The first day of Doomsday Week was mundane. The garden sprinklers diligently spread their odorless and colorless nectar, the birds chirped without alarm and the postman had materialized in front of the neighborhood mailboxes like a nonchalant specter. Helen was on her third cup of coffee when she decided she didn’t want to go to work that day. In the semi-darkness of her apartment, she had seen the outlines of her own ghosts, morose and slow, summoning her to stay at home a little longer. A sliver of light created silent swirls of dust on the bookshelf opposite the window, and the humming of electrical appliances seemed to have no end. Bottles of water, too many bottles of water, sat on the living room table, kings of polyethylene, witnesses of a deep and hopeless melancholy. Helen, whose body seemed to be animated by invisible threads, sat on her sofa, cup in hand, her eyes lost in space, her head filled with blurry images and shapeless names, her stomach hollow, and her crotch full. A simultaneous desire for life and death. Its ambivalence tricking the ghosts. She wondered if it was still too early to masturbate. Her phone, placed near the water bottles, showed ten o’clock. She could already imagine herself, bare stomach, and thighs against the velvet of the sofa, her hand furtively buried in the warmth of her cotton panties, her fingers gone on a reconnaissance mission towards a forbidden land. Her thoughts were interrupted by a notification on her phone: Paxler saw that you weren’t in your classroom and he’s furious!
Principal Paxler was a fifty-year-old man, short, vaguely overweight, easily recognizable by his bushy eyebrows and perpetual frown. His hair was cut so close to his skull that Helen suspected it to be an attempt by the principal, to appear more military than he was. He was an authoritarian and all-around unpleasant man whom everyone described as having “a strong temper” or “an iron fist”, wonderful euphemisms to avoid describing the reality: Paxler was an asshole.
Beneath the varnish of order and rigor and grandiose moral declarations, he hid a devious temperament. He abused his power. And he had no qualms about harassing anyone he judged to be inferior to himself. Not everyone shared Helen’s opinion and she was careful not to vocalize it in public. The joy of being a white man in his late fifties always dressed in a well-pressed suit resides in the simple fact that he has never had to be held accountable for his actions. Spectators, statues of salt facing his misdeeds, colleagues and administrators ignoring or downplaying his bile and evil spells. Move over! Nothing to see here! Mouths are sewn shut and glances are to be avoided. Helen had stood up to him and since then, not a day had gone by without her regretting it.
Absent from her class. Absent from herself. Ready to set her own life on fire. Bills, debts, adult responsibilities at the stake. She agreed to make her life a burning wooded mass, purple lights against the dark background of her existence, like a spell in a fairytale forest. Helen, a drinker but never a water bottle-finisher, depressed and morose.
Why not masturbate while trying to figure out what to do with her life? She didn’t have time to finish her thought as a second notification lit up her phone. It was her mother: Darling, turn on the TV right now!
The urgency of the message did not seem particularly surprising to her. Her mother, Kathryn, a renowned catastrophist in her household of one, spent most of her retired years sending her messages that relayed conspiracy theories and bloody news stories where women, men and children perished in terrible circumstances, often at the hands of a father, an uncle, a brother, or a stranger. Helen kept telling Kathryn to stop sending her these types of absurd and mortifying messages but as usual, the septuagenarian did what she wanted. There were few lines Kathryn refused to cross. Her daughter’s consent was about as important to her as a lost ant on her kitchen table. Whether she crushed it or ignored it, the result was the same for Helen: a feeling of abandonment clouded her interior and blackened her organs.
Helen no longer wanted to masturbate. She glanced passively at her water bottles before dragging her neurasthenic body into her kitchen, with the mission of refilling her now-empty coffee cup with tap water. All those half-finished bottles, and yet Helen only had eyes for the lukewarm water from her kitchen faucet. A woman full of contradictions, this Helen. No expensive drinking water from the supermarket for me, ladies, and gentlemen! Shit water from my sink faucet will do just fine!

