Acceptance

Bryan mutters to himself as he makes his way up the stairs to his three floor apartment. He sticks his key into the lock, the school issued lanyard dangling from the end. “Hey,” Bryan greets, kicking off his sneakers, knocking them into the corner by the door. He drops his arguably unnecessarily heavy backpack to the floor, his books rustling around within the canvas, courtesy of his relentless reading assignments. He drops onto the couch, the motion slightly shaking his roommate, Iven, in the process. “What movie is this?” he asks, knocking his head to the screen, illuminating images of fires and soldiers quickly shifting back and forth as a news banner running across the bottom.

“Channel Four,” Iven mutters, shaking his head, afraid to tear his eyes from the screen for even a second.

Bryan leans back, holding the button on his phone to reboot it since he’d had to turn it off for his exam. “Never heard of it,” he mumbles, tapping the side of the phone, trying to rush it back to life. The white screen with tiny fruit in the center signals the inevitable power surge that comes with having a phone a few releases behind.

Iven knocks Bryan’s knee with the back of his hand, his rings cold against Bryan’s bare skin. Bryan recoils, questioning how his roommate can stand to wear them all the time, not even being able to stand a watch around his wrist most days. “It’s not a movie, it’s Channel Four, this is live footage,” Iven says. Bryan leans forward, squinting as if he wasn’t already wearing his glasses. His mouth drops open, his elbows now resting on his knees, his body on the edge of the couch, as far forward as he can get without falling on the floor. “They’ve been repeating the same instructions for the past thirty minutes: take shelter, close all windows and doors, limit exposure-”

“To what?” Bryan asks, interrupting Iven’s train of thought. He’d been sitting here the past thirty minutes just listening to the blonde news anchor try to remain calm while internally freaking out, who wouldn’t be, who isn’t.

“A new type of mushroom has been discovered, India first, then New Zealand, here, it’s been confirmed to be on every continent except Antarctica,” Iven says, summarizing the first article he’d found when he’d opened his phone twenty minutes ago when he decided to check whether it was a goof or not, some sick take on an April Fool’s joke. “The spores are deadly, there’s already two million dead and it’s been less than twelve hours since the discovery, there’s already teams deployed to destroy them where they haven’t affected areas yet but it’s a race against the clock, the weather’s getting too hot everywhere, it’s only a matter of time,” he says, mentally calculating the rough odds of the teams getting to their locations in time, burning them successfully, then controlling the fire. Those deemed responsible enough to handle this challenge will quite literally be battling the elements, and that’s not even including the chance that there’s dormant ones under the layers of ice and snow in the colder climates. Iven leans back, his fingers dancing over his legs, tapping out an imaginary beat that he’s never quite been able to replicate on his keyboard. “You want to know what the worst part of this is?” he asks, sighing heavily.

Bryan looks at his roommate as if he’s sprouted horns, but Iven’s face is completely serious. “That the entire world including the human population is dying,” Bryan says, confused as to how his roommate could think he’s that clueless. He may be aloof sometimes, a little self-absorbed, but he deserves a little more credit than that.

Iven lowers the volume, the words still repeating loudly within his head. “No, well yeah, but that was bound to happen eventually, look at the dinosaurs, no it means Nixon and Reagan are probably patting their own backs in the great beyond for guessing that drugs would be our downfall,” he mutters, leaning back further to rest against the back of the couch.

Bryan scoffs, “Oh please they were just patsies and that whole time they were more concerned with weed and cocaine than mushrooms.”

“Still,” Iven says, shrugging his shoulders with as much energy as he can muster. “How’d you think the world would end?”

Bryan exhales heavily, his mind racing between all the alternative endings he’d thought about over the years, ever since the imminent ending of life as they know it was brought up in elementary school by a kid whose parents needed to severely restrict his internet access. He tilts his head back and forth as if it would help him decide. “Nuclear meltdowns,” he says, still considering that there’s time for it, after the spores have wiped out the majority and the factories are left to their own devices. “You?” he asks.

“Virus outbreak from a secret lab under the control of a country trying to figure out biological warfare,” Iven says, having been thinking about all the zombie movies and shows he’s watched over and over.

“Not bad, would’ve been cool to see a zombie before I bite it,” Bryan says, imagining the gore and guts of a decaying monster as he tears through it with a machete, even though he knows he’d be more likely to be bitten fairly early and have to be put out of his misery. As the scene plays out in his head, he looks at Iven, whose leg is now shaking the entire couch. “Ideal ending?”

“Aliens come to Earth, share all their knowledge, cure us of diseases, introduce us to new things including space travel,” Iven says.

“God, I wish that’d be epic,” he says, interrupted by a knock at the door. Bryan moves around the table, opening the door to see the girl, Sara, from across the way standing with her hand raised.

“Hey, sorry, my roommate and her boyfriend are having the world is ending sex so can I hang out here? Normally, I’d go to the roof, but that’s not really recommended right now,” she says, rushing past him into the apartment. He has to shake himself back into action, closing the door and checking to make sure it properly seals.

Sara sits on the couch, watching the tv screen change. “People are so focused on the death that they don’t see that the planet's healing.”

“Ahh you’re one of those,” Iven says, chuckling to himself.

Bryan scoffs, kicking Iven’s shoe out of the way so he can sit in the recliner. “Don’t act all high and mighty, you brought up Reagan, a dude who was president before we were even alive,” he states. Iven shakes his head, turning the volume back up as the broadcaster comes back on, obviously just reading the teleprompter, incapable of hiding her own fear. Bryan turns towards Sara, waving at her to draw her attention from the screen. “You really think that?”

She blinks her eyes a few times, as if clearing the images from the news from her head. “Scientist predicted that the next ice age is within fifteen hundred years, maybe they just got the timing a little off, I mean the planet has never had to account for toxic fumes and energy plants before, and either way, quite frankly I’d rather suffocate than freeze to death,” she says.

Iven looks at his hands, remembering the coldest he’d ever felt, the one winter where he’d gotten locked outside with no gloves while his mom was at work. “How would you know?” he asks, involuntarily twitching his fingers.

“I’m PreMed, we covered frostbite last semester, it’s brutal and slow, and the news is reporting that within first exposure, you’re dead within six hours fairly peacefully,” she says, rather matter of factly, no emotion in her words even as her eyes begin to water. “I think as living creatures, that’s the most we can ever hope for, to die peacefully.”