they close now? It’s business as usual.”

“This is hardly usual,” his mom says with a vague hand gesture to indicate everything around us. “We should’ve stayed in. I’ve got some steaks in the freezer.”

I sigh. “Donna, you know I’m vegetarian.”

“Oh. Right.” She sounds distracted because she is. Everybody reacts to the impending doom differently. Some people freak out and give up on life. Others keep going as if everything is normal. If I wasn’t facing the same fate as everyone else, I might find the whole thing to be an interesting psychological study. But it’s hard to feel all that engaged with anything when annihilation is hanging over your head. Especially when you have so much time to think about it.

Besides, I don’t really want to think about it.

The door to Rubio’s stands open, blasting cheesy Italian music out into the street. We step inside, and my heart sinks.

“Never mind the place being open,” Case’s dad says. “We should’ve called to make a reservation.” He steps up to the host stand and tries to talk to the young man behind it. The music, layered on top of about a hundred voices, is making it difficult to hear.

Case leans close to my ear. “What’s plan B?”

I shrug. The smell is making my mouth water, and I really don’t want to think about having to go somewhere else. But when his dad turns around, the expression on his face tells me we don’t have much of a choice. We all pile out into the relative quiet of the street.

“How long is the wait?” his mom asks.

“They’re completely booked.”

“That’s okay,” Case says, seeing the way my body droops. “We’ll call and get a reservation.”

“No.” His dad stares absently down the street. “They’re booked solid for the next two weeks.”

“Rubio’s won’t be here in two weeks,” I point out.

Nobody says anything to that.

5 days to go:

My best friend, Katrin, watches her little boy climb up the yellow-and-blue play structure, Case in hot pursuit. The new playground that’s replaced the old is a lot less adult friendly.

“Don’t get stuck!” I call from my perch on a swing. Katrin grunts in amusement.

“Zach got stuck in the tunnel once. I thought I was going to have to call the fire department to get him out.”

I turn to her with a frown. “What was he doing in the tunnel? He’s six-four.”

“He’ll do anything for Colton.”

Anything but spend his last days with his own kid, I think. But I keep my mouth shut. Zach has always worked hard. He seems to be working even harder as the world winds down, though. It might be a coping mechanism, but it’s a pretty shitty one. At least Case is willing to step in and be the dad he’ll never get a chance to be.

“How come you’re not working?” Katrin asks, giving herself a gentle push with her feet. The swing sways beneath her.

“Nobody needs an accountant right now.”

“You’re not an accountant.”

“I work for a bunch of accountants. There’s not much to manage in an empty office.”

“Colton! Don’t you dare!” The sudden shout startles me, and I look over to see that the little boy is standing near the fireman’s pole. Instead of reaching for it, though, he looks like he’s getting ready to simply jump. Before he can do anything, Case creeps up from behind and grabs him under the arms. Colton squeals as he’s lifted up onto a pair of wide shoulders.

“Have you told him?” I ask. Katrin pulls her gaze away from her son and turns to me.

“About the Hellbank?”

I nod.

“A little. We kind of had to. Before the schools closed, all the kids were talking about it. He came home in tears.”

“I don’t blame him. How’d you explain it?”

“We just told him that a really long night was coming, and everybody was going to go to sleep.”

“Jesus, Katrin. That’s dark.”

She frowns. “What was I supposed to say? Nobody even knows what this thing is.”

“I thought your church said it was a leak from Hell.”

“It’s not my church. We only go because Zach wants to keep the peace with his parents.” She scuffs her feet against the rubberized surface beneath them. “Doesn’t matter now.”

“I’ll say.”

She shakes her head. “No, it really doesn’t matter. They were on holiday in Ireland.”

I say nothing. What can I say? Europe has already been swallowed by the Hellbank. Condolences for two people feels sort of weak when billions have already been lost.

“Colton wanted to know if it would hurt.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said it wouldn’t. That it would just be like going to sleep for a very long time.”

I sigh. “You don’t know that.”