Helen had eventually obeyed her mother Kathryn and turned on the television. She watched scientists take turns on the news to talk about mysterious climate phenomena shaking the country. Endless rain in the Grand Canyon, a plague of locusts in New York, and soon, as Helen would discover in her garden, an avalanche of octopuses falling from a cloudy sky. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Helen still hadn’t shown up for work, but she had managed to wash the dishes, brush her hair, and motivate herself to take out the trash. Despite the alarming signs that had descended upon the country, she favored the comfort of routine over the discomfort of reality. What could be more reassuring than a structure, automatic gestures, a shutdown of the brain and senses for the benefit of the routine mechanics of daily life. Helen didn’t particularly like putting on gloves to douse the grease in her frying pan with dishwashing liquid. She also didn’t like dealing with her hair’s perpetual reluctance to obey gravity. What could be worse than having to leave your home and take the risk of being seen and perceived by your neighbors. Dressed in a bleach-stained t-shirt, faded shorts, and holey sandals, carrying a large, embarrassingly bulging trash bag. A true contemporary work of art. Performance art. A commentary on boredom and toil in the domestic sphere. That Tuesday, standing in front of the trash cans in her building, the first octopus fell on her head. Then two. Then three. Soon the entire street was covered with them. Surprised then terrified then jaded, succession finished in the span of a few seconds, Helen looked up to the sky. It was really raining octopus. Soon the entire building resonated with screams and the stunned exclamations of passers-by. Cars braked suddenly. Electric wires, broken by falling octopuses, were clinging to trees. An octopus even fell into a stroller and Helen kept the image in her mind to laugh at later. For the moment, unsure of what attitude to have and what behavior to adopt, she decided to hastily pick up some octopus for dinner before running to her apartment.
Once she arrived at her apartment, ignoring the various notifications on her phone and the beep of the washing machine which had finished running, she placed the octopuses she had collected in her freezer. She couldn’t believe it. The rain of octopuses had only lasted a few seconds, but the duration of the event shocked her much less than its very nature. Memories of her lonely childhood at home resurfaced. She saw her twelve-year-old self leafing through the browned pages of a large book entitled “The Great Mysteries of the History of the World”. The snake shower in Memphis, Tennessee in 1877. The rain of dead ducks in Maryland in 1969. She pensively took an octopus out of the freezer and decided to cook it. She prepared the octopus, immersed in her memories, and enveloped by an absurd and tenacious stupor. Her mother’s voice telling her to “close that evil book!” blended in with the voices of the news channel presenters who had now devoted most of their airtime to real-time reports of strange climatic events. Spicy grilled octopus was one of Helen’s favorite recipes. She loved the swirl of spices, the envelopment of oil, the strategic bitterness, the melting of texture on her tongue. A dance that she had already shared with former flings and lovers. A dish to apologize, to entertain, to show love or fear. Please don’t leave me! Here is this pretty octopus that I cooked for you!
Once her recipe was completed, Helen saw things a little more clearly. She had to face the facts. Something was no longer right on a cosmic level. The ten plagues of Egypt were real, and they fell on the First World Power with as much verve and aplomb as a dog taking a shit in a bush. We are in trouble! I’m in trouble!
The smell of grilled octopus wafting through the air, Helen sat down at her small kitchen table. A little romantic wonder picked up at a flea market when she was still dating Rosa. The tablecloth that decorated it, a white and red checkerboard, was reminiscent of those you could see in certain pizzerias. A gift from Andrew, the fiancé who had asked her to give him her engagement ring back on the day of her thirtieth birthday. Helen’s kitchen, an inexhaustible source of memories that stuck to her skin like memory leeches, traces of a less solitary life. Helen, cell phone in hand, decided to give way to her hitherto successfully repressed religious indoctrination, to set her new special Signs of The End Times schedule. She told herself that, while she was at it, she had better adapt her way of life to the apocalyptic program.

When Helen woke up on the third day of the apocalypse, at three in the morning, the memory of the octopus falling into a baby stroller entertained her on the toilet seat. She giggled loudly and the echoes of her mirth drifted into the corners of her bathroom. They fell into the tap hole, the toilet bowl and bounced off the mirrors, making them vibrate, calmly like still water disturbed by the ricochets of a stone throw. Since the end of the world was near, Helen decided it was time for her to do what she had never dared to do: face old demons and by extension, confront Rosa and Andrew, her two exes who were married to each other. This brilliant idea had come to her while she was putting her grilled octopus in Tupperware’s and this idea had not left her since. Her light sleep, disturbed by this relentless thought, had evaporated, and given way to a silent obsession.
