When the world first burned up, very little changed about much at all. The sun turned its million tons of hydrogen into fiery broth, still. The constellations kept true to their shapes, twinkling brightly, still. Jupiter, its eye bore down on its solar neighbours and the its loss of one hardly perturbed its orbit, still. Even the moon, hung for a few days, carried by the momentum like its tie to the planet was some residual Stockholm disorder it had not shook, still. And a tiny civilization that lived on a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, they so happened to have a telescope to the sky, performing a study of the Milky Way Galaxy, which they called the Smudge Galaxy. And they were studying a young red giant, and had learned about its brightness by measuring the nine celestial that passed across the young star, each caused a little blip on a graph. The tiny civilization was so far away that one fewer blip on their graph went unnoticed, still.

A child started the burning of the world, which might have surprised many readers of the Bible, considering that it suggested quite often that the world would be set aflame by sinners. But children cannot sin. Therefore the Bible was incredibly wrong, for such a prescient manuscript. It was no sinner, it was an angel that cooked us up.

She was playing with matches, a small box that her father had given her so she would stop distracting him from his work. The father worked as an actuary, keeping track of extortionate amounts of money used to feed the appetite of enormous beasts called corporations. These beasts had eyes made of office block buildings, claws made of fine suits and dresses and hair gel, their stomach a bank vault. All the beasts fried when the world burned up.

Actuaries were no longer important in the solar system because money was gone. In fact, this is a lie: a small European island named Hungore had replaced all their bank notes with ones made of non-flammable plastic two years prior. This was the only thing that survived the purging of the planet, everything else was turned into the products of combustion which are CO2 and lots of carbon.

And so for a few days after the father’s child had barbecued the world and all life on it, a giant black rock hung there, glimmering like charcoal, in the space where a churning life-ful blue marble once had been. The burning created residue, which drifted off and formed a ring. The ring was blue and red because eighty-percent of it was made of Hungorian notes. Then on the sixth day a realization dawned on that black rock: that it could just drift all apart now, it was so light and full of holes.

It drifted apart like a salt cracker dropped in a pool, and inside those parts were the carbon atoms of actuaries, little children, some brown bear was in there, plenty of side walks and tarmac, but the majority of it was all farm animals, missiles, trash. The civilization enjoyed collecting and growing three things: farm animals and missiles and trash. Yet this civilization on this world was a nervous collector, and had it ever had extraterrestrial visitors, their greatest collections would be the first things they would try to hide from view.

The child had lit the match using an incense candle that her mother liked to light when she meditated. She said it helped to clear her mind. Minds were fascinating things when they had existed. They weighed no more than a watermelon, yet they contained all the parts to make the most noise anyone had ever heard. This noise could become overwhelming for the listener, and so they lit incense in the hopes to clear it out a bit.

About a thousandth of a percent of the cooked carbon black rock was human minds. About a tenth of a percent of the cooked carbon black rock was farm animals minds.

An archaeologist four-thousand years into the future discovered the reason why the world had burned up. It was not the child, they said, it was this: there was more farm animal brain on the world before it was fired up, than human brains a-hundred times over. If the humans had counted the brains, they would have maybe been a bit more humble about their whole existence and realized they were collectively as stupid as a mega-herd of moo-ers.

But the human brains contained a very strange chemical which the archaeologist named urbusognic when they discovered it. This was a vile chemical, they explained – almost like a disease. The chemical made the brain noise make sounds like the following: “I”, “Me”, “Mine”.

The most fortunate part of the kebab-ing of the world was that most of the urbusognic was destroyed. Only one sample of urbusognic was ever collected. But millions of very small, flexible rectangular slips with alphanumerical symbols and the face of a very sour white man on it were gathered in huge hauls. The civilization that had collected the remains of the world in a giant sieve would never be able to understand the meaning of the letters and numbers on the Hungorian bank notes, and so their meaning was now irrelevant to the entire universe.

The bank notes had once meant this to minds that no longer existed: “The greatest nation on the greatest planet.”

If the Bible were written by a civilization more aware of its place in the universe, it might have said something like this, instead:

And cherish the child, but hide them well. With rope keep them close and by flame, hold them afar. For it is not the sinner that we must watch with our eye, but the sinless. For the sinless is nature’s self-destruction mechanism. The sinless child ‘tis employed for purposes to test, navigate, destroy.

The civilizations alive today, they were the ones to realize the danger in the youth of their species. Evolution created these individuals with purpose for destruction, a safety switch to turn it all off in case the whole experiment was a mess.

Hence, children are intergalacticlly outlawed.

Before the Great Ignition, there was a Thai restaurant that specialized in serving only vegetarian items on their menu. It was one of many around the world, but none of them were aware of the existence of any others, or did not care. The restaurant based its entire business model off of offering a range of identical tables and chairs that one could sit at. Each person was given three two-minute conversations with a waiter, who was a person employed to go around taking vigorous notes with a pad and pen of any food-based words you might mention. At the end, the waiter was supposed to ask you about your day and smile at you because this meant you might pay them more. The waiter usually did not enjoy this line of work, the people at the restaurant usually pretended they liked this line of work.