“Nobody knows. That’s the problem. All we can do is speculate.” She brings her swing to an abrupt stop. “I know you don’t want to think about it, Evalynn. But it’s happening. Excuse me if I wonder about our impending annihilation.”

“What good does it do to wonder? You can’t do anything about it. All you’ll do is make your last days miserable.”

She bites her lip and turns back to the play structure. Case is letting Colton ride piggyback as he slides the few feet down the fireman’s pole, then turns and gallops back to the mini climbing wall on the far side. The tiny moment of joy, backed by a soundtrack of childish laughter, seems out of place in the ending world. But I cling to it, anyway, if only so I don’t have to think about other—darker—things.

“Race?” Katrin says. I turn to her with a frown. “Swing race,” she clarifies.

“I don’t think we can go very high with these new swings.”

She ignores me and shuffles backward. I grip the chains and do the same, just so she won’t get too much of a head start.

4 days to go:

Case’s sudden sexual disinterest is troubling. A bit of a relief, I have to admit, but still way out of character.

“You want to come to bed?” I ask around the toothbrush stuck firmly in my mouth. Plaque seems like the least of our concerns, but habits are hard to break.

“I’ll be there in a minute.” He aims the remote at the TV. The volume rises. I sigh and turn away, vigorously brushing so I won’t have to hear the news that’s taken over all the major networks. But as soon as I spit and rinse, the horror tiptoes closer, echoing in the tiny apartment. Half hearing that stuff is worse than hearing it, so I stand in the doorway and quietly watch the doom clips that play on an endless loop.

“The last charter flights departed from Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver today, heading to Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland.” The anchor sounds way too chipper. Almost… unreal.

“Are they reading the stories with AI?” I ask.

Case hesitates for a moment before responding, like he always does when he’s distracted by something. The guy can’t multitask to save his life. “What?”

“Did the real anchor quit?”

“I don’t know.”

The cheery voice continues. “Continued efforts to satellite map the area overtaken by the Hellbank continue to fail.” The screen goes mostly dark as the footage is shown, that blanket of blackness I hate to look at because it makes me feel like my eyeballs are being sucked out. There’s no charred landscape. There are no features at all. There’s just a terrifying nothingness spreading like an existential ink stain.

“Why do they have to keep showing that?” I ask.

“People want to know.”

“They want to know how their existence is going to end? That’s morbid.”

“Would you rather not know?”

I pull my gaze away from the sucking gravity of the TV. They’ve moved on to a segment featuring crowds of harried-looking people that some have taken to calling the Pioneers. Probably because they’re moving westward in a fruitless attempt to outrun the Hellbank. “Maybe,” I say.

Case finally turns to look at me over the back of the couch. “Really?”

“If it moved faster. I guess. Yeah.”

“But it doesn’t move fast.”

“No shit. I’m going to bed. You want to—”

“I’m good.” He turns back around and fixes his gaze on the TV. “I think there was going to be something about the origin.”

“We already know the origin: Meyrin, Switzerland.”

He doesn’t say anything, and I’m left staring at the back of his head. I have an urge to throw something at it. But I also don’t want to start a fight. Not when we have so little time left. The last thing I want is to spend that final moment in solitary misery. I start to pull back into the bedroom when he speaks again.

“Do you think your parents saw it coming from the lido deck?”

I haven’t let myself think about that awful possibility. So I don’t answer.

3 days to go:

I can think of better ways to spend my last days than camping on a crowded beach and having to use portable toilets. But, apparently, other people can’t. The refuge for quiet strolls at sunset has been destroyed as people teeter on the most westerly bit of land they can find.

So Lynnzie and I stay away from the sand and opt for the sidewalk instead. She pushes the stroller with my sleeping niece, just over ten days old and already approaching the end of her little life. She doesn’t even have a name yet. A permanent frown—one that appeared the day the Hellbank was birthed—twists her mother’s features.

“Want to get some ice cream?” I ask. She shakes her head and throttles the handle of the stroller. “Iced coffee? Fries?”

But my beach-food temptations have little effect, and my sister continues to stare straight ahead, down the moderately busy sidewalk. I look up into the sky. Clear. Perfect. Just like it has been all over the world since the moment the Hellbank erupted into our existence.

