You needed your milk every morning. You drank it fast, as usual. The cold liquid was running down your throat, reminding you of the dawn of humankind, when people stopped drinking water from lakes or streams, and started domesticating cows and stealing the milk from the calves.

The day went by. The mills of civilization grind in business as usual.

When things slowed down, you were back in your apartment. It was your habit to smoke a cigarette every evening.

The milk-routine in the morning and the cigarette-routine in the evening. You always flicked the ashes in the empty milk bottle from the morning. Filling the empty bottle of liquid cow motherhood with the burnt ashes of a burning death stick. There was nothing better in the world to contaminate the cold and milky interior of your mouth with the bitter and acid taste of nicotine. It was like a symbolic representation of the end of humanity in an ever-hotter world. Burnt and buried by the side-effects of their hedonistic hybris. Your morning and the dawn of humankind: milk! Your evening and the nightfall of humankind: fire!

Your hushed away these bizarre and dark thoughts with the smoke of your last puff and flicked the rest of your cigarette into the bottle. While having been sunk in your egocentric phantasies, you didn’t realize how dark it suddenly got outside. It was snowing!

It got so dark, it almost looked as if the snow was black. You turned on the light and––the snow was still black. You feel how a chilly feeling of cataclysm runs down your spine. You shiver. This must be an optical illusion. You open the window and reach out with your hand. You expect the cold snow to land on your hand, and, surely, something falls, but what you sense is not cold, it is almost warm. Afraid and curious you withdraw your hand and stare. “This is not snow,” you think. “These are ashes!” “It must be burning somewhere!”, you reason. But there is no fire in sight, not burnt smell. Nothing unusual, besides ashes falling from the sky.

An insane thought bursts into your mind. You rush to the milk bottle, and turn it upside down. You see the ashes pouring out and – you lose the ground under your feet. Your books, your clothes, are falling with you from the ground to the ceiling, your furniture, chairs, the table, your bed, everything falls to the ceiling. You land hard on your back, into the chaos of what was once your room. You feel dizzy. You manage to stand up. You shudder with sheer terror.

“The world is a simulation”, you stutter, “and the milk bottle must be the administrator perks!”

You panic! Where is that milk bottle? You look around. And there is the bottle, it is lying only some meters away, next to the wall. It landed safe on some cushions in the corner. Carefully you walk towards the bottle. – And then you hear a noise. A copy of Edward Munch’s The Scream that was hanging on your wall and was still held on the wall, slides off the nail that was holding it. It falls. Towards the bottle. You sprint. The Scream is faster. It lands on the bottle and bursts it into pieces. The bottle cracks, and so does your world. Your furniture, your room, torn apart. Your body, torn apart. Splinters of wood and cement, of bones and flesh.

Blood everywhere.

The end.