The Last Day of Me It all began trivially enough. Living where we did, with the climate we had, and the exploitive media we demanded, doom was forecast almost nightly. In our numbness we had learned to ignore that ancestral tingle at the base of the spine that sends other beasts to higher ground, and found ourselves in a nightmare. Living where we did, it didn't come as a massive shock that the government was ponderous and ineffectual. What suprised us all was the savagery the reemergence of the survival desire brought with it, and how animal and carniverous our reactions became. On a crowded street in the press towards a grocery outlet I noticed the nicest, plumpest titties I'd ever seen, and I squeezed them. It was only when the girl began to cry, and her mother pulled her away, that I realized she couldn't be more than eleven years old. After a few days we headed to a stadium, to be centralized and safe. The violence began again in the dark, and the smart ones hid. A young girl was dragged by a group of men into the bathroom, and her mother came to me, frantic and crazy and pleading for help. I couldn't be certain if she was or my guilt made her into the eleven year old's mother, but I held her to the ground and covered her mouth to keep from being noticed. Terrified in the dark, I was both captive and captor, and realized that things were not as I had believed them to be. I was a different man than the one I'd envisioned, something other than the man I'd understood me to be. I couldn't understand all the things that had happened, but I knew I was no longer me.