I’m getting really fed up. With everything. I left Case in front of the TV to watch the end of the world as it livestreams ever closer, departing without saying the words I longed to hurl at him:

We’ve only got a few more days, and you’d rather sit there and waste them than live them.

If you’re going to ignore me, you might as well go back to work.

At least your parents still exist.

Lynnzie and I didn’t really talk about it after that first day of radio silence, when the Hellbank swallowed the Mediterranean, obliterating our cruise-loving parents. With Lynnzie, it sort of makes sense why she hasn’t grieved much; she’s pretty focused on the baby. I don’t know what my excuse is. Maybe I figure it isn’t worth spending the time or energy when I’ll soon end up just as annihilated as them.

“Maybe they’re still here,” Lynnzie says, so quietly that I almost don’t hear her over the plastic creak of the stroller. I turn to her with a frown.

“Then where are they?”

She shrugs.

“Isn’t it worse if they’re not simply dead?”

“Why would it be worse?” she asks absently, reaching forward to adjust the canopy shading the baby’s face.

“Would you want to be stuck in a black nothingness?”

She sighs, and I know where the conversation is headed.

“They’re not in Heaven,” I say. “I don’t care what they believed. What they tried to force us to believe. There’s no such thing. When we die… that’s it.”

“That’s your opinion.”

“Prove me wrong.”

She gets really quiet. When I look at her, I can see the tremble of her chin. I sigh.

“Sorry.”

“You don’t know,” she says miserably. “Nobody knows what the Hellbank is. Or what it does. We don’t even know if it kills people.”

“It sure looks deadly.”

“Yeah, but what if it’s not? What if it just… moves them?”

“Where?” I ask. “And please don’t say Heaven.”

She clears her throat. “Never mind.”

“Believing in it won’t make it so.”

“And believing you’re just going to be snuffed out won’t make it so, either.”

“That’s what’s going to happen, Lynnz. That’s what was always going to happen to us, anyway, Hellbank or not.” I spot the open door up ahead. The smell of fresh waffle cones wafts toward us. “Come on. One last chance to get some rocky road.”

“Are you buying?” she asks. “My last credit card bill was—” She breaks off. Shaking her head, she steers the stroller through the doorway to the ice cream parlour. “Never mind. My treat.”

2 days to go:

“Case!”

My shout startles me. It doesn’t startle him, though. He’s gone, sucked into the black hole of the forever-looping, whatever-o’clock news.

“Continued efforts to satellite map the area overtaken by the Hellbank continue to fail,” the TV drones.

“She said that half an hour ago! Turn it off.”

“There might be something new.”

“There is nothing new! The networks aren’t even paying attention. Where’s the mass suicide? Or did they just not notice that fifteen-hundred people livestreamed offing themselves at the stadium this morning?”

“What?”

His absent tone infuriates me. I march over, rip the remote from his hands, and back away. But he barely notices. Not until I press a button and the screen goes blank.

“Evalynn, come on!”

“What is wrong with you? It’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”

“So?”

“So, don’t you want to do something while you still can?”

“There’s nothing we can do.”

“I’m not talking about the Hellbank. I’m talking about us. Humans. Mortals who’ve only got, like, forty-eight hours to cram a whole lifetime of living into.”

“What’s the point?”

I haven’t cried yet. I didn’t cry when I first saw that giant stain spreading across the screen of the TV in the hospital lounge, just moments after being kicked out of Lynnzie’s maternity suite. I didn’t cry when we got the news about our parents. I didn’t cry when my friend Nell’s phone went offline, right in the middle of our last call ever, as the Hellbank swallowed the Eastern Seaboard.

But I cry now. Case stands up. I think he’s going to hug me, but he’s just going for the remote. I whip it away and march over to the sliding door. As soon as it’s open, I hurl the device out into the stupidly beautiful day.

“Damn it, Evalynn.” He storms to the front door.

“If you go out there, you’re not coming back in here.”

“Don’t be a bitch.”

“Excuse me?”

