One day, I sat on a park bench. The sun was out – it was pleasant – and the gentle breeze was rustling the leaves. On my lap before me was my lunch – a sandwich – and I anticipated eagerly to eat it.

With both ecstatic hands, I picked up the Earl’s Enterprise, and was primed to place the first bite into my mouth, when a sudden flash of light accompanied by a loud noise erupted in front of me.

“Don’t do it!” instructed a voice from within the flash, which quickly resolved into a man, of about average fuckability, standing in front of me. “If you take a bite of that sandwich, the world will end!”

I looked at the man in confusion. 

“Who are you?” I asked him.

“I am Æ, and I’ve come from the future to tell you that the fate of the world depends on you! I have studied the butterfly effect closely, and have deduced with utter confidence that the end of the world, resulting in the complete destruction of all that is known, springs from this very moment: that is the tornado, and the butterfly is yourself (because you are very beautiful) and your taking a bite out of that sandwich is the innocent flap of your pieridine wing that sets the whole sequence in motion. So please, I beg you, lower your comestibles and spare the world of a cruel fate.”

My confusion changed into disbelief.

“Sure,” I said doubtingly, and I raised the sandwich back up to my mouth.

“No!” screamed Æ, but it was futile. Driven by peckish hunger, I took a bite of the sandwich.

I watched the supposed time-traveller drop to his knees in despair; but alas, I looked around me, and the world persisted. It was only then that a pressing question passed my mind.

“If the world ended after I bit this sandwich, how did you come back in time to warn me?”

But my interlocutor remained helplessly mute, and in that instant, my own attention was drawn by a faraway burst of light. 

I turned to look at it, the initial glow too intense to by inspected not through spaced fingers, and as the light diminished in brightness, I saw the explosion of flame that had risen to the sky, igniting the atmosphere and sending a propagating inferno across the firmament, spreading across the world.

Æ cried in acknowledgement of the terrible tragedy that he had failed to prevent. I really had to admit: it did look as if the world was ending after all.

“Oh.”

30.VIII.23