I keep having this fear when I’m crossing the road that I’m actually looking at a car but for some reason I can’t see it and then it hits me and I die. Which isn’t exactly a normal thing to be afraid of, but I’ve always had very specific fears. When I was ten, my biggest fear was that I’d bite into an apple and it’d be full of razors and they’d cut up my tongue and slip in between my gums. Last year in spring I kept thinking I’d be walking and a butterfly would get sucked right into my mouth and I’d swallow it whole and it’d flap around my oesophagus until it died and then I’d breathe butterfly dust for the rest of my life.

But going back to the cars, I think the thing I should do really is just to cross at the pedestrian crossing and avoid the whole problem entirely. But the cafe is right across the road from my house, so I can’t be bothered.

When I get to the café, my friend Cam’s there and she says to me, “It’s the end of the world.”

“Isn’t it always?” I reply, sitting down.

Our table’s in the shade, away from everyone.

“But more spe-ci-fic-ally – ” she says, sounding out every syllable carefully.

“It’s good to be specific,” I say, thinking of the fears.

“– I had a vision.” Cam gets visions. Sometimes they’re true and sometimes they’re not – it’s hard to tell if they’re actually visions or if they’re just dreams informed by the news or whatever.

The waiter comes and takes our coffee order; we pause doomsday chat.

Cam leans forward. “It’s going to be quick, like not a whimper situation, a bang.”

“What kind of bang?”

She leans back in her seat and stretches. “I dunno.”

“Do you know when?”

“End of next week.”

“Next week!” A few people turn around to look at us, but they’re back to their own things when they see I’m not on fire or whatever.

“I’m not sure what exactly,” she says. “There was just a lot of fire.”

“Hmm.”

The waiter sets down our coffees and Cam asks for a bowl of chips.

“Well, that can’t be good,” I say. I feel numb, as if I’ve been sitting in ice water for so long my limbs have forgotten they’re limbs.

“No,” she says. “Do you want to go to the pool?”

The pool’s not too busy today, despite it being hot and sunny; it’s a school day and the air smells like the fires that are burning hundreds of kilometres away.

We spread our towels out in the shade and I watch a little kid playing in a floaty tyre. I remember my first very visceral fear being that I would somehow get stuck in one of those tyres, flip upside down, and not be able to get myself free. Then I’d drown. I hated going to the pool for years as a kid, but now it’s not so bad. I just don’t use the tyres.

“Do you think it’s a real vision?” I ask.

Cam puts down her book and peers out over the pool, squinting as the sunlight reflects off the water. “I kinda hope not but I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

“Kinda?”

“Yeah. I mean. I don’t want it to be true, obviously. Weird choice of words.”

I’m afraid of choosing the wrong words, like somehow I’d been tricked and every word I’d be speaking meant the opposite of what I was saying.

We watch as from the water a parent coaxes their kid to the water’s edge. This kid’s got goggles on, a swimming cap, floaty wings and a pool noodle. They dip a foot in, scamper back to the shade.

“Do you reckon it’ll be like, worldwide?”

Cam’s book lies face down on the grass beside us now. “Yeah,” she says. “All at once too.”

“Maybe like a big asteroid thing?”

“Yeah, maybe.” We watch the floaties-up kid be coaxed back towards the pool edge. “It’d be nice to let everyone know, but then no one would believe us.” Cam puts on her sunnies and looks up at the sky. Fat, puffy white clouds expand above us. “Plus, if I’m wrong, then that’s just a lot of trauma to dump on people, I guess.”

“Treat every day like it’s your last,” I say in a lofty voice.

“Too right.” She lies back on the grass and puts her hands under her head. “I think we just gotta go on as per uzhe.”

“Reckon.”

I watch the kid slip, limbs flailing out wildly, it’s almost as if they grow an extra pair of arms, and then their parent at the last second cradles their head before it hits the wet concrete. They bring the kid into their arms, hold them to their wet chest, and the kid doesn’t even seem to realise they’re in the water.

I’m in a zoom meeting when Cam texts me a few days later. Since she told me the world is ending, I haven’t really done anything special. If I had any money maybe I’d go somewhere with her and we could just have a nice week in some beautiful place with a glacier or a waterfall, something to do with water. All my water-based fears could be put to rest maybe, if I just spent long enough looking at water. That’s what I think sometimes, but then I worry that’ll just make me more anxious about water and that the sight of it will be burnt into my brain – I’ll never be able to stop looking at it.

Worse things could be imprinted on your eyeballs, though.

But I don’t have any money and I can’t quit my job, just in case the apocalypse isn’t real. So, I’m sitting here in my pyjamas listening to the weekly rundown of what we need to cover this week.

Since working from home, one of my fears is that my microphone doesn’t actually switch off and people can hear me sitting here farting and chewing but everyone’s too polite to say so. No-one’s brought anything up so – it’s probably fine. I constantly check the little microphone button though, moving my mouse over the bottom of the screen so the icons pop up.