Smarkle Gusby worked at Thai Forty-Four on the corner of East and Queensmore, and the last thing he did before the world cooked up was pretend to smile at someone to try to increase their tip. The customer he was serving put twelve fine red and blue Hungorian notes on the metal tin with the check on it, and then watched as his foot, his leg, his torso, and the entire wall became engulfed.

Smarkle Gusby was the only person who knew the world was going to burn up. He had been informed of the cook-out by Momo Zogandi-III. Just as a raisin’s entire universe is the inside of a fruit cake until it is eaten, so was Momo’s entire universe the inside of Smarkle’s head until he was roasted black. Momo, once set free, saved Smarkle. It took him one-thousand years, but Momo found every once-Smarkle atom floating in the Hungorian ring and put him back together part for part.

The Saturday before The End, Thai Forty-Four was full. No one knew the world would end in three days. The light from the paper lanterns on the wall played staccato figures along the tables – they danced dangerously on the edges, pop away, showcase their ability to elongate. He had encased his body inside silver Egyptian cotton and wrung his neck with a tie, the man at table twelve. She had vacuum sealed herself into a red Turkish silk. Neither had been to Turkey or Egypt. He selected the champagne glass like one might pull gold leaf from the hood of a car. To drink, his lips pursed, and he made polite small sips. When presented a joke, neither laughed, but instead explained the emotion they would have expressed, had they been capable: “Toh hoh, very funny, very funny.” Her laughing device was her nose, which she squeezed upward. His was his lips, which he pinched and pulled down at the sides.

Smarkle had acquired a film of sweat in the last hour. Thai Forty-Four had ten gas radiators along six walls. They covered the windows in a thick fog so no one might see in or out. Only the flickers of the table candles made it past. Their dances invited people inside from the cold.

The last shirt Smarkle wore was a black button-up of synthetic cotton. He wore the same shirt as he walked up to invite Him and Her into an exchange of food-related words. The cotton near the pits was unforgiving and highly absorbent. With a lip pursed as a prune, the man in the silver suit invited Smarkle to his table with a raised eyebrow. Smarkle approached with two great rings around his sides, blacker than the shirt he wore.

“Hello sirs and ma’am, have we decided on food?” Smarkle’s hand had already pulled the pen and pad from his side pocket for him.

“Mm. The yellow curry, does it contain nuts?” The lady asked the question directly at the menu. Smarkle informed her of the situation: the curry was nutty.

“Mm. That will not do.” She scowled, not letting her gaze leave the four corners of the paper pages before her. “You order, Jonathan.”

Jonathan let out a long breath he had apparently been holding. He raised his nose so that he could see down it like a barrel of a gun and aimed directly at Smarkle’s chest. “I will have the No-Duck Lad Na, please. Sauce on the side.”

Smarkle stopped his hand from finishing the writing. “Uh, no sauce? The duck comes in the sauce. It’s like a curry.”

“Oh?” He aimed his nasal weapon back at the menu. “Mm. I prefer my duck dry – could that be done?”

“Not really. That’s how it is. We don’t just do the No-Duck by itself.”

“I see.” The man had created an impressive collection of chins on his neck as he surveyed the menu again. He popped his eyes into his eyebrows and said to his wife, “You go, darling. I need a moment to think.”

“I can come back in few minutes,” offered Smarkle.

“No, no,” said the lady, “I’ve decided.” She pointed at the menu with a finger and Smarkle did not need to look to know what to write: Swimming Angels.

“No nuts on that please,” she said. Smarkle explained that Swimming Angels was tofu in a sauce made entirely of blended peanuts.

Smarkle did not work on Monday’s and Tuesday’s and so had two whole days to think about what he might do before the world combusted. When Wednesday came around he still had not decided, and he still had not decided when he pretended to smile deeply and the collar of his cheap cotton button-up caught on fire. Smarkle’s mind, like all the minds on the planet, made so much noise that he had to pay very careful attention to turn it off and listen when someone spoke to him. Everyone had their own noise radio. Smarkle’s played two channels. The first was was channel Forty-Four, which replayed historical classics such as Him and Her, or Order Up. The second was channel Momo, which only played late at night after work or all day Monday and Tuesday.

Channel Momo was on full-blast the Monday before the rain of fire. Smarkle liked to listen to it with a hot cup of lemon and ginger tea. His apartment consisted of eighty-six wood tiles, seven plaster walls, a bay window adorned with black mould, a kitchenette with three things: a microwave, an electric oven, and no space to turn around – a bed either in the closet or the bedroom, a small wooden box with a carving of an elephant on it which contained all thirty-one shells Smarkle’s mother had gifted him for his birthdays, a traffic cone, and six litres of caulk. All of this would be transformed into soot and charcoal in two days.

The most interesting thing Smarkle could apply his attention to right now was the pieces of zest in his tea. They clumped together and formed groups, but when he had tried to show his girlfriend this once, she had looked at him like he had just flattened her souffle. She broke up with him the next day, on grounds that he never listened to her, never remembered the things he told her, and was he even listening now? She said that she was sorry and that she would like Smarkle to let his mother know that she was sorry she would not be visiting again.

Smarkle did not have a mother.

Smarkle had a page on his pad and pen from work which he took vigorous notes on all the things his girlfriend told him. This was done while his brain was cooked by one of two channels.