He walks out, slamming the door behind him. I spot his keys, nestled with mine, in their bowl. I hurry over and throw the deadbolt.

1 day to go:

“You guys are coming over tomorrow,” I say. “Right?”

There’s a long pause while Lynnzie hesitates. My heart quickens as I wait for the answer.

“If you’ve changed your mind…”

“Rhett wants to go to his parents’ place.”

“Right.”

“I’m his wife.”

“I know.” My voice sounds like a three-year-old’s. I swallow hard.

“I don’t want to,” she says.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Don’t you think I’d rather spend the end with you? Especially since Mom and Dad—”

“I wouldn’t have wanted to spend it with them, anyway.”

She sighs. “Even now, you can’t let it go?”

“Yeah. Sure. Years of therapy to try to undo the religious trauma. I’d just forget all about that and listen to them preach about how I’m going to Hell.”

“They can’t preach about anything now.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Look, I get it.”

“No, you don’t. You’re still part of that stupid cult.”

“That doesn’t mean I believe everything they say. Besides, what if they’re right about the Hellbank? Isn’t it better to… you know…”

“Turn off my brain for Jesus?”

There’s an offended silence on the other end of the phone.

“Sorry.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

I open my mouth, then close it again. That’s something nobody’s really asked me. Not seriously. Most people who ask that question are just waiting to get my answer out of the way so they can tell me their own theory. While I’ve been bombarded by everyone else’s ideas, I haven’t thought much about my own.

“I don’t know,” I finally say.

“Then how do you know it’s not what the church says it is?”

“There are plenty of other theories.”

“Like what?”

“Some people think it’s some sort of black hole.”

“Wouldn’t that be causing a lot more destruction?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s not like there’ve been a lot of black holes on the planet. But it’s not really a hole. It’s more like… a tsunami of darkness.”

“That sounds like the name of a band.”

“We should start it. I’ll get some t-shirts made.”

Lynnzie sighs. But I can almost hear the smile on her face.

“Case thinks it’s the universe breaking down.”

“Yeah, well, Case has always been a glass-half-empty sort of guy. Did you ever get him away from the TV?”

I look over at the darkened screen. “Sure did.”

“That’s something, right?”

“Lynnz, can you please come tomorrow?”

Maybe there’s something in my voice. Maybe she’s thinking about what Mom and Dad would’ve wanted… although, I’m not sure exactly what that is: their daughters dying peacefully together or their perfect daughter trying to bring the dirty heathen back to the flock in her last moments? Or maybe my sister’s relationship with her husband isn’t what she’s been displaying to the rest of the world. Because she doesn’t say no right away. There’s a very long pause.

“Can Rhett come, if I can get him to?”

“Yeah, sure.” The hope in my voice disgusts me. I don’t even like Rhett. But I like the idea of being alone even less.

“I’ll ask,” she says.

0 days to go:

When I open the front door to go down to the lobby and get the mail, a body tumbles into the apartment with a groan and the stink of booze.

“Get up,” I say, leaving the door open as I step over Case’s sprawled form and head for the elevator.

“Do we have any ibuprofen?”

I ignore him and jab the down button.

“Ev?”

“You know where it is.”

“Am I allowed into our apartment?”

“Do whatever you want. I don’t care.” The elevator arrives. I step in and turn around so I can press the button… and see Case limping toward me. His left shoelace is untied. “I thought you wanted ibuprofen.”

“It’s almost here.” He stumbles into the elevator. I recoil from the smell.

“So?”

“Don’t you want to… you know… one last time?”

“No.” I jab the button again, even though the doors are already closing, and stare straight ahead. I know he wants me to say something else, but I know that, if I do, he’ll just start to whine. So I try to ignore him, focusing instead on the mundane task ahead of me. This is the last time I’ll ever do this. The thought—or a variation of it—has plagued me for the last day, no matter what I’ve been doing. It’s hard to ignore what’s about to happen. What’s already happened to billions. What will happen to the rest in the coming days. It isn’t that I’m savouring each moment. Really, I’m trying to remember them, even though I know it’s futile. I won’t remember anything after the Hellbank. Soon, there won’t even be anyone to remember me.

