The Apocalypse Reader by Justin Taylor (Editor)

cousin and I have talked about how I'm not going to have any kids for my reasons and she's not going to have kids for her reasons. We look at each other and know we're the end of the line.
    APOCALYPSE
    THEY COULD STAY afloat for only so long before the deranged creatures picked them off. They were so thirsty or so hungry. They swirled in the raging wind, fire, and water. Their skin shriveled. Time had ended and yet passed. Parched, they watched the last particles of moisture rise and fade in the golden air above the orange earth. There have never been colors like this. They trudged on and on but the land was barren. Fungus rotted their limbs and bacteria new to the dying world cruised their organs. Germs, maggots, and death from virile viral microscopic life loomed in the near future. Buildings tumbled upon them. Flying debris severed them. Chasms opened wide and swallowed. They were crushed and strewn, and they exploded. Their brains burst from the noise. A spinning cow or lamp broke them. Their insides fell out. Their fingers crumbled. They were all half-dead anyway, until they died.
    DINOSAUR
    A DINOSAUR LAY under a rainbow in a white sunset on shining hills. The girl reached for the imaginary hand of the ghost. The ghost had been trailing her for states, holding his basket, ever since the apocalypse. In the basket, tiny ghosts of prairie dogs and butterflies, mongeese and baby foxes wobbled, nested, nuzzling in their contained afterlife. The vast exposed land, its lid lifted, its whole history layered under the grass, now history: girl, dinosaur, ghost, basket, teetering on the deserted road in the light air. The dinosaur's anchor-shaped nose brushed the grass tips at its knees. Plateaus of clouds seemed still. The hand of the ghost was not a hand, it was the memory of hands, or now, since the apocalypse, the idea that a hand could come. She missed her dog. Purple flowers massed and then spread thinly over the field. Yellow flowers made a wave near the road. She remembered how many people must have used to have been awakening each moment. With so little left after the silent blast that razed so much and left so much as well-too much to take in, to count, witness, know, hunt, cover, recall-she didn't know what to do with her still empty hand full as it was to be, if she could reach it, with that much ghost. The dinosaur looked heavy, the rainbow looked light, and the hills could have been covered in snow, or nothing, or something that had never existed before.
    CAKE
    SHE BAKED AN angel food cake for the dinner party, which means it's as white as possible in cake except golden on the outside and you have to cut it with a serrated knife. It's funny to eat because you can kind of tear it, unlike most cakes. It stretches a little. It's a little supernatural, like an angel.
    I was watching her with her boyfriend because I admire them and am trying to make them an example in my life of good love being possible. Toward the end of the cake everyone was talking and a couple of people were seeing if they could eat the live edible flowers that she'd put on the cake for decoration. A fairy cake. She told a story about making the cake. There wasn't a lot left. Everyone was eating the ends of their pieces in different ways, and because of the stretchy texture there were more methods than usual, and no crumbs at all.
    Really funny cake.
    I tried to imagine making the cake, same as I often tried to imagine love. I would never make a cake. So it's down to say less than a quarter of the cake and the boyfriend reaches across the table-it's a big table that no one else would be able to reach across, he just has really long arms, and he takes the serrated knife but when he cuts at the cake he doesn't do the sawing action, he just presses down which defeats the point(s!) of the serrated knife. The cake squishes as he cuts it in half; it was only a piece of itself already, clinging to its imaginary axis, and now it's not even a wedge-it's pushed