When she repeatedly rang the doorbell of Rosa and Andrew’s wooden house, she realized how stupid this impulsive decision was. The city, caught between chiaroscuro and impenetrable darkness, seemed comatose. The octopus tentacles littering the ground gleamed under the dim streetlights. Distant sirens, the boom booms of unknown music, engines purring in the anonymity of the night. And these damned octopuses, planted there, ruined, viscous absurd tributes of the gods, who in their anger had not realized the hilarious impact of a rain of octopuses in this world of asphalt and concrete.
“Helen? What are you doing-? It’s three o’clock in the morning”.
Andrew. A green and serene tree with dark and healthy bark. That’s how Helen would describe him. Beautiful and imperturbable. Shady but reassuring. When he left her, she had felt exposed, her raw flesh exposed to the blazing sun.
“I wanted to call ahead, but it was way too late, and it didn’t seem appropriate”.
Terrible excuse. She knew it. Andrew knew it. He let her in not without emitting a sigh of exasperation. It was followed by a ceremony-ritual of removing of coat and scarf and a “How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you.” After a few minutes had passed, Rosa tiptoed her way to them for fear of waking up the baby they had given birth to a few weeks earlier. Helen wasted no time.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed – and I know I’m about to sound like the evangelical lunatic we meet in all the slightly dirty streets of the big cities of the World – but the end seems to be quite literally nigh if you can believe it!”
Rosa, beautiful as a summer mirage wrapped in a pink bathrobe, observed her, perplexed. In Andrew’s eyes, you could see a vague annoyance, a sort of reluctance to nostalgia in the face of a fast-paced speech and frantic hand gestures that were familiar to him. Helen, either a dead sea or a marine typhoon. A ballet of extremes that had stopped exciting him a long time ago. Rosa, too, had bathed in these waters. She had also almost lost her skin in them.
“What are you talking about, Helen?” asked Andrew.
“Okay, don’t look at me like that. I know what you think. Oh, poor traumatized girl, she still spouts that same bullcrap… but have you looked at the news recently?”
“Yes… strange things are happening, but nothing concretely seems to indicate that it’s the end of the world.”
“Look, I’m not going to try to convince you that the end of the world is real. This is not the purpose of my visit. I came here to get some sort of closure. I don’t know if that’s really the word I’m searching for.”
“I get it, Helen, I really do… but couldn’t you wait until… I don’t know, later?” Rosa retorted, visibly annoyed. “You show up after I don’t know how many years in the middle of the night at my husband and I’s home to tell us that the world is going to end when we just brought a baby into it. What’s the plan? How do you even know where we live?”
“Are you sure you want an honest answer to this question? If I tell you, you’ll want to file a restraining order against me.”
Helen realized that she didn’t have a plan. Confront her former partners? Yell at them? Why? Because they were more compatible with each other than they had been with her? Because they had shared her life in a multidimensional way and had gone away leaving her there, left to her invisible demons and a suffering so monotonous and common that it seemed banal.
“Listen, you both were… the only people in my life that I truly adored. And seeing you guys happily married and in love makes me feel like shit. And I feel like I’ve never actually expressed that. I sort of disappeared for a while.”
Helen had chosen the path of honesty. She continued:
“I wake up alone in the morning. You have each other. You own a house and a life. I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m always starting from scratch. And- now that the World is ending, I’m realizing that I don’t have a lot going on for me. I saw octopus falling from the sky earlier and I wasn’t even scared! I was entertained, mostly. If I had a family and things to live for, I would have probably been scared shitless!”
She realized how pathetic and overbearing she could sound. Words bursting out of her as if her mind was a pimple being popped open. After Rosa left her, she had flirted with death and almost managed to seal the deal. But death did not want her and had also abandoned her. Funeral bisexual. She made love to women, men, and death.
“Helen”, Andrew began, “you have always been your own person. You were never the type to truly settle down.”
“Make no mistake, you tried!” continued Rosa. “I’m sure you thought you could keep playing house with us. But that wasn’t you. You spent hours painting alone in your studio, you devoted yourself body and soul to your students. You didn’t give any sign of life for long weekends. You-”
“Ok I get it. I’m a hardened hermit.”
“Not really. You’re a solitary soul and a whirlwind at the same time which is fine. This is in no way a flaw. That’s just… life!”
“That’s life”, repeated Helen.
C’est la vie! A banal and very uncathartic conclusion to a nocturnal excursion during the end of the world.
“I brought you some grilled octopus… Here!” Helen exclaimed, falsely enthusiastic, handing them a transparent Tupperware with a blue lid.