I leave Case slumped in the elevator and head for the lobby. There’s junk mail in the box, as there always is. Apparently, our mail carrier is one of those people who intends on working until the last moment. I look through the stack, walk over to the recycling bin, and toss everything in.

Like it matters.

I’m just about to head back upstairs when I spot movement on the other side of the lobby door. Lynnzie stands there, looking anxious as she jabs at the buzzer. I rush over and push open the door.

“Lynnz? Where’s Rhett?”

Her face crumples.

“Never mind,” I say, stepping outside so I can hold the door open for the stroller. “Come on.”

She sniffs up a slurpy breath and pushes her daughter into the lobby with what looks like a fierce determination, not bothering to wait for me as she heads for the elevator. I follow, letting the door swing lazily closed.

The ride up is mostly silent except for the baby’s newborn grunts. I push back the stroller’s shade and see the infant peering up at me. No recognition yet. She doesn’t know I’m her aunt. She never will.

The apartment door is still open when we arrive on our floor. Lynnzie frowns.

“Did you leave it open?” she asks, her voice tinted with concern.

“Technically, Case did.”

“Is he here?” She pushes the stroller into the summer-warm apartment and parks it just inside the front door, casting her gaze around nervously.

“He was. He came down in the elevator with me when I went to check the mail.” Frowning, I hurry to the bedroom and pop my head inside. No Case. He isn’t in the bathroom, either.

“Did he go down to the parking garage?”

“He better not have. He’s still half wasted.”

She sighs and busies herself with the baby while I glare at the fiancé-free apartment. The last two weeks have been full of moments when I wanted to scream at him. Now, there are so few of those moments left, and he isn’t available to take the brunt of my rage. Actually, I’m kind of surprised. I expected he would want to sit in front of the TV and wait for the Hellbank to swallow him. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought. And now I’ll never get a chance to remedy that.

Lynnzie finishes her fussing and lifts the baby out of the stroller, careful to support the big head on the noodly neck. Then she walks to the open sliding glass door, where she seems to freeze like a glitchy video. The spell is broken a moment later as she sucks in a breath.

“No,” she whispers.

The tone of her voice sends a shiver through me. I give up puzzling over the absence of my supposed other half and hurry to join her. Our apartment has a good view down the street and always gets a sparkle of morning sun. It’s one of the reasons I wanted this unit. But I don’t want the view I see now. Juxtaposed against the brilliant summer day full of sunlight and colour is a massive wall of black. It isn’t like a thunderstorm, where the bank of clouds is uneven. This is pure darkness… with a sharp edge. I can’t tell how tall the thing is; relative sizes seem all off. We’ve seen the Hellbank on the news, of course. But seeing it in person is entirely different.

I take a step back, grabbing Lynnzie’s sleeve to force her to follow, when she juts her head forward as if to better see something.

“Is that Case?”

“What?” Stepping to the open door, I peer down at the street. There are a few people out there, some just standing still, others backing away… and a few others trudging toward the wall of oblivion that’s rapidly approaching. I step onto the balcony, trying to puzzle out how my hung-over fiancée got down there so fast. “Case!” I shout. But my voice seems to be sucked into the void. It’s like those dreams where you scream and scream but can’t make a sound.

The eerie quiet makes me shudder. Even though nobody ever said anything about the Hellbank making noise, I sort of expected it to. A rumble, maybe. Or a hiss. But there’s nothing. I can’t even hear the people down on the street, some of whom appear to be screaming as they retreat, advance, or stand still.

The softest noise from behind makes me turn, and I spot Lynnzie standing just inside the apartment, clutching the baby, looking horrified. Her lips move. My name is on them. But I can’t hear her. I turn back to face the sight of our ultimate end.

And I see Case standing in the middle of the crowded street.

I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see this. It doesn’t matter what I want. I’m going to see it, anyway. People jostle as opposing urges hit and instincts kick in. Some flee. Some sprint toward the nothingness and are devoured. Some, like Case, just stand there. He turns around and looks up, his gaze—clear and resigned—meeting mine. His familiar form tenses as the shadow looms behind him, and I can see the exact moment when he makes the choice to keep existing, even if it’s just for a few more seconds.

