Originally published in The Casco Bay Weekly, February 1996

Three slices of life at the end of the world in Portland, Maine

by Valerie Kahn-Dorato and Stephen Dorato

It was the morning Portland smelled like chicken.
     Kyle had smelled worse. Yesterday had been frog breath, dank and thick. You knew it was frog breath because you saw the frogs falling from the sky, pelting Exchange Street tourists, spattering the Back Cove water like giant raindrops. At least the frogs were friendly.
     The chicken smell just made him hungry.
     You'd think Kyle would have felt stranger, knowing the end of the world was coming. He didn't. Everything was changing. His mother had called this morning to tell him his father had turned into a giant monarch butterfly, which she said was an improvement over the beer gut and receding hairline, and at least he let her have the remote. Not that anything was on, except new episodes of "I Love Lucy" and "Bonanza." The new shows seemed dated, though.
     A gray haze covered the post office, and as Kyle drove nearer the haze resolved itself into thousands of flies. All with little white heads, half of which screamed "help me," the other half "get OUT," bouncing off the post office doors.
     He didn't know why, but it looked like fun.
     And it was kind of a decision, in that half-a-millisecond, as he felt himself leap into the air, into the swarm. His legs shrank away and his clothes dropped off, which was good because his new wings were pretty fragile. With his multifaceted eyes, even the post office looked kind of cool.
     A fly. Following in his father's footsteps, sort of.

Her checkbook wasn't the only thing she lost that night on Wharf Street. Her eyeglasses were gone, which was okay, since she didn't see like normal people anymore; the world was this weird fishbowl thing, but at least she could see when John -- her little boy, whose legs have been replaced by flippers, which oddly didn't make that much of the difference -- tried to wander into Commercial Street traffic or pick up one of the dead frogs. "Stop that," she said, "you don't know where it's been."
     Her checkbook, her eyeglasses, all memory of ever having been in the supermarket. Streamlining, she guessed. Little John was streamlined without his ears, which had always been a little too big anyhow.
     It was 9:20 exactly, and in two hours and forty minutes, the world come to an end. She didn't know how she knew; she thought it was unfair that people in Japan and Turkey had to live by Eastern Standard Time. She wondered how the end would feel.
     She wondered if Gritty's would still be open; probably pretty hard to draw beer when you've changed into a deck of cards or a hanging plant. She started up the fishbowl street, John flopping wetly behind her.

Sleet pelted his bare chest as he raced across the darkened expanse of Monument Square.
     Sleet in July? Whatever. The cobblestones hurt Sam's feet and he kept running into people, or people who weren't people anymore. He slammed into something which didn't move out of the way and fell, swallowing a multiple of pineapple flavored slush. He preferred lemon.
     He spat, blinked, looked around. Saw the others.
     Hundreds of people crowding the Square. All naked. Sam was a little disappointed at being so unimaginative; at the time it is seemed quite a fashion statement. It was the best he could do, minus creative body modifications.
     Five minutes, now. Without looking at the clock, he knew it was nearly time. Seven months ago he had waited for New Year's Eve fireworks here -- probably with half these people (clothed at the time) -- when the end of the world had begun. The fireworks went up, but no bursts of light, no lights at all, no explosions. Just loud, falsetto "oohs" and "aahs."
     Like then, everyone was silent. Waiting.
     He wondered what God looked like. Too bad this wasn't Longfellow Square; Sam could've pretended that God looked like Longfellow, minus the graffiti. Now all he could do was wait, look for friends and avoid staring at genitalia.

At precisely midnight EST, everybody in the world, you and me included, sat around au naturale and waited for the world to end.
     At precisely 12 AM, we heard a voice, though nobody agrees if it was male or female or neither. We heard one phrase, in every language of the world, including Portlandese.
     "Never mind."
     So the world didn't end. But it didn't change back, and we didn't get our clothes back either. Which was a little weird, and annoying in the winter.