Helen believed Doomsday Week had reached its peak, when on the sixth day, every pet in the country had disappeared from the homes that had adopted them. Mrs. Porter’s beagle in apartment 304? Vanished! The Donaldson children’s hamster in apartment 420? Evaporated! Mr. Philipps’ snake was suspected of having devoured one of Mrs. Ostrich’s cats, but both snake and cat had disappeared. As well as the rest of the ten cats that Mrs. Ostrich housed in her twenty square meters on the fifth floor. Helen also wanted Principal Paxler to disappear, this old bulldog hadn’t stopped barking on her voicemail. His first voicemail had been nothing but threats and insults. The latest one was more conciliatory. It’s true that the way we approach things tends to change when we get two or three octopuses thrown at us.
Helen had not returned to work. She had given in to collective panic and had gotten into a fight with a mother of two over a pack of Evian and far too many rolls of toilet paper. She wasn’t proud of it. A mysterious madness had taken possession of her mind and she had told herself that it was perfectly reasonable to buy twenty cans of canned tuna and thirty-one-kilo packets of rice. Once she arrived home, she realized the absurdity of the situation and even ate some leftover grilled octopus with fresh rice. Filled with laughter, between two mouthfuls of rice and under the questioning murmurs of owners of missing pets, she found the end of the World infinitely stupid. She had invited Mrs. Ostrich to lunch with her. This sixty-year-old, always dressed in a fluorescent floral shirt that was at least two sizes too big for her, with thick-rimmed white plastic glasses and a perpetual hat adorning her head, was the only person with whom Helen interacted semi-regularly since she lived in this apartment.
“My darlings have disappeared”, lamented Mrs. Ostrich.
Olga, Charles, Jean, Sylvia, George, Truman, Marilyn, Paul, Albert, Roseanne, and Feather had all disappeared. Helen imagined the gods around a table, brainstorming the tricks they were going to play on mortals before annihilating them, like caffeinated young start-up employees. Sitting around a table, ties loosened, dark circles under each eye, gesticulating from time to time to propose ideas all rejected by a greater god, more important than the others. Smooth, botoxed skin, no tie, but well-ironed suit.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Ostrich. Everything will soon be back to normal.”
Somehow, Helen was sure everything would be okay. Not necessarily in the way that ordinary people expected “okay” to be. But on a cosmic level, transcending any human construction around the concept of order. Indeed, the notion of order – whether we consider the latter in terms of social, political, public, or symbolic order – suggested permanence, regularity, stability as opposed to that of change, conflict, hazards, even anarchy. However, on another level, order was whatever the cosmos decided it to be. And what it decided may have had seemed anarchic to mortals but meaningful to itself.
So much so that during the last day of the apocalypse. The seventh day. Helen witnessed the instantaneous combustion of most of her neighbors, certain passers-by, and the local cigarette seller. Bodies ignited in a thousandth of a second, reduced to ashes the next. Horrified then stunned, Helen sat in a park near her building while waiting for her turn. She thought of all the ignored calls from her mother, Kathryn, and her absent father, Fred. She told herself that the end of the world would be sweeter without her mother’s “I told you so’s” and her father’s performative tears. In her mind flashed images of the faces of Andrew and Rosa from Wednesday morning, Paxler’s grotesque fizzog and gaping hole of a mouth, and the face of Mrs. Ostrich twisted by the mourning of her thousand cats. They blended into each other, paraded next to each other, in an infinite loop, as if her mind was having trouble locating events preceding the week of the end of the World. Who was I before this week? Do I really want to know? Helen sat on the park bench until nightfall. Panic giving way to boredom. An unprecedented calm reigned in the city. Not a sound, nor a whisper. Just black ash dust floating in the air. Helen was still alive. Her body had not been reduced to dust by instant combustion. She would later discover that neither did Mrs. Ostrich’s. Moreover, when she went up to Mrs. Ostrich’s apartment on the fifth floor, she saw the old lady there, pink with joy, surrounded by her eleven cats. In the corridors of the building, the once-extinct pets wandered carefree and Helen even believed to have seen Mr. Philipps’ snake, now free of its master.

…

Aurore Phipps is a writer based in France. She is currently a certified English teacher in Paris. She is also a print and web contributor for indie Australian art magazine Beautiful Bizarre. Her writing has been featured in Voix Meets Mode, Anti Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram at purapari_ !