In the end, though, that choice doesn’t matter. Before he can take a single step, he’s gone.

My whole body trembles violently as I throw myself back into the apartment and yank the slider closed. The room is still bright with the sun that has yet to be snuffed out. Lynnzie is sobbing, cradling the baby in her arms, but I can’t hear anything other than a slight ringing in my ears. Shaking my head, I steer her toward the couch, where we both collapse onto the cushions. I put my arms around her and pull her close, smelling her shampoo and the sweet smell of new baby. The baby might be crying. Her mother sure is. I sure want to.

But I can’t.

We only have a few seconds. A few seconds to think of all the regrets. Of all the things I love. Or have loved.

The room goes dark.

I hold my sister tighter as we wait to be devoured.

I hold my breath.

Host Commentary

Now before I go further, a warning: I’m about to ramble about death for a bit. If you’re dealing with that right now, and you otherwise just think it might be too much, skip me. I don’t mind.

Still here? Sure? All right. I think about death quite a lot. It’s partly because I have children, and because I almost died when my first was born. It’s partly because I’m getting older, and because I increasingly spend time with doctors who smile reassuringly and maybe just a tiny bit patronisingly at me. It’s a lot of things. You might say it’s morbid, but we’re all going to die. The Reaper is coming for all us, and the best we can do is prepare to say hello.

One of the things I think about is that our society has worked really hard to minimise sudden and unexpected death. We have emergency surgery, blood transfusions, antibiotics and vaccines. We told everyone to quit smoking and lots of people did. We’ve got health and safety stuff splattered all over the place. It’s much more difficult to, say, accidentally electrocute yourself or drown or set fire to your house or crack your skull after an altercation with a fatally shiny floor than it was in the 1970s and 80s. Fellow Gen Xers will recognise the public information films I’m referencing, by the way. I refer youngsters to YouTube or one of Scarred for Life’s social media accounts.

And the result of all this is that most of us can expect a long life. Which is good.

But we can’t expect eternal life.

There are a few tech bros out there who’ve convinced themselves otherwise. I suspect the fact that no amount of wealth and privilege can save them from death is simply inconceivable to them. Of course they’re deluding themselves. At some point, even good experiences have to end. You’d soon get fed up with chocolate if you actually couldn’t stop for a piece of fruit. A rollercoaster would become a nauseating torture device if you couldn’t ever get off. A page-turner story without a solid ending would… quickly stop being a page-turner. Endings matter. The alternative… well, that’s a horror story all of its own.

There’s no point trying to escape death. You don’t have to welcome it, but you have to make your peace with it. It’s part of why I hate ‘lost the battle’ language. Because it’s not a fight. It’s a journey. Sometimes it’s a journey with steep, rocky bits and terrible weather. Sometimes it’s easy and sunny, with nice scenery that you can say ‘ahh’ at. But, like all journeys, there has to be a point where you stop and put your feet up. Literally.

And that’s why I see a strange kind of hope in this story. The characters are facing the same thing we all face, the only differences are that they know it’s coming soon, and they know it’s coming for everyone, all at once. There’s a calmness in the way they’re trying to deal with it. They’re not fighting. They’re not running. Most of them are looking it in the eye, as much as they can bear to. Evalynn is angry and upset – it would be weird if she wasn’t – but she’s not desperately trying to find a solution. She’s accepted there isn’t one.

No, in the end she simply… faces it down. And she takes the last few seconds to think about all the things and people she loves. Or has loved.

You, listening to this, are probably not facing down a Hellbank. Unless things have got very weird indeed. Possibly you’re facing something that feels a bit like a Hellbank – we’ve all had days like that. But regardless, you have more than Evalynn’s few seconds. So take a bit of time today to remember the things and people you love. Or have loved. And the people who love you. We’re all loved by someone. We all matter.

Because at the end of it all, at the literal end of it all, that’s what’s important. That’s what makes it good.