Cam’s message says she’s got more info on the vision. Can she call? It’s only a week away now, though we dunno what time it’ll start. I tell her to wait a sec and then I tell everyone in the meeting I feel really ill, I’ve got to go, see youse later, and I snap my laptop shut, call Cam. “What’s goin on?”

“I had the same vision,” she says. “And then I woke up. Did you see the news?”

“Nah, I just woke up in time to get to work.”

“There’s an asteroid, you’re right. Come out of nowhere and it’s gonna hit us. Like the dinosaurs, we’re all gonna die. The news says it’s gonna miss us, but it won’t. Bang!”

I shiver, my palms break out into a sweat and this time I feel it properly. At the same time, I feel I’ve betrayed Cam a bit, like I should have felt this the first time she told me, that I shouldn’t have waited until the news confirmed what she’d said. Why didn’t I trust her more? “Jeez.”

“You wanna come stay at mine til it happens?” Cam’s got this great apartment with a huge balcony that gets the morning sun. She works from home too, so we’ll be together.

“I’m supposed to go to the movies with Stella and that tonight, do you wanna come?”

“Maybe another time.”

I go to the movies but can’t concentrate. The others don’t know. Should I tell them? Cam’s never told anyone else about her visions and so to tell them now seems a bit much. Maybe it’s best they get to live their lives to the last second – all this awareness that I’m driving around with is heavy, wearing me out. Do I prefer the specific fears over this huge weight? It’s kind of a relief to have something proper to worry about.

“You got any plans for the weekend?” Stella asks me as we’re leaving.

Two windows open in front of me. One, tell her, she thinks I’ve lost the plot, we don’t speak and then we die on Tuesday. Two, I don’t tell her, and she keeps on having a nice night. “Just gonna hang out with Cam,” I say.

She tells me about everything she’s doing and I’m glad she’s at least going to have a nice last weekend. I catch the bus and stare out of the window the whole time, miss my stop. When I first began catching buses on my own when I started high school, I would always be afraid I’d read the numbers and destination wrong, and that I’d end up hours and hours from home. And that there’d be no more buses that day, even when it was only two in the arvo.

The walk home isn’t too long and it’s lit by spaced-out streetlamps. A bat chitters overhead as it flies by. I look up and the sky’s covered in clouds. What if I never see the moon again? A terrible rift opens in me and I stumble home, text Cam I’ll come over tomorrow, and I lie awake to shiver the night away.

I go to Cam’s and we work on our laptops, chop veggies to make lunch, and we end up at the drive-in cinema. Stars peek out through the clouds. “Do you know what time on Tuesday?” I ask as I wipe the condensation away from the windscreen for the third time.

“Nah.”

“You reckon you can manifest a dream tonight to check?” I ask, laughing at the end.

She smiles at me, quickly looking away from the screen, back to it. “Maybe.”

The movies ends the same way it always does and we go home. We share the same bed, pressed up against each other, breathe the same air. The second last night.

“What are we supposed to do?” I push the plunger down on the French press.

“I think it’s more about what we want to do,” she says, sliding her cup forwards. “Chuck sickies?”

“I used up all my leave already.”

“Well, hopefully this is one of those times when the vision isn’t true,” she says. She pours milk into our cups.

“Hopefully.” We catch each other’s eyes.

We stay in the kitchen, we bake bread and the house smells of it as we lie on the couch and read and play games and watch videos. She brushes my hair, something we’ve never done together. The quiet rustle of the brush, fingertips brush past my cheeks, the care she takes to avoid my ears. Shivers run up and down my arms and then I can’t stop, I’m shaking violently, Cam puts her arms around me but I can’t stop.

When I was little, I was scared of goosebumps, convinced little bugs were trying to break free of my skin. Same thing with the pimpled skin of a plucked chicken. Now the goosebumps are raised on my arms and I wish that bugs would erupt out of them and just eat me so I don’t have to wait for the asteroid, but then Cam’d be alone, so I’m glad they don’t.

The next morning, we make plunger coffee again. We sit on the balcony and look out at the street; the tram goes by. People go to work, go to school, take outdoor seats at the cafes.

I brush Cam’s hair. We read each other funny posts we find as we scroll. “No dream last night re: time?”

Cam looks at me, shakes her head. “Nah,” she says, but I see in her eyes the same two roads I felt when I told Stella my weekend plans.

“Alright,” I say, sitting back and sipping the coffee, which is the best one I’ve had all week.

“I’m sorry I told you,” she says. “I just didn’t want to be alone.”

I try to breathe in more fresh air than my lungs allow. “Don’t worry about it.”

Below, someone starts to cross the road and I wonder if they’re thinking the same things I think, about the cars, and the fear. Probably not.