Picnic at Sunset
written by: Alex Serezis
The sun hovered just above the green hills, ready to sink from view. The sky; a marvel of colors. Oranges, reds, violets, and fading blues. Claire enjoyed the comforting light breeze as she leaned back on her elbows. Her toes played with the grass at the edge of the checkered, woolen blanket. The wine bottle between them had already lost half its exquisite but rather expensive contents, an overkill, one might say, for a picnic.
John handed her a thin cracker with some Brie and a slice of white peach on top. “You know, this almost feels like normal.”
Claire giggled. “Define normal.”
“Imagine us, somewhere in France. You’re an art historian, I’m a failed novelist. We met in a bookstore of course. You handed me a copy of Wuthering Heights and told me it is overrated.”
“Which, by the way, it is,” she replied.
He laughed and clinked his glass against hers. “To better endings!”
Claire’s little bluetooth speaker played the last notes of Nightwish’s masterpiece: “The Poet and The Pendulum.” A favorite song of both. They then sat in silence, contemplating and admiring the sunset. Flocks of birds flew over them, some in silent waves, others more frantic. Their backlit bodies were like dark points on the canvas above them.
Her gaze shifted from the bids toward the horizon again. The sky had started to lose its color too quickly. A sudden twilight began to loom over the land, erasing light and shadows much faster than usual.
“What did we do wrong?” she said, her voice stripped of its warmth. “It was supposed to work, the numbers were right.”
John didn’t answer at first. He took a slow sip of wine. “We WERE right.” “The trajectory shift worked. But the butterfly flapped its wings somewhere we couldn’t see.”
“We aimed at an asteroid of that size and prayed the math would take care of the rest. Hubris and Nemesis is what the Greeks used to call it, right?” Claire argued.
They both turned their eyes skyward. Where the sunset painted its beautiful colors before, an expanding darkness spread bit by bit across the atmosphere. Olethros had hit the Earth somewhere across the ocean, and the dust was already climbing.
“What do you think everyone else is doing?” Claire wondered.
John didn’t answer. Claire stared at his face, pale in the fading light, and thought how odd it was to be afraid of the dark again. After so many years of fearing global warming, that was on the verge of making the planet uninhabitable much sooner than initially predicted.
They were both part of a last desperate effort, redirecting the course of a near-Earth, massive asteroid, just enough to affect the climate and cool the planet. A bandage from out of space, for a disease humanity couldn’t stop giving itself. The plan had taken years, billions of dollars, and the rare international cooperation of the world’s best minds.
And now, the sky grew darker. Not with night, but with ash.
Claire poured the last of the wine into her glass. Her hand trembled, but she smiled anyway. “We could have just gone to the bunker in Iceland and hoped.”
“But we didn’t,” he said. “And we both know it wouldn’t change anything.”
The sun is gone now. Not set, not hidden. Swallowed.
Claire leaned into him, her head against his shoulder. The air grew cold and thicker.
Far away, a rumble echoed across the hills, a sound like thunder but deeper. The ground beneath them shook.
They sat still, holding hands.
Above them the dark giant appeared. The sky no longer had anything left to say.
And just like that, what started with a big bang, had ended with another.
- Picnic at Sunset - July 4, 2025
