“I thought you were on a diet?” the bakery clerk asked him. They hadn’t seen him for a while because of it.

“I buy biscuits.” He spoke, his crisp language almost sharper than usual. “Because eating healthy doesn’t seem to matter when the world is ending.”

They stared at him, almost forgetting to bag up the biscuits. The part of them destroyed by retail work remembered soon enough to continue the motions mechanically. “Oh? What’s wrong?”

“The world is ending.”

The man, in his suit and tie, had never appeared the type for hyperbole. Therefore, when he said the world was ending, they